India and The Early Modern World

India and the Early Modern World
India and the Early Modern World provides an authoritative and wide-ranging
survey of the Indian subcontinent over the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, set
within a global context.
This book explores questions critical to our understanding of early modern
India. How, for instance, were Indians’ religious beliefs, their ways of life, and
the horizons of their learning changing over this period? What was happening
in the countryside and towns, to culture and the arts, and to the state and its
power? Were such experiences comparable or linked to those in other parts
of the world? Can we speak of a global early modernity, therefore, within
which India played an important role? Organised thematically, each chapter
engages with such key issues, debates, and concepts, covering wide ground
as it connects, compares, and contrasts developments witnessed across early
modern South Asia to those around the globe.
Drawing on the fruits of research in numerous fields over the past fifty years
and rich in detail, India and the Early Modern World is a pathbreaking volume
written engagingly and accessibly with scholars, students, and non-specialists
in mind.
Jagjeet Lally is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and

Colonial India at University College London, where he is also Co-Director
of the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World.
He was educated at Oxford, the London School of Economics, and then at
Cambridge, where he was also a junior research fellow. His prize-winning first
book is India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (2021).
Countries in the Early Modern World
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Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives

Edited by Sarah Covington, Vincent P. Carey, and Valerie McGowan-Doyle
Britain in the Wider World: 1603–1800

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India and the Early Modern World

Jagjeet Lally
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India and the Early Modern
World
Jagjeet Lally
Designed cover image: A painting by an Aurangabad artist from c. 1690 accompanying the
manuscript of Muhammad Baha’ al-Din al-’Amili’s Nan va Halva (‘Bread and Sweets’),
showing a recluse chided by his dog for accepting bread from an infidel –here represented by
Charles II –with a margin of real and fantastical birds. Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, 1999.157
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-44063-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-44065-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00733-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Newgen Publishing UK
To Fiona,
in deepest gratitude,
and with love
Contents
List of Maps viii

List of Figures ix
Preface xiii
1 Introduction 1
2 Belief 33
3 Ideology 80
4 Urbanism 128
5 Capitalism 175
6 Violence 227
7 The State 275
8 Kingship 329
9 Vernacularisation 374
10 Knowledge 426
11 Conclusion 472
Bibliography 493
Index 541
Maps
1A India 4
1B The Delhi Sultanate: Lodi Rule on the Eve of the
Mughal Conquest 6
1C Vijayanagara at its Zenith 10
1D The Deccan Sultanates and the Nayaka Kingdoms 11
1E The Mughal Empire at Akbar’s death, 1605 16
1F The Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb’s death, 1707 18
1G The Maratha and other Mughal ‘Successor States’, c. 1760 19
1H Early Modern World Empires 23
3A The World of ‘Monsoon Islam’ 86
3B Mughal Bengal 89
4A Urban Centres 138
5A India and the Indian Ocean World 199
6A Afro-Eurasia’s Arid Zone 241
7A The Marathas and other Mughal ‘Successor States’, c. 1760 317
Figures
2A A Prince and Attendants Visiting Shaiva Holy Men

(watercolour; Rajput; eighteenth century), 1933,0610,0.2.
© The Trustees of the British Museum 37
2B A Monumental Shiva Linga in Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre,
Photo: Jagjeet Lally 40
2C Vishnu as Narasimha from Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre.
2D Dancing Dervishes (watercolour and gold; Mughal artist;
c. 1610). Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
55.121.10.18 49
2E Portrait of a Dervish (watercolour and gold; possibly Bijapuri;
early seventeenth century). Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, 57.51.30 51
2F Washerman listening to a Singer and Musician (watercolour
by the Mughal artist Bichitr, c. 1645). © Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, IM. 27–1925 61
2G The Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 67
3A Facing Portraits of Akbar (left) and Jahangir (right)
Praying (ink and watercolour; Mughal artist; c. 1605).
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
29.160.19 and 29.160.20 81
3B St Francis’ Church, Kochi. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 94
3C The Monkey Tries Carpentry, from the Kalila wa Dimna,
(ink and watercolour; possibly Gujarati; early sixteenth
century). Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, 1981.373.26 110
3D Krishna and his Brother (Balarama) Fighting the Enemy, from
the Harivamsa (watercolour and gold; Mughal artists;
c. 1590–95). Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, 28.63.2 111
x List of Figures
3E Cosmic Fire Hurled at the Pandavas, from the Razmnama

(watercolour and gold; Mughal artists; c. 1616-17).
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 55.121.31 113
4A Agra Fort’s Ramparts. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 129
4B The Qila Mubarak, Viewed from Top of Chandni Chowk.
4C Street Plan of Chandni Chowk (watercolour with Persian
annotations in ink and French translations in pencil; Indian
artist; c. 1770s). © Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, AL.1762 132
4D Akbar’s Hall of Private Audience, Fatehpur Sikri.
4E Shahjahanabad’s Jami Masjid. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 151
4F Base for a Huqqa with a Design of Irises and Other Flowers
(zinc alloy and inlaid brass; Bidar; late seventeenth century).
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1984.221 165
5A Painted Chintz (Palampore) for the Sri Lankan Market
(Coromandel, eighteenth century). Courtesy: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, 2010.337 200
6A Spear (steel; south Indian; possibly seventeenth century).
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
36.25.1952 231
6B Portrait of Malik Ambar (watercolour and gold; attributed to
an Ahmednagar artist; early seventeenth century). © Jimlop
collection / Alamy Stock Photo 234
6C Dagger with a Hilt in the Form of a Nilgai (nephrite and steel;
north India; c. 1640). Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, 1985.58a, b 247
6D Indian Draughtsmen Working on Ground Plan of Trace
Italienne, from the Boileau Album (watercolour; Thanjavur
artist; c. 1785). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London,
IS.75:5-1954 261
6E Flintlock Blunderbuss from Tipu Sultan’s Capital (steel, wood,
gold, silver; Mysore; dated 1793/94). Courtesy: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, 36.25.2227 270
7A Portrait of Raja Man Singh of Amber (ink, watercolour, and
gold, by Mughal artists, c. 1590). Courtesy: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, 1982.174 290
7B Aurangzeb Carried on a Palanquin to a Hunt (watercolour
and gold; by the Mughal artist Bhavanidas; c. 1704-20).
8A Humayun Feasting in a Garden Pavilion (watercolour and
gold; Mughal artists; c. 1550s with later additions).
© Alamy Ltd 332
List of Figures xi
8B Ancestors of Chingiz Khan at their Court, from the

Chingiznama (watercolour and gold; by the artists Basawan
and Bhim; c. 1596). Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, 48.144 336
8C Genealogical Chart of Jahangir (watercolour and gold;
Mughal artist, c. 1610s-20s). © The Aga Khan Museum,
Toronto, AKM151 338
8D The House of Bijapur (watercolour and metallic paints; by the
Deccani artists Chand Muhammad and Kamal Muhammad,
c. 1680). Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
1982.213 339
8E Humayun’s Tomb and Gardens. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 346
8F Equestrian Portrait of Shah Jahan (watercolour and gold; by
the Mughal artist Payag, c. 1630). Courtesy: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, 55.121.10.21 351
8G ‘Jahangir Embracing Shah Abbas’ (watercolour and metallic
paints; painted by Abu’l Hasan; c. 1618). © Alamy Ltd 358
9A The Taj Mahal, Agra. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 397
9B Alamgiri Gate, Lahore Fort. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 401
9C Padshahi Masjid, Lahore Fort. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 402
9D Mughal Artists’ Copying and Reworking of European Pictures
(watercolour, ink, and gold; unknown Mughal artist; late
sixteenth century). Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, 2012.132 406
9E The Virgin and Child Attended by Angels, in an Indic Style
(coloured inks and gold; attributed to Manohar; c. 1600).
9F Chameleon (watercolour and inks; by the Mughal artist
Mansur; c. 1612). © Alamy Ltd 411
9G Trumpeters (watercolour; by Nainsukh in Jasrota; c.1735-40),
2019,3004.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum 417
9H Shri Raga, from a Ragamala Series (ink and watercolour;
unknown artist from Bundi; mid-seventeenth century).
10A A School of the Sciences, from a Manuscript of Nan va
Halva by Muhammad Baha’al-Din al-‘Amili (watercolour,
gold, and inks; unknown artist in Aurangabad; c. 1690).
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United
States, 1999.157 427
10B The Jaipur Jantar Mantar. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 457
11A Step Well in Vijayanagara’s Capital. Photo: Jagjeet Lally 476
Preface
Those careless writers who talk of Hinduism and Islam in almost monolithic
terms are the targets of seemingly perennial ire, yet their critics seldom pause
to concisely describe the historical development of such systems of belief for
the general reader. Many of us look out from the vantage-point of imperial
capitals and court centres, but Indian urban history is relatively underdevel-
oped, and no existing textbooks provide a survey of urbanisation, let alone
new urban cultures. There is little to bridge the gap between the ever-increasing
number of incredibly specialist articles delving into particular genres of
Persian, Sanskrit, or Braj, on the one hand, and lengthy monographs on The
Language of the Gods or India in the Persianate Age, on the other. We know
more about individual artists and painters than ever before, not to mention
imperial and regional styles, yet the discussion is increasingly divorced from
any consideration of broader patterns of cultural change. Fine-tuning our
understanding of the state and sovereignty, monarchy and kingship remains
evergreen among scholars of early modern and colonial south Asia, but who
has offered a concise synthesis to guide students through the weeds? As for
economic history and the study of capitalism, these have largely gone out of
fashion, while the history of science and knowledge in early modern India
variously seems impressionistic or recondite, at best, where not put into ser-
vice of narratives about India’s superiority/inferiority (depending on whether
one is reading nationalist or Eurocentric writers). And subjects like violence
remain taboo.
This book endeavours –foolhardily, perhaps –to address these topics and
problems via a sequence of thematic essays, each written with non-experts,
generalists, and students in mind. This book complements others, like Richards’
The Mughal Empire, updating yet also ranging beyond such volumes in terms
of geographical, chronological, and thematic scope. Now in its second edition,
India Before Europe is a landmark work and perhaps the best introduction to
pre-colonial south Asia (c. 1000–1800 CE) that students and teachers have to
hand, written by two of the most respected experts in the field and with espe-
cial strengths in cultural and political history. Nevertheless, the growth of early
modern world history helps make the case for another volume, one that looks
xiv Preface
squarely at the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, over a broad range of themes,

and across as much of India as is currently feasible.
Not only do existing volumes have little or nothing to say about cartog-
raphy or the role of kinship in long-distance trading ventures, for instance,
but they often do not engage with some of the major concepts or theories that
students may have learned about in their study of the early modern world at
large: vernacularisation, the Military Revolution, the Great Divergence, the
advent of the Anthropocene, to take a few examples. No existing survey works
help make early modern India more accessible by drawing out what is familiar
from our knowledge of China, Japan, England, France, or the Ottoman
world, say, before showcasing and explaining what made the subcontinent’s
institutions or historical experience distinctive or divergent. The global turn
has showed the value of making such comparisons, yet teasing out connections
is also valuable. These connections sometimes spilled out of (or, equally, had
nothing to with) the Persianate, the Indo-Islamicate, or the Indian Ocean
worlds. Consequently, a survey limited to only one or other of these frameworks
would be inadequate, to the extent that this book glides between and beyond
them as appropriate.
This book operates at five levels. At the first and most elementary level, it
sets out a picture of what life was like in the past, pausing over such questions
as where people lived in towns and how law and order was maintained, for
instance. It also seeks, secondly, to describe how and why India was changing
in early modern times. The significance of these experiences/phenomena and
changes/processes are thrown into relief, thirdly, via comparison. This book
uses comparison to tease out what is similar and different about India’s experi-
ence compared to other parts of the world. Fourthly, then, this book examines
whether and to what extent India’s greater connection with other states and
societies explains shared experiences and convergences. Finally, and as a corol-
lary, it seeks to probe the idea of (global) early modernity. An ever-dwindling
minority of Indian historians may continue to speak of a rather long ‘late
medieval’ era lasting until the advent of colonial rule, but it has become much
more commonplace to describe India from c. 1400 or 1550 to c. 1750 or 1800
as belonging in the ‘early modern’ period. To see whether we can speak of
(global) early modernity, this book takes stock of the ways India and ‘Indians’
experienced, participated in, and shaped –as much as they were shaped by –
processes, phenomena, and experiences regarded as hallmarks of the period.
In linking linguistic and cultural change to the development of the state, or
how religious ideas and economic life were entangled with the making of pol-
itical violence, to take two examples from what follows, I hope that this book
will help unite numerous fields of study that remain fairly disparate to thereby
provide a much more integrated picture of early modern India. Whether or not
I have realised that ambition, I hope that this book will nevertheless be a useful
guide to existing knowledge and, in some cases, will even help better define
gaps in our knowledge and set out new subfields of inquiry. More importantly,
I hope it will provide a useful point of departure for teachers, students, and even
newgenprepdf
Preface xv
researchers venturing into the history of early modern India, and that some of
the ideas provoke debate in the classroom or stimulate further inquiry. Much
of what follows is an attempt to do justice to my students’ thoughtful questions
and often perspicacious observations, not to mention their advice –and the
input and critical feedback of my colleagues –on what this book should cover
and whether its arguments stacked up. In return, I have tried to structure India
and the Early Modern World as accessibly as possible. Each chapter is divided
into sections (e.g., 3.1) and often into further sub-sections (e.g., 3.1.2). Every
so often, where readers’ understanding of the discussion at hand might benefit
from what is covered in another part of the book, a reference to the relevant
section(s) is inserted as follows: (§8.2.2). There is no glossary but an extensive
index, so readers can look up foreign language terms that are defined else-
where in the book. There are also extensive footnotes, not only to point to the
source of particular ideas, but also to provide references for further reading
and research.
1 Introduction
The early moderns were greedy. They had a greed for land, for riches, and
for worldly goods, tastes, and pleasures. This acquisitiveness was matched by
an inquisitiveness: an incessant yearning for knowledge and for beauty, for
the path either to salvation or utopia, but also for fresh ways of expressing
themselves and articulating their place in the world. Some of this hunger was
quite real; a feasting after the hardships of era-defining plague, pestilence, and
famine. Others had not a growling belly but a mind whirring with curiosity,
possibly stimulated by the receipt of new ideas or even newfound intoxicants.
If there is a thread linking an adventurer like Hernán Cortés with a former
slave like Malik Ambar or a shadowy figure like Himmat Bahadur, those
Jain ascetics invited to the Mughal court with Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit
delegations to the Forbidden City in Beijing, it was that they lived in a world
with a culture of increasingly restless (and sometimes forced) mobility.1
Occurring by stages, ‘Occidental breakout’ began in the decades following
the Black Death, hastening after Europeans ‘discovered’ the Americas and a
direct maritime route to Asia in the 1490s. One consequence was the so-called
‘Columbian Exchange’ between the New and Old worlds, from which a form
of capitalism gradually developed and spread across the globe in interaction
with its regional or local cousins.2 The period following the pestilence (pan-
demic?) of the Black Death and the cessation of Timur’s world conquests, to
the global warfare of the eighteenth century and the onset of the Industrial
Revolution, witnessed the expanding scale and quickening pace of movement
that both spurred and satisfied contemporaries’ rapaciousness. This meant a
1 Faroqhi, Travel, offers a fabulously rich picture of employment and (im)mobility in the early
modern Ottoman Empire. On the many motivations and pressures linked to the relocation of
free and forced labour, see: Paquette, Seaborne Empires, 131–44. See, also: §5.2.
2 On the ‘Occidental breakout’ of the Portuguese and Spanish into the Atlantic to Africa, the
Americas, and Asia: Darwin, Tamerlane, 50–65, 97–99, where the author notes that the role of
this development in the rise of Euro-American hegemony in the global system was not inevitable
and immediate but came a few centuries later. See, also: Belich, ‘Black Death’. Sussman, ‘Black
Death’, argues that India was left relatively unscathed, despite being plugged into those mari-
time and terrestrial trade routes via which plague is thought to have passed across Eurasia.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-1
2 Introduction
gradual yet palpable breaking away from the past, a period with its own dis-
tinctive character even as it laid the foundations for modernity –a period we
call the ‘early modern’. Can we discern such a break in the historical experience
of India’s many peoples and the communities, societies, and states of which
they were a part? Can we place India within the portrait of early modernity
just sketched out? Such questions are the province of this book.
The research and writing of India and the Early Modern World coincided
with a twenty-first century pandemic of truly global proportions –global
in both the reach of a new virus and the ramifications of quarantines and
lockdowns upon a planet and its peoples more connected than ever before. Our
recent experience highlights how rapidly phenomena can be transmitted from
one part of the world to others, how this can lead to broadly similar patterns
of experience in far-flung locales, but also how phenomena and their effects
can be transmuted as they travel across distances, and how the distinctiveness
of local approaches and the specificity of place –whether in terms of dem-
ography, government, society, culture, and so forth –can mediate or inflect
experiences and outcomes in different areas. Our recent troubles are testament,
therefore, to the need for ‘global history’ approaches that identify connections
and make comparisons a part of the examination of global phenomena, while
being alert to the limits of connectivity, the enduring power of locality, and the
role of ‘endogenous’ developments.
Keeping all this in mind, this book examines India’s place within the set of
shared experiences constitutive of early modernity to identify how India was
shaped by some of the same pressures of the period experienced elsewhere, or
else vitally contributed to those phenomena seen as its hallmarks.3 At the same
time, it contrasts aspects of India’s experience with those of other parts of the
world, whether to bring to light how and why India’s experience was distinctive
or to demonstrate the limits of shared experience and, ultimately, the limits of
the global early modern world itself. With these goals in view, this chapter sets
out the necessary context and conceptual frameworks for the rest of this book,
starting with a description of the Indian political landscape in the century or
so immediately following Timur’s invasion in 1398. What follows is a pano-
ramic survey of the steadily expanding frontiers of state power over the varied
landscapes of south Asia, culminating in the Mughal Empire and its successor
states. For this process brought more and more Indians under kingly –or even
imperial –authority, not to mention their yoking to the plough.
1.1 India after Timur: Indian States, c. 1400–c.1600

Also known as Temür, Timur-i Lang, ‘Timur the Lame’, and Tamerlane, Timur
was born in the 1330s into a lesser clan of the Chagatai khanate, one of the
3 How the early modern world is conceived, and India situated within it in this book, owes some-
thing to pioneering approaches, e.g., Richards, ‘Early Modern India’. See, further: §11.2.
Introduction 3
four divisions of the erstwhile Mongol world empire of Chinggis or Genghis

Khan (d. 1227). By 1370, he was master of the Chagatai khanate, and thus
of Transoxiana (the area across the river Oxus). Timur’s conquest of cen-
tral Eurasia was in motion from 1380, with present-day Iran and Iraq, the
Caucasus and southern Russia brought under his rule. Timur also pushed fur-
ther west and, in 1402, defeated the Ottomans and took the Ottoman ruler as
his hostage, triggering the Ottoman interregnum and civil war that lasted until
Mehmed I was crowned in 1413, by which time Timur himself was long dead.4
Timur’s prospect had also extended southward to the Indian subcontinent’s
great riches, a prize he had taken in 1398 after launching a devasting raid into
north India. Some of the effects of Timur’s plunder raid were immediate, but
others –such as state formation triggering a new political cycle (see: Chapter 7)
or a sharper articulation of identity spurring vernacularisation (Chapter 9) –
unfolded over the early modern centuries.5
1.1.1 Landscapes and Populations
Who did Timur have to defeat to take India’s riches? What did the political
organisation of late medieval India look like? Today, in very remote pockets of
the subcontinent, there remain peoples whose habitations may fall within the
territorial boundaries of the nation-states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, India
and Bangladesh, even though their lives and livelihoods are little affected by
such sovereign authority. Their number are shrinking, however, as processes
of bringing the land and its people under the jurisdiction of some or other
state are still culminating, thanks to transport and communications technolo-
gies that have shrunk distance and made the state’s surveillance and control
more effective.6 These processes quickened in the nineteenth century under the
aegis of the colonial state but are centuries long and built upon much earlier
foundations.
The Jats, for example, shifted at some time over the eleventh to sixteenth
centuries from pastoralism to settled agriculture in Punjab, but tribal or pas-
toral societies quite probably constituted a far greater share of even the highly
centralised Mughal Empire than courtiers and later historians have had us
believe. Such groups were not remote or isolated, however, exhibiting varying
degrees of nomadism or pastoralism versus settlement and differing degrees
and kinds of interaction with areas and peoples more systematically under
the yoke of a centralised state (e.g., exchanging forest or pastoral products for
those of the plains, providing seasonal labour). Some were gradually ‘absorbed’
into settled agriculture, like the Jats, while others acquired landed status that
4 Darwin, Tamerlane, 4–6.

5 For a similar appreciation of Timur’s impact: Eaton, Persianate Age, 99–141, 217–24. See,
also: Orsini and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 22–28, for a rich yet succinct overview of political
change in north India after Timur’s invasion.
6 Scott, Art, with a statement about the role of technology on xii.
4 Introduction
Map 1A India
Introduction 5
they were able to pass on to their heirs (a process called ‘Rajputisation’ by one
historian of north Indian society).7 Up to the late eighteenth century, they
maintained a broad range of relationships with the state, from integration
to fierce resistance.8 Thus, when we picture states and empires in pre-modern
India or elsewhere, we ought to see the state not as shaded in solid red on the
map, but as a lumpy entity with its power thicker in the agrarian heartlands
and thinner or more contested –and its boundaries much blurrier –in forested,
desert, or upland zones.9
Around 1400, some areas remained either uninhabited and unsettled, or
else settled but not subject to a larger political authority than that of a local
clan or tribe or other collectivity. They were most likely to be found beyond the
desert frontier or forest line.10 There was far more jungle to be found in 1400
than 1600 or 1800 or the present day due to the steady clearing of the land to
make way for subsistence and then commercial agriculture, and the deforest-
ation of land for its timber and other natural resources –processes that are
also centuries-long and were accelerating in the early modern period (see: §5.1).
Or, to put it differently, as little as 20 or 30 per cent of the land in south and
southeast Asia was settled and densely populated at the beginning of the six-
teenth century; people lived surrounded by swathes of forest, as they did in
other parts of Afro-Eurasia, too.11 Jungle can still be found in the uplands
of the northeast and the centre of the Indian peninsula –even as vast tracts
have been steadily cleared to make way for tea gardens and plantations –but
was once also found in parts of Punjab in the northwest, such as the Lakhi
Jungle.12 Upland pastures and deserts were likewise beyond the pale of popu-
lous settlement. Unlike jungle, however, deserts have become larger in con-
sequence of environmental change and ecologically damaging alterations to
land use. Desertification can also be linked to the mobility of India’s great
rivers. For instance, the Indus was very susceptible to changes in its major
tributaries, most especially the highly mobile Sutlej, which shifted several times
during the early modern period, once or twice swerving through the parched
lands of Bikaner and reaching the sea at its own mouth.13 The Thar, India’s
largest desert, is spread over Rajasthan and parts of the present-day provinces
of Gujarat, Haryana, and Punjab. Those peoples who lived in such environ-
ments –forests, uplands and deserts –by necessity travelled to larger centres of
7 Kolff, Naukar, 71–74.

8 Singh, ‘Conformity and Conflict’; Alam, Crisis, 140.
9 Stein, Vijayanagara, 21.
10 Habib, Agrarian System, 1–24, for a rich survey of the variety of settled landscapes and the
incursion of settlements into scrublands and jungles. Valuable insight into the ‘politics of
wildness’ can be found in: Skaria, ‘Being Jangli’. See, also: Singh, ‘Forests’; Guha, Environment
and Ethnicity.
11 Wink, Indo-Islamic World, 38.
12 Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 76, 80.
13 Lally, India and the Silk Roads, 32–33.
6 Introduction
Map 1B The Delhi Sultanate: Lodi Rule on the Eve of the Mughal Conquest
Introduction 7
population for trade, exchanging the specialist productions from their locales
with those of plains societies.14
For the most part, settled populations were found in the plains where
seasonal rains were supplemented by river water that could be channelled
into irrigation canals, thereby making cultivation possible over a large area
through the year, an additional benefit being the rich alluvium brought down
from the uplands. Forming the northern limit of the Indian subcontinent, the
Karakoram range and the Himalayas are the source of two of India’s great
river systems (see: Map 1A). Draining into the Arabian Sea and the western
Indian Ocean is the Indus, whose tributaries –the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas,
and Sutlej –give the region its name, Punjab (lit. ‘five rivers’). Draining into the
Bay of Bengal and the eastern Indian Ocean are the Yamuna and the Ganges,
their confluence at Allahabad/Prayagraj being a sacred centre holy to Hindus,
and which are joined by numerous other tributaries to form one of the most
fertile and densely populated parts of India. Already major capitals by the
Middle Ages, Delhi and Agra had grown beside the Yamuna, a testament to
its strategic importance. From their headwaters in the upland peninsular spine
known as the Western Ghats, the Godavari, Krishna, and Kaveri rivers each
flow into the Bay of Bengal. Separating these northern and southern rivers is
the Narmada, which originates in the central Indian plateau and which is often
taken as a kind of dividing line between north and south India.
1.1.2 North India: the Delhi Sultanate and its Successors
Generally, population density increased downstream, and was greatest on the

fertile deltas. Greater densities made it easier for rulers to tax the populace and
thereby raise revenues to build the edifice of state power –a bureaucracy, a
military, and a political centre or capital, which often played home to the royal
court. Thus, while a few villages or a larger area of countryside and town might
be under the authority of a local ruler, whether a strongman or large landlord,
such men might be incorporated within a kingdom or a hereditary royal dyn-
asty, in turn. Around 1400, there were two important polities whose authority
was larger still in the sense of wielding authority over hereditary dynasties
and kingdoms. In the north was the Delhi Sultanate, the collective name for
five successive dynasties from the early thirteenth to the early sixteenth cen-
turies whose rulers for the most part made Delhi their capital: the Mamluk,
Khalaji, Tughluq, Sayyid, and Lodi dynasties (Map 1B). Under the Tughluq
ruler, Alauddin Khalji, campaigns into peninsular India expanded the reach
of Sultanate authority to its greatest extent by the mid-fourteenth century, but
at some cost. The Tughluq polity steadily became more territorially compact,
14 The fear of mobile peoples who lived in these spaces, but migrated seasonally for trade
with plains societies, sharpened after the Indian Rebellion, accelerating the (forced) settle-
ment of such groups and the control of their homelands; see: Markovits, Pouchepadass, and
Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and Circulation.
8 Introduction
while its military power was so depleted that barely 10,000 cavalrymen were
mustered in defence against Timur’s devasting invasion in 1398. Timur sacked
the capital, seizing its valuable hordes and impoverishing north India. The
Tughluq state survived until c. 1412 and was succeeded in Delhi by the rule of
the Sayyids (1414–51) and then the Lodis (1451–1526).15
Before Timur’s invasion, a number of regional kingdoms were already
starting to make their appearance, often at the expense of the Delhi Sultanate,
and often owing a debt to mobile Sufi leaders and footloose Muslim
diasporas.16 After Timur left, this process reached its climax, for the Bengal,
Gujarat, Jaunpur, and Malwa sultanates had all come into being. Bengal’s dis-
tance from Delhi and its landscape of thick jungle and manifold intersecting
rivers meant the Delhi sultans faced the perennial difficulty of maintaining
their control, especially when the officers appointed to rule Bengal on their
behalf began asserting their independent authority; so came to be the Ilyas
Shahi dynasty (1342–1493, with a brief interregnum in the early fifteenth cen-
tury). By the late fifteenth century, the Hussain Shahi dynasty (1493–1538) had
taken control.17 Gujarat was another seaboard state, although a little closer to
Delhi than Bengal. It also seceded from Tughluq rule relatively unchallenged,
with Zafar Khan assuming the title of Muzaffar Khan in 1407. His grandson
and successor founded the city of Ahmedabad in 1411, with the dynasty’s rule
lasting until 1573 despite numerous challenges from neighbouring polities and
the Portuguese, who first landed on India’s western coast in 1498.18
Jaunpur lay between the realm of the Delhi Sultanate and Bengal, and its
rulers –the Sharqi dynasty –broke ties with Delhi in 1396, prior to Timur’s cam-
paign. Jaunpur territory was former crown land, and so its existence represented
a grave material loss to the Tughluq and Sayyid rulers. Sikandar Lodi sacked
Jaunpur and effectively extinguished Sharqi authority in 1494.19 Malwa, in cen-
tral India, was another polity established by an erstwhile Tughluq officer who
severed his allegiance to the centre. It bordered the authority of the Bahmani
sultanate in the Deccan, as well as Gujarat and Mewar (Udaipur).20 Mewar
deserves special mention, being one of the pre-eminent Rajput kingdoms and
because it lay in southeastern Rajasthan on strategic routes to Delhi and the
Ganges as well as Gujarat and its ports. Its rise took place under Rana Kumbha
(r. 1433–68) –leader of the Sisodiyas, one of the most prestigious Rajput lin-
eages –who fought the Gujarat and Malwa rulers to carve out his territory. Its
other neighbours included the powerful Rajput states of Marwar (Jodhpur) and
Amber (Jaipur), established by the Rathores and Kacchwahas; like the Sisodiyas,
theirs were ruling lineages of some pedigree by the post-Timurid period.21
15 Kumar, ‘Delhi Sultanate’ is an excellent primer. See, also: Asher and Talbot, India, 40–53.
16 Digby, ‘Before Timur Came’. See, also: §3.1.1.
17 Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 32–70.
18 Sheikh, Forging; Balachandran, Narrative Pasts.
19 Asher and Talbot, India, 112–13.
20 Ibid, 113–15.
21 Ibid, 115–16.
Introduction 9
1.1.3 South India: Vijayanagara and the Deccan Sultanates
Many of these changes were prefigured in south India, specifically the area
known as the Deccan. This is often a fairly broad category, used to describe
lands south of the Vindhya range or the Narmada river up to the banks
of the Kaveri, within which the modern-day states of Gujarat, Madhya
Pradesh, and Odisha (formerly Orissa) form an intermediate zone of sorts,
separating everything to its south from the Indus and Gangetic valley zones
of the north. Of course, this is a northerner’s perspective; a narrower or more
specific usage confines itself to the plateau extending over the south and west
of the Indian peninsula containing the Krishna and Godavari river basins
(and thus excluding the Carnatic), while other uses of ‘Deccan’ and ‘Deccani’
revolve not around terrain but the identities of people found in the south
(described below).22
The massive yet short-lived expansion of the Tughluq sultanate in the early
fourteenth century involved the southward march of its armies and the conquest
of parts of the Deccan. Alauddin Bahman Shah (d. 1358) revolted against his
Tughluq master and carved-out the Bahmani Sultanate from some of the Tughluq
lands in the Deccan. This was an instance of something larger: as the control and
influence of the Delhi sultans over the south waned, those regional kingdoms
that had been flattened by the armies from the north began re-emerging, while
entirely new states also took shape around the mid-fourteenth century. Of the
latter, the most significant was the Vijayanagara Empire (Map 1C), a collective
term for the rule by four successive dynasties –the Sangama, Saluva, Tuluva,
and Aravidu houses –from the 1330s to the 1640s, their capital for the most part
at the new urban centre called Vijayanagara (lit. ‘City of Victory’).23
The Sangama dynasty expanded their authority slowly and steadily
from the kingdom established by the Sangama brothers, Harihara I
(r. 1336–56) and Bukka Raya I (r. 1356–77), with members of the extended
family exercising their own personal authority over the constituent parts
of the Vijayanagara polity. These domains, extending from the central and
southern parts of present-day Karnataka to the southern part of Andhra
Pradesh, were more rapidly enlarged in the first half of the fifteenth cen-
tury by Devaraya II (r. 1432–46); Sangama rule then stretched from coast
to coast. The Vijayanagara Empire thus became the largest polity ever
created in south India, extending over most of the peninsula south of the
Tungabhadra river. This expansion brought its rulers into conflict with
the Bahmani sultans, whose sway was to the north of the Krishna river.
There were three areas of conflict between these states: the Raichur doab
(a term for the area between two rivers, the Tungabhadra and Krishna in
this case), the fertile Krishna-Godavari river delta, and the western coast
22 Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, 1–8.

23 Michell, Southern India, 9–16.
10 Introduction
Map 1C Vijayanagara at its Zenith

Introduction 11
Map 1D The Deccan Sultanates and the Nayaka Kingdoms

12 Introduction
and its ports (where Arabian, Persian, and central Asian warhorses were
available for purchase).24
Only when Devaraya II welcomed military entrepreneurs skilled in cavalry
warfare could the Vijayanagara state compete effectively with their neighbour.
That said, Devaraya II’s successors struggled to compete with both the Bahmani
sultans and the Gajapati rulers of a growing kingdom founded in the 1430s
in what is today northeastern Andhra and southern Odisha; each made con-
siderable gains at the expense of the Vijayanagara Empire. The result was the
deposition of the Sangamas by the short-lived Saluva dynasty (1485–1505), and
then of the latter by the Tuluvas. The second Tuluva king, Krishnadeva Raya
(r. 1509–29), worked to consolidate the state, reconquer lost territories, and
expand the empire, making it the preeminent power in the south. Besides their
defeat of the Gajapatis, the Tuluva rulers were buoyed by the shattering of the
Bahmani Sultanate into a number of new successor states over the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, a process often spearheaded by the sultanate’s own
governors and ministers.25
The resulting states were centred on Khandesh (ruled by a dynasty that
became known as the Faruqi Khans) and Berar (the Imad Shahis) in the
north of the Deccan; Ahmadnagar (under the Nizam Shahis) to the west;
Bidar (the Baridis) on the central plateau; Bijapur (under the Adil Shahis) in
the southern Deccan; and Golkonda (the Qutb Shahis) in the eastern Deccan.
They are collectively known as the ‘Deccan Sultanates’ (Map 1D).26 They
were competitive, for each sought (unsuccessfully) to enlarge its authority
over the entire Deccan, save for their collaboration in 1565 against the
Vijayanagara Empire.27 The Aravidu family ruled in the name of the Tuluva
kings from the 1540s until 1565, when Tuluva defeat by the combined forces
of the Deccan Sultanates at the Battle of Talikota allowed the Aravidus
to seize power. They were able to cling onto power for less than a century,
although ruling a far more compact state. A raft of new kingdoms emerged
in the Vijayanagara Empire’s place, described as its successor states because
of the continuities between old and new.28 These were the nayaka states
(i.e., those led by nayaks –governors or lords), notable among which were
Mysore, Madurai, Ikkeri, Ramnad, and Tanjavur (Map 1D). They survived
until around the late seventeenth century, when many were absorbed either
24 Although it now seems a little dated, Stein’s Vijayanagara remains a reliable guide and is still
much cited.
25 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 78–104, offers a compact yet colourful survey of fifteenth-and
sixteenth-century Vijayanagara. Narayana Rao and Subrahmanyam, ‘Ideologies’, 210–225,
examines Krishnadeva Raya’s imperial ideology.
26 Michell and Zebrowski, Deccan Sultanates, 8–18, offers a digestible guide. For a recent, rich
analysis: Fischel, Local States.
27 Fischel, Local States, 83–85.
28 See, for example: Bes, ‘Sultan’, for analysis of continuities relating to dress and statecraft.
Introduction 13
by the Deccan Sultanates or else a little later by the expanding Mughal and
Maratha empires.29
Despite centuries of rule by the Muslim lineages of the Delhi and Deccan
sultanates, the population of the south –like that of the north –was predom-
inately what we would call ‘Hindu’ (§2.1). Dakhni (Deccani) is the name given
to Muslims belonging to those conquest groups who migrated from central
Asia and Iran first to north India and then further south.30 (Dakhni also refers
to the regional language that developed in this period; see: §9.2.2). Ghariban
(‘foreigners’) denoted even newer Muslim emigrants from Iran and the Arab
and Turkish lands under the control of the Ottoman Empire.31 They migrated
because of the opportunities for mercenary or bureaucratic service, and because
of the demand for litterateurs and learned (religious) men, engineers, artists,
and workmen, contributing tremendously to the dynamism of early modern
south Indian states in return.32 To their number can be added the group known
as Habshis: Africans from the east coast (present-day Ethiopia and Somalia),
mostly shipped as military slaves, of whom some attained independence and
even great power, office, and status, such as Malik Ambar. Alongside Hindus,
the Dakhnis and Habshis formed the political and social elite of south India,
whose existence was succoured by the agrarian surplus the bulk of the popu-
lation laboured to produce, notably cotton, millet, rice, and sugar, as well as
other valuable crops such as indigo and pepper.
1.2 Timur Redux: Mughal Rule to c. 1707
1.2.1 Climate and the Little Ice Age
Geography and environmental factors have been important to the scholarship

of André Wink, Jos Gommans, and others shaping what has been presented so
far in this chapter and what follows in the rest of this book.33 ‘Natural’ factors
play an important part in explaining not only the expansion of the agrarian
frontier (Chapter 5) and the elaboration of the state’s revenue-bureaucratic
apparatus, which permitted greater centralisation (Chapter 7). They also
explain the interaction between the settled and mobile worlds of the wet and
dry zones, which were implicated in everything from the pattern of trade to
the siting of capital cities and the character of urbanism (Chapter 4), the pro-
duction of hard power or violence (Chapter 6), and ultimately the nature and
29 Michell, Southern India, 16–22, for a concise guide. See, also: Fischel, Local States, 192–235;
Narayana Rao and Subrahmanyam, ‘Ideologies’, 225–32.
30 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, especially 67–70, on the shifting meanings of Dakhni. For more
detail: Fischel, Local States, especially 70–74.
31 For a useful, critical discussion of the terms used to describe this group, see: Fischel, ‘Ghariban’.
32 Overton, ed., Iran, contains a rich survey of the topic.
33 See, most recently: Wink, Indo-Islamic World, for a synthesis putting historical geography
centre-stage. Other references follow throughout this book.
14 Introduction
dynamics of the state in south Asia. Not only did geography, environment,
and climate give form over a millennium or so to what Wink calls the ‘Indo-
Islamic world’; short-term fluctuations in each of these factors during the early
modern period engendered some of those phenomena and developments that
mark out this era as distinctive (§5.1).
Across the northern hemisphere, climatic cooling and heating interacted
with other environmental factors to shape broadly common patterns of change
in agrarian life. A jump-start to agrarian expansion due to favourable climate
in the ninth to thirteenth centuries was followed by a highly variable period
of more adverse weather (including cooling or drying), then a milder, slightly
more agriculturally propitious period up to the late sixteenth century. After
this warming and plenty came cooling and upheaval linked to volcanic mega
eruptions (as in 1580, 1586, and 1593 in Indonesia and Peru, and then through
the latter half of the next century), which had their own cooling effects but
also contributed to more severe El Niño events.34 The combination of volcanic
activity, weather events related to the North Atlantic Oscillation and El Niño
Southern Oscillation, and changes in the sun’s energy output gave rise to the
so-called early modern Little Ice Age. This disturbed farming from the 1560s
or 1570s and most markedly –but in two phases –in the decades either side
of the mid-seventeenth century before, finally, another mild and productive
period commenced from about the second-quarter of the eighteenth century.35
The bleaker periods saw reduced agricultural production but also epidemics,
in turn creating social dislocation and political crisis. The impacts of the tur-
bulence in the seventeenth century were formerly described by some European
historians such as Geoffrey Parker as a ‘general crisis’ in which poor harvests
and popular hardship triggered unrest and social disorder leading to the
toppling of political regimes and even regicide.
Using fresh scientific data and evidence from outside Europe, Parker has
not only resuscitated his much-debated thesis of a European ‘general crisis’;
he enlarges it into a ‘global crisis’ afflicting the northern hemisphere from
England to China.36 But nowhere was the suffering as severe or prolonged,
nor the landscape so deeply scarred as in parts of the Ottoman Empire. The
empire’s semi-arid expanses were far more vulnerable to even slight environ-
mental change, so that the combination of fierce cold and the worst drought in
six centuries with the demands of a state at war helped unleash a crisis of such
severity that it would take a century or so to recover, according to recent work
by Sam White.37 Belying the general pattern, in other words, were numerous
conjunctural factors that shaped different regions’ or states’ varied experience
of climatic upheaval. Mughal India, too, has been drawn into this analysis,
34 Jenkins, Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith, 90.

35 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 103, 106.
36 Parker, Global Crisis.
37 White, Climate of Rebellion, which is richer and more complex than can be adequately
summarised here.
Introduction 15
not least because of the devastating famines of the 1630s, which hit Gujarat
especially hard. In contrast to their counterparts in other parts of the world,
however, the Mughal dynasty came out largely unscathed.38
1.2.2 The ‘Great Mughals’
But who were the Mughals? –and why are they important? The first Mughal
was Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), who was born in central
Asia and was a fifth-generation patrilineal descendant of Timur and a fifteenth-
generation matrilineal descendant of Chinggis Khan. By the time Babur came
into the world, Timur’s empire had fragmented, and Timurid and Mongol kin
fought one another to wrest a larger domain for themselves. Babur entered the
fray aged eleven. Ten years later and already something of a vagabond, he was
driven out of his homeland in the Fergana Valley, seizing the Timurid out-
post of Kabul in 1504, which provided him and his growing band of followers
a secure base and considerable military resources. In the 1520s, they began
regular raids in Punjab as Babur’s attention turned to the larger prize of north
India, also known as Hindustan. Invited by the Afghan rulers of Punjab to
invade, Babur fought and defeated the last of the Lodi sultans in 1526, inaug-
urating Mughal rule over India.39
The Mughal Emperors, 1526–1748
Babur, r. 1526–30
Humayun, first r. 1530–40
interregnum under Sher Shah Suri
Humayun, second r. 1555–56
Akbar, r. 1556–1605
Jahangir, r. 1605–27
Shah Jahan, r. 1628–58
Aurangzeb, r. 1658–1707
Bahadur Shah, r. 1707–12
Jahandar Shah, r. 1712–13
Farrukhsiyar, r. 1713–19
Rafi’ ul-Daula, r. 1719
Rafi’ ul-Darjat, r. 1719
Muhammad Shah, r. 1719–48
Mughal line continues to 1858
38 Richards, ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’, engages with the first iteration of the ‘general crisis’
thesis and opens a special issue of the journal on the topic also spanning southeast Asia. This
is not too dissimilar from Parker’s subsequent treatment of these same regions in Global Crisis,
115–51, 399–420, 484–506.
39 Dale, Babur, 100–208. Here, see also: Digby, ‘Before Timur Came’, 314.
16 Introduction
Map 1E The Mughal Empire at Akbar’s death, 1605

Introduction 17
Although the Mughals exploited their Timurid inheritance in time (§8.1),

Babur had hesitations about deriving his legitimacy from such credentials
on account of his numerous Timurid relatives –who had helped with the
conquest (mulkgirlik) or were subsequently invited to help him pacify
Hindustan –standing ready to seize all or part of his new domain for them-
selves.40 Stretching from present-day Afghanistan to the north Indian plain,
the early Mughal state was of a very different form to that of the ‘classical
age’ of the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century (§7.1). It was
yet to be consolidated and rather fragile, being vulnerable to challengers from
within as well as the vestiges of Lodi authority across the north, with taxation
and administrative arrangements being rudimentary, so we can debate whether
and to what extent it could be termed an empire at the time of Babur’s death
in 1530.41 All these challenges came to the fore during the reign of Babur’s son
and successor, Humayun. His time on the throne was cleft by a period in exile
at the Safavid court in Iran. Humayun’s first reign was from 1530 to 1540;
he was then defeated and driven abroad by Sher Shah Suri, who had risen to
power via military service to the nascent Mughal dynasty.42 Humayun returned
to India to defeat Sher Shah’s heir in 1555. Upon his own death in 1556, the
throne passed to his adolescent son, Akbar, with government left in the hands
of regents until 1560.
Before 1560, Akbar’s reign was concerned with defeating the remaining
claimants of the Sur dynasty, reconquering territory in the Lahore to Jaunpur
imperial heartland, and expansion into central India. Upon reaching his
majority, Akbar began a period of sustained expansion, first into Malwa in
1561, which lay north of the Vindhyas, and then into the present-day regions
of Odisha in 1564 and Rajasthan toward the end of the decade. In the early
1570s, the conquests of Gujarat and Bengal extended the empire’s frontier
to the shores of the western and eastern Indian Ocean regions, bringing key
ports and their wealth into the Mughals’ ambit (Map 1E). Meanwhile, a period
of administrative reform was underway, supporting the consolidation and
better integration of newly conquered lands. Although there were important
developments in the Mughal state under his son and successor, Jahangir (r.
1605–28), the next moment of significant territorial expansion came in 1636
during the reign of Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), with the
absorption of the erstwhile Ahmadnagar Sultanate into the Mughal domains.
As Bijapur had swallowed up Bidar, and Golkonda had annexed parts of
the waning Vijayanagara state, there remained only two powerful obstacles to
Mughal domination over the Deccan. A treaty recognising Mughal supremacy
was signed by the Adil Shahs of Bijapur and Qutb Shahs of Golkonda, but
the Deccan was not pacified. This is because much of the countryside was
40 For a history of the Mughals steeped in the Timurid ideological, institutional, and techno-
logical inheritance, see: Wink, Indo-Islamic, 136–59.
41 See, usefully: Dale, Babur, 177–92.
18 Introduction
Map 1F The Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb’s death, 1707

Introduction 19
Map 1G The Maratha and other Mughal ‘Successor States’, c. 1760

20 Introduction
outside either sultanate or Mughal control, creating a space for the rise of a
new power –the Marathas –who would prove to be a major obstacle to the
Mughals. The Deccan campaigns were headed by Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) –
first as a prince, then as Mughal padshah or emperor. He moved the imperial
capital to the southern city of Aurangabad in 1681 and defeated the Bijapur
and Golkonda armies later in that decade. The empire now obtained its greatest
extent (Map 1F). Yet, it bears remembering that some conflicts produced very
limited gains for the Mughals or even led to their defeat, and that a number
of more or less independent kingdoms held out behind the lines of moun-
tains and forests, more or less alluding Mughal power, including Kuch Bihar,
Kamrup, Assam, Arakan, large parts of Ajmer province, as well as Odisha and
central India (§6.2, §6.4.2).43
1.2.3 The Marathas and Late Mughal India
Other than being the Mughals’ fiercest rivals, it bears asking: who were the
Marathas? At the start of the seventeenth century, the Maratha leadership
probably belonged to what was no more than one of many peasant-warrior
groupings. In return for service to the Ahmadnagar sultan, the Marathas had
acquired landed rights by the time of Maloji, who became an aide to the de
facto ruler and was rewarded with an estate that subsequently passed to his
son, Shahji. Shahji, however, served several masters: the Ahmadnagar sultan,
the Mughal emperor for a time, and eventually the Bijapur sultan.44 The eclipse
of Bijapur power and the advance of the Mughal armies around the mid-
seventeenth century established the context for Shahji’s son, Shivaji, to make
an independent bid for power. One source of Maratha-Mughal hostilities was
the Mughal court’s failure to incorporate Shivaji as a noble in the later 1660s.
This was not because his claims were grandiose and of dubious legitimacy,
but because Mughal elites saw him as merely a petty zamindar (landlord or
landed gentry). Having steadily expanded into the space between the erstwhile
Ahmadnagar and Bijapur sultanates, and consolidated the administration and
military, Shivaji determined in the early 1670s that he should be crowned and
invested as a Hindu king (§2.1.2).45
Aurangzeb’s prolonged campaigning in the Deccan from the 1680s pitted
the Mughals against Shivaji’s successors, whose success or failure altered partly
with the changing allegiance of local elite groups, while the toll of fighting
and raiding on the land and its people was immense. A turning-point came
following Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. On the one hand, were difficulties faced
on the ground, in the Deccan itself, where the Mughals struggled to maintain
their grasp while the Marathas asserted their claims over various lands south
of the Tapti River. On the other hand, political intrigue within the Mughal
43 Habib, Agrarian System, 228–29.

44 Gordon, Marathas, 41–58.
45 Ibid, 59–90.
Introduction 21
court erupted following the death of Aurangzeb’s successor, Bahadur Shah

I (r. 1707–12). Mughal succession had hitherto been an open contest, usually
fought between rival claimants when one or other of the imperial princes felt
conditions were ripe to launch their bid for the throne (§7.3.1). Prince Salim
had launched a rebellion against Akbar in 1599, later ascending as Jahangir
(his regnal name, meaning ‘world seizer’ or ‘conqueror’), shortly afterwards
facing a rebellion from his own son, Prince Khusrau, who was captured and
blinded in 1607 to thwart his ambitions once and for all. Prince Khurram
fought a war of succession upon Jahangir’s death in 1627, ascending as Shah
Jahan (‘king of the world’), but a dramatic contest for the throne began a few
decades later, resulting in the emperor’s forced abdication and imprisonment
in Agra, before the victor –Alamgir I, more commonly known as Aurangzeb –
ascended the throne.
The war of succession after Bahadur Shah’s death was among the last, how-
ever, for his successor, Jahandar Shah (r. 1712–13), was overthrown in a matter
of months. Pulling the strings were the infamous Sayyid brothers, who effect-
ively finished the open-ended system of succession by installing Farrukhsiyar
(r. 1713–19) and a sequence of other puppet rulers before Muhammad Shah
I (r. 1719/20–48) took his place on the throne. These factional contests were
the context to the Marathas’ demands finally being ratified in 1719 by one of
the Sayyid brothers’ emperors in Delhi. That said, as much as such recognition
cemented the Marathas’ rising power outwardly, it was also possible because of
a change inside the Maratha state or swarajya (a term the Marathas used widely
to describe their independent sovereignty or rule). It was not the Maratha king
himself, but his peshwa (akin to a prime minister), who led the armies and
brokered the deals. In the decades that followed, the peshwas became the de
facto rulers of the Maratha domains, even as they came to share power with
key Maratha chiefs, namely those of the Gaekwad, Holkar, and Scindia dynas-
ties.46 The peshwas’ achievements were many. They included alliance-building
and securing the loyalty of military leaders as well as literate elites, the latter
to staff an increasingly streamlined bureaucracy; improving the region’s rela-
tively poor banking and credit facilities, thereby supporting the expansion
of trade and the economy as a whole, shoring up the treasury, in turn; and
continued territorial expansion, making the Maratha Empire the pre-eminent
Indian power by the end of the period examined in this book (Map 1G), even
protecting the Mughal emperor against invading forces in the 1750s.47
The period from Akbar reaching his majority in 1560 to Aurangzeb’s
death in 1707 witnessed the steady expansion of the Mughal imperium to
its greatest extent and an efflorescence in the arts and intellectual life, cul-
ture and the economy. Often termed a ‘golden age’ or what Stephen F. Dale
has called a ‘Timurid renaissance’, and granted the lion’s share of scholars’
46 Ibid, 91–113.
47 Ibid, 113–53, as well as 178–95, for a critical discussion of ‘empire’ and other concepts as
descriptors of the Maratha polity.
22 Introduction
attention, the unwarranted implication is that the subsequent period was one
of dullness if not decline (§7.4).48 Borrowing from Ottoman history, we might
be slightly better off if we identify and describe the 1560–1707 period as the
Mughal ‘classical age’. It was a time which saw many of those institutions
associated with Mughal rule come into being, including those later adapted
or reformulated (sometimes by the Mughals’ successors) as the Mughal state
was itself transformed. Of course, we can only make use of the term with the
weighty caveat that Mughal institutions probably never acquired a ‘classical’
form, given their constant flux, not to mention their variation across the non-
homogenous political topography of the Mughal imperium.49 What also bears
mentioning is that the period between the late classical age and the era of the
‘colonial transition’ was marked by the establishment and/or expansion of a
number of states, many of a ‘regional’ character and often seen as successors
to the Mughal imperium because they exhibited continuities with Mughal
institutions and practices. Some were formed by erstwhile Mughal governors
(e.g., Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad; see: Map 1G), others by the Mughals’
rivals (e.g., the Marathas), while others still were kingdoms that had been
incorporated into the Mughal imperium (i.e., the Rajput states, like Mewar).
1.3 Early Modern Empires and Globalisation

The Mughal Empire was not the only by- product of the fragmentation
of Timur’s imperial domains. On its western fringe, Ottoman expansion
resumed: the conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453 and the conquest
of Red Sea trading ports and the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina in
1517 were pivotal moments in the transition of a ‘frontier principality’ into a
‘world empire’.50 Safavid Iran was another successor state to Timur’s short-
lived empire.51 Some, like the rulers of Muscovy –a sometime tributary state of
the Mongol ‘Golden Horde’ –also benefited from the political ferment. After
1580, they broke out of Muscovy’s core and rapidly expanded across the steppe
to the shores of the Caspian, even reaching the Pacific by 1639 (see: Map 1H).52
A related process was the spread of Islam (Chapter 3), for the rulers of the
Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires were all Muslims. The expansion and
consolidation of their domains not only helped to create states of a greater
48 Dale, ‘Legacy’. As for the dominance of the Akbar and Aurangzeb period, we might note the
recent volume by Koch and Anooshahr, eds., Mughal Empire, which very valuably spotlights
the Jahangiri and Shah Jahani eras –so often nested or skimmed over –within the classical age
at large. By examining the decades either side of Aurangzeb’s death, however, Kaicker’s King
breaks out of the confines of the classical age or the separation of the seventeenth century
empire from that of the eighteenth century.
49 Here, I take my cue from the incisive critique of Ottoman historiography advanced in Hathaway,
‘Periodisation’.
50 See: Goffman, Ottoman Empire.
51 Darwin, After Tamerlane, 82.
52 Ibid, 65–72.
newgenrtpdf
Introduction 23
Map 1H Early Modern World Empires
24 Introduction
degree of centralisation than had been seen before (see: Chapter 7, especially
§7.5), but also helped to bring the languages, culture, and sciences of the Islamic
world deeper into Eurasian societies (Chapters 9 and 10). At the same time,
Islam was spreading into sub-Saharan Africa and across the seas to southeast
Asia, so that the Persianate cosmopolis was imbricated in the Afro-Eurasian
and Indian Ocean worlds. This dynamism in the ‘Orient’ not only puts the late
medieval Occidental breakout into perspective; it also reminds us of the many
frameworks through which we should view the history of early modern India.
1.3.1 Situating Early Modern India
India’s so-called ‘Persianate age’, as so magisterially surveyed by Richard

M. Eaton, began centuries before the period studied in this book.53 ‘Persianate’
in this and other scholars’ usage refers to the ascendance of Persian as a lan-
guage, becoming a lingua franca and obtaining a hegemony in literary and
other kinds of knowledge production by the early modern period across a
terrain stretching from the Balkans to Bengal and even to the Malay world.54
‘Persianate’ refers to more than language, however, and signals the dominance
of (evolving, never static) cultural forms: arts, architecture, literature and lit-
erary forms, material culture, yet also cuisine, dress, deportment, style, state-
craft. These were transmitted in Persian texts and oral traditions, and via the
peregrinations or migration of people from other parts of the Persophone
world, especially (post-)Timurid Iran and central Asia.55 The Vijayanagara
Empire was also part of the Persianate world to a degree, such was the influ-
ence of Persianate culture.56
It was difficult to make a living in the parched lands of Iran and Iberia
or the harsh and rugged Scottish Highlands. The inhabitants of these regions
thus sought to migrate to prosperous lands of opportunities like India and
the New World.57 The migration of Iranians (or Iranis, in Indian sources) was
consequently but one part of the larger transfer of population from poorer
regions around the globe and was one factor in the steady increase in ‘cross-
cultural’ migration from c. 1500 until the great migration boom after c. 1850.
It was also one aspect of the larger kinetic culture of early modern times, other
manifestations of which included the movement of courts, the circulation of
itinerants and holy men, or the march of armies over ever greater expanses.58
53 Eaton, Persianate Age.

54 On this last, see: Subrahmanyam, Tagus to the Ganges, 76.
55 On the migration of Iranian specialists directly to the late medieval and early modern
Deccan: Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 59–63, 99–102.
56 Eaton, Persianate Age, 16.
57 On the push- pull factors, itineraries, networks, and ‘culture’ underpinning early modern
Persianate mobilities/circulation, see: Flatt, Living Well, 74–119.
58 Lucasen and Lucasen, ‘Mobility Transition Revisited’, on cross-cultural migration in Europe,
western Russia, and the Ottoman lands. Evidence of the wider kinetic culture can be found
throughout this book.
Introduction 25
That said, it bears emphasising that those Basques and Scots who entered for-
eign service (military, commercial) or else settled in as distant locales as north
America, the Baltic, and east-central Europe nowhere engendered anything
like the so-called ‘Persianate world’, rendering the latter all the more remark-
able and important.59
Though not an actors’ category, contemporaries were aware of Persianate
influences. For their part, Indians seldom expressed disgust toward the
ghariban and more often emulated and interacted with new constructs and
concepts, as we shall see. The reverse was not always the case: even two-and-
a-half centuries of Mughal rule was insufficient to minimise the shock and
horror some Persophone immigrants felt upon setting foot on Indian soil,
to say nothing of the fear and loathing reported by those venturing beyond
the fringe of the Dar-al Islam or Muslim world.60 India was hardly a ‘per-
iphery’, however, for it vitally shaped the ‘Persianate cosmopolis’ and was
one of its centres, probably the preeminent one outside Iran, especially in
the early modern centuries studied in this book. Reflexively, the Persianate
world/cosmopolis is an important framework within which to situate and
thereby better understand early modern India, even as we need to be aware of
the limits of the ‘Persianate’ and ought not ignore competing, complemen-
tary, or overlapping but not quite equivalent constructs (e.g., the Sanskrit or
the Arabic cosmopolis; see: §9.1).61
Persian was used in what had become the predominately Muslim soci-
eties and states of western Asia, so that its spread was entangled with the
spread not only of Islam, but of ‘Islamicate’ culture and learning even more
broadly. A word is due about the terms ‘Islamicate’ and ‘Indic’. The former is a
neologism coined by the late Marshall G.S. Hodgson and widely used nowadays.
It does not refer to the ‘world of Islam’ or the influence of Islam as a religion.
Instead, scholars use it to refer to the swathes of Afro-Eurasia under Muslim rule
and its influences, be they upon art, architecture, language, literature, culture, and
the sciences.62 By the same turn, the term ‘Indic’ refers to Indian learning and
norms ‘beyond Hindu doctrine or practice’.63 Both terms point to ‘a repertoire of
language and behaviour, knowledge and power shaping lived experience beyond
the world of religious doxa or practice, David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence
propose, and neither Islamicate nor Indic ‘denotes simply bounded groups self-
defined as Muslim or Hindu.’64
59 See: Miller, Urban Societies, 52, 69–71; Belich, ‘Black Death’, 101–02.
60 Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 131, 159–242.
61 The following are valuable essays examining more fully the ideas and concepts described above:
Amanat, ‘Remembering the Persianate’; Green, ‘Introduction’; Eaton, ‘Persian Cosmopolis’,
which usefully notes the overlap and tension between ‘Persianate’ and ‘Islamicate’.
62 Gilmartin and Lawrence, ‘Introduction’, 2.
63 Ibid, 2.
64 Ibid, 2.
26 Introduction
Why have these terms obtained such currency among historians of

premodern south Asia?65 As we shall see in the next two chapters, what
seem to us like primordial identities –such as ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ or even
‘Indian’ –were in actual fact little felt and of lesser importance in premodern
south Asia.66 It might be easy for us to slip Hindu for India/Indian and of
Turk or Muslim for foreign/foreigner for the sake of convenience when talking
about medieval or early modern south Asia, but this was seldom how contem-
poraries categorised self and other. Islam and Muslim culture became thor-
oughly indigenised within India, furthermore, both through their adjustment
to the Indian environment and because of the engagement of non-Muslims
with ideas, languages, traditions, and technologies brought by Muslims to
the Indian subcontinent –an exchange and interplay that we shall explore
throughout this book.67 Consequently, we find many lineaments of premodern
identity and loyalty, some mutually exclusive but others capable of overlap-
ping, so that one’s sense of self and other could well be complex and even fluid.
Take, for instance, the conscious ‘code-switching’ between stitched clothes
(Islamicate) and draped cloth (Indic) at the Vijayanagara and Maratha courts
depending on the kind of business being conducted and the sort of image the
ruler wanted to outwardly project.68
Long before the craze for porcelain and armorial ware in eighteenth-century
Europe, Timurid elites collected and displayed Chinese porcelain, sometimes
in dedicated chini-khanas (‘house of china’ or ‘china rooms’), pointing to the
imbrication of the Persianate and Indo-Islamicate worlds with the Eurasian
and Indian Ocean arenas.69 Like the former, these terrestrial and/or maritime
spaces of circulation and interaction also antedated the early modern period,
even as their evolution entered a new phase after c. 1400 or c. 1500. Mughal
imperial aspirations often returned to the dynasty’s homeland in the continental
interior of Eurasia –disastrously so, in the case of the wars of the 1640s and
1650s. Despite the Delhi Sultans’ and Mughals’ failure to politically knit cen-
tral and south Asia together in a lasting way, India remained closely connected
to the states and societies of the Eurasian continental interior thanks to the
routine movements of pastoralists and merchants, diplomats and holy men,
and so forth, right through the early modern period.70 During the fifteenth cen-
tury, there seems to have been a revival in maritime trade as well as something
of a reorientation, with India arguably moving to the centre of what historians
call the ‘Indian Ocean world’.71 This concept is used in the sense of the ‘greater
65 Hodgson’s differentiation of Islam from Islamdom and the Islamicate is not without its critics,
such as: Ahmed, What is Islam, especially 157–75.
66 Compare this with, say, the situation in the Ottoman lands by the late fifteenth century: Barkey,
Empire of Difference, 60–64.
67 See, further: Alam, Languages.
68 See: Lally, ‘Fashion’.
69 Chida-Rizvi, ‘Chini-khana’.
70 Lally, Silk Roads.
71 See, for instance: Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 162–64.
Introduction 27
Indian Ocean’ or ‘maritime Afro-Asia’, made up of the seas and the ocean
and their coastlines, but also their hinterlands and the deep interior.72 Thus,
when Vasco da Gama and his fellow Europeans arrived in Asian waters via the
Cape of Good Hope for the first time at the end of the fifteenth century, they
faced the challenge of operating within a very well-connected and competitive
trading environment.
1.3.2 Occidental Breakout and Seaborne Empires
The Iberian powers sponsored the Occidental breakout that was well in motion
by the post-Black Death era. Under the patronage of Henry the Navigator
(1394–1460), Portuguese mariners ventured along the north and west African
coasts, paving the way for Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage of 1497–1499. The
Portuguese monarchy made handsome profits from the spice trade because
of its near monopoly over the Cape route in the sixteenth century –only a
near monopoly, because merchants from other European nations began to
try their hand at Euro-Asian trade by the late sixteenth century. On the heels
of an Englishman landing in Asian waters via the Cape route in 1592 and a
Dutchman following in 1595, a spate of rival companies came into being, each
competing for the profits from Euro-Asian trade. These companies helped
to share the very high risks associated with the dangerous oceanic voyage,
yet too much competition undercut profits, thereby undercutting the viability
of trade.
Thus, merchants realised that some form of monopoly granted by their
respective governments was necessary to support their enterprise, and so the
East India Company (EIC) was granted its charter by the English monarch
in 1600 and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) established
as a merger of rival interests in 1602. At first, the VOC and EIC struggled to
break into the competitive world of intra-Asian trade, which was critical to
the procurement of those spices found across Asia and desired by European
consumers. They had to compete with the Portuguese, who held something
of a first-mover advantage given their relationships with Asian rulers and
merchants as well as knowledge of routes, marketplaces, and procurement
networks. In time, the Dutch would attain pre-eminence in Euro-Asian trade,
this position subsequently superseded by the English company, even as it
veered from one cash crisis to another. That said, no single European organ-
isation ever dominated intra-Asian trade, such was its enormity.73
Gabriel Paquette has recently made compatible two seemingly contra-
dictory issues regarding the ‘seaborne empires’ of the early modern Spanish
and Portuguese, the Dutch, French, and British (Map 1H). On the one hand,
72 Vink, ‘New Thalassology’, 53.

73 Chaudhury, ‘International Trade’. For a subtle evaluation of this overarching trend from the
VOC’s perspective: Gaastra, ‘Dutch Response’. On the Company’s teetering financial position,
see: Wilson, India Conquered, 1–81.
28 Introduction
each of these powers were rather peripheral within Europe before they began
‘metamorphosing into seaborne empires’, yet also ‘appear to be secondary
and rather faltering actors’ when viewed ‘in the unfolding global drama of
power’ shaped by such massive empires as the ‘Ottoman, Qing, Mughal,
Romanov, Kongolese, Aztec, and Inca, among others’.74 On the other hand,
the period from approximately 1620 to 1820 saw the ‘explosive expansion of
European influence –through trade, conquest, and occupation –at the expense
of non-European empires, whether judged by control over territory, trade, or
preservation of political sovereignty’. It was often propelled by the rivalry
and competition among the seaborne empires, especially in the wake of the
Reformation, and sometimes even in the face of criticism, staunch resistance,
and subversion at home and abroad.75
This was possible, he reconciles, because ‘the commodities [including slaves],
precious metals, and capital accumulated in the extra-European world helped
to transform formerly marginal enclaves into epicentres of geopolitical power’,
seldom because of the vision or capabilities of Europeans alone, and more
often in collaboration with non-European elites acting in pursuit of their own
interests and via institutions they had created (particularly legal and adminis-
trative ones).76 Thus, we cannot understand the newfound hegemony exercised
by western European states by the end of the early modern period without
understanding their imbrication within extra-European developments and,
vice versa, it is revealing to look at the contributions of places like India to the
evolving global system. Let us probe this final point some more.
Among the impacts of the expansion of Euro-Asian trade in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries was the pumping of liquidity into the Indian
Ocean world –especially India and China –in exchange for Asian goods.
The wider impacts were numerous, even if they were felt more acutely in
certain places (e.g., ports, court centres) than others, and even if we should
be careful not to overstate the size and resultant significance of pre-modern
Euro-Asian trade.77 To preview a few of those effects examined in this book,
we find evidence of: widening money usage and greater commercialisation of
economic activity, the circulation and development of knowledge over larger
distances and with increased velocity, cross-cultural and artistic exchange,
and diplomacy and rivalry between royal courts both in proximity or at a
great remoteness from one another (Chapters 5, 8, 9, 10). The greater enrich-
ment of the already prosperous Mughal state spurred the deeper involve-
ment of political elites in commerce, at the same time making India a more
74 Paquette, Seaborne Empires, 8, for citation, and 31–37.

75 Ibid, 8, for citation, 26–27, 47–96, on competition and expansion, and 180–206, on critique and
resistance.
76 Ibid, 8, for citation, and 38–41, 174–71. A forensic account of the excruciating process of
network-building by Europeans with Mughal nobles in pursuit of a farman (writ) to trade can
be found in: Siebertz, ‘Farman from Shah Jahan’.
77 See, for instance: de Vries, ‘Limits of Globalisation’.
Introduction 29
appealing proposition for would-be rulers, whether originating from the sub-
continent or abroad, as we shall see.
1.3.3 Tribal Breakout and the Eurasian Revolution
The year 1717 represented a landmark moment in two respects. First, because
the Mughal emperor, Farrukhsiyar (r. 1713–19), signed the farman or writ
that stipulated the EIC’s trading privileges. Most notably, the Company was
exempted from the payment of all customs and transit duties in return for a
nominal fee of 3,000 rupees, resulting in a massive expansion of EIC trade,
soon surpassing that of the VOC. Second, because Murshid Quli Khan was
effectively establishing his personal control over the province of Bengal, though
remaining a tributary satrap or nawab. The succession of his son-in-law in 1727
marked the creation of a hereditary dynasty typical of the kind also coming
into being in such Mughal satrapies as Awadh and Hyderabad part and parcel
with the decentralisation of imperial government. The Company’s interest in
textiles had brought its merchants to Bengal, and since the privileges granted
in 1717 deepened its commercial activities –and political interests –in that
province, so the one development would be affected by the other.
The year 1739 also represented a turning-point. Over a decade earlier, ‘tribal
breakout’ in the Safavid-Mughal borderlands triggered a chain reaction that
led to the toppling of Safavid rule. Inexperienced, the new rulers of Iran were
soon overthrown by Nadir Shah Afshar (d. 1747), who placed an heir of the
Safavid house on the throne as his puppet before taking the throne in his own
right in 1736. With the support of his general, Ahmad Shah Durrani, and the
latter’s Afghan kinsmen and followers, Nadir Shah marched from Iran to the
north Indian plain in 1739, where they defeated the Mughal armies, entered
Delhi (Shahjahanabad), and sequestered vast amounts of treasure and other
valuables as booty. It was made possible by the acquiescence of certain Mughal
elites, who cooperated in their own self-interest with the invading forces,
even as Delhi’s commoners rose up in defiance and rebellion.78 Following his
master’s assassination in 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani united several Pashtun
tribes before successfully creating a new kingdom spanning what is today
eastern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. Thus, he launched sev-
eral campaigns in close succession into Mughal territory from 1747, resulting
in the expansion of the Durrani state and its enrichment through the seizure of
Mughal wealth and revenue-yielding lands.79
The year 1757 was especially momentous. Moving from the northwest,
Ahmad Shah Durrani’s forces made their way to the Mughal capital at
Delhi, where the emperor suffered the further humiliation of being publicly
78 Kaicker, The King, 20–21. See, also: §4.2.4.

79 See: Lally, ‘Beyond “Tribal Breakout” ’ which argues for this process being more of a ‘break-in’.
Gommans, Indo-Afghan, offers the best study of Durrani imperialism. See, also: Gommans,
Indo-Afghan, 112, for the relationship of Mughal decentralisation to the slave and horse trades.
30 Introduction
proclaimed a subordinate of the Afghan leader. News of yet another assault

on the Mughal capital soon reached the ears of Company grandees at Fort
William, Calcutta. The Company already stood accused by the Bengal nawab
of abrogating the terms –and spirit –of its 1717 farman, especially on account
of its militarism and commercial aggression. The Bengal nawab proposed a
negotiated solution, was rebuffed, and thus seized the EIC’s base in Calcutta.
Humiliated and angered, the Company enjoined the Jagat Seth –a banker
often described as the Rothschild of India –and others with their own interests
at stake into a plot to remove the nawab and replace him with a Bengali general
who had defected and aligned himself with the British.
The Company defeated the Bengal nawab at the Battle of Plassey
in 1757, received a few territories around Fort William in return, and
succeeded in placing a puppet ruler on the throne. In 1765, the Company
fought the combined forces of the Mughal Empire and the Bengal and
Awadh nawabs at Buxar. This should also be seen against the backdrop of
the Company’s participation in the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–
47) and then the Seven Years’ War (1756–6 3), for the English and French –
while attempting to ‘destroy each others’ trade and political influence on
the southern (Coromandel) coast’ –became embroiled in the conflicts of
Indian rulers, effectively turning them into proxy wars.80 More signifi-
cantly, the Company’s victories in 1757 and 1765 formed the prelude to
its massive expansion up the Gangetic valley and across north India, with
parallel expansion being launched from bases in the south (Madras) and
west (Bombay). The victory over the Marathas in 1818 made the EIC the
most important political power on the Indian subcontinent.
What is revealed by recounting these events? In the first place, it shows how
phenomena and processes, actors and networks that were local, regional, and
even global in scope either shaped or served as a backdrop to key transitions
in early modern India. For its part, the expansion of the East India Company’s
territorial power on the Indian subcontinent was part of a larger phenom-
enon, what John Darwin has termed the ‘Eurasian Revolution’ of the 1750s
to the 1830s. This, he argues, was actually constituted of an interrelated,
threefold revolution: one in geopolitics, involving the massive global expan-
sion of Britain’s empire, and latterly those of France and Russia; one in eco-
nomics, resulting in the Great Divergence between the living standards of the
industrialising northwest European states and other parts of the world; and
a cultural one. This last revolved around a developing sense of the moral and
intellectual superiority of Euro-American peoples, who saw it as their role to
champion ‘liberty’ and nurture ‘progress’ elsewhere in the world, whether by
conquest and colonisation or otherwise.81 It must be emphasised, however, that
India had a special part to play in these developments: the conquest of India
80 Bayly, Indian Society, 45, for the citation, and especially 45–68, for further details of what is
described here.
81 Darwin, Tamerlane, 160–217.
Introduction 31
was the fulcrum of the spread of British hegemony in the Indian Ocean world
as it was turned into a ‘British lake’, while India’s technical expertise –as much
as its raw materials or the availability of a vast market –were integral to British
industrialisation.82 In such respects, India played a key part in shaping local,
even trans-regional and often global developments, as much as it was impacted
by them.
‘We must generate better integrated, multidisciplinary historical research in

early modern south Asia (not Mughal India),’ Richards stated forcefully in
1997, ‘in which scholars move seamlessly between the particulars of local
and regional histories to broader south Asian and world description and ana-
lysis.’83 A quarter-century hence, India and the Early Modern World strives to
do precisely that. Arranged thematically, rather than taking the state as its
framework or fixating on individuals, the following chapters explore the cen-
turies after Timur left.84 Our focus rests not merely on one or other kingdom
or empire (e.g., the Mughal Empire), or even on one or other formation (e.g.
the Persianate world), but instead spans as much of the subcontinent as pos-
sible, at the same time linking or comparing Indian developments to those
around the globe, except where they are so distinctive as to merit attention
in their own right. We turn, in the next two chapters, to what people believed
and how this was changing in interaction with shifting social and moral ideas,
as well as the power of increasingly centralised states whose rulers claimed
universal authority. Chapters 4 and 5 then examine everyday life. We begin
by looking at where and how people lived and the character of an urban-
centred lifestyle that was coming in to being, driven by steady urbanisation.
This last was closely linked to the deeper and wider commercialisation of the
economy, which was one of the most obvious symptoms of early modernity
and is thus among the subjects of the chapter on capitalism and markets, on
how people’s material lives and economic relationships were changing in the
period.
There were markets for violence, too, and so Chapter 6 explores their origins
and how Indian rulers ‘transacted’ with the pools of men ready to take arms
for the defence and enlargement of their kingdoms, while being attentive to
the environmental and cultural dimensions of early modern (organised) con-
flict and considering the relationship between warfare and state centralisa-
tion. The overarching concern of this and the following two chapters is with
power, whether of warbands and pastoralists, of kings and courtiers, or of
texts and images. How the state functioned and was experienced –especially
82 Metcalf, Imperial Connections. On the role of Indian knowledge in British textile manufacture
(albeit to printing and design rather than to the mechanisation of fabrication): Riello, ‘Asian
Knowledge’.
83 Richards, ‘Early Modern India’, 209.
84 The approach of this book is informed by O’Hanlon’s critique in ‘Cultural Pluralism’ of what
were then recent treatments of early modern India.
32 Introduction
via bureaucratic and legal institutions –is the subject of Chapter 7, which
is careful to contrast ideals with realities and considers transitions from one
early modern regime to another, for this reveals a subtler picture of pol-
itics and the nature of power relations between the monarchical centre and
its provinces/provincial actors than has long been supposed. How kings and
their trusted courtiers fabricated the royal or imperial image has been one
of the most popular subjects of all those examined in this book. Chapter 8
examines kingly (self-)presentation through the interplay of various strategies
and media (e.g., diplomatic communications, dynastic histories and geneal-
ogies, artworks, rituals, the built environment) with their various audiences
and arenas. Connected with rival royal centres like never before, early modern
kingly identities converged in significant respects yet also became distinctive,
as evinced by the eschatological and universalist themes discernible in monar-
chical claims to authority or even the fascination with the globe as a motif.
Cultural and intellectual life are the subjects of the final chapters.
Cosmopolitan languages like Persian and Sanskrit and the high styles of the
Mughal arts not only flourished in early modern times, but also supported
a seemingly contrary development, namely the development of vernaculars,
examined in Chapter 9. The vernacular did not quite become the ‘national’
in south Asia, as was the case elsewhere in the world toward the end of our
period, and this had important implications for the relationship between know-
ledge production and state power on the eve of the colonial conquest. Thus,
Chapter 10 examines who (and how) one received an education; the kinds of
knowledge production and their registers extant in early modern India; how
these were changing via interaction with other traditions (whether Indian,
from the Islamic world, or elsewhere); and who was excluded from higher
learning or else has been ignored by historians despite being highly knowledge-
able (women, most especially).
India and the Early Modern World consistently and explicitly makes use of a
period label that has become mainstream since its advent in the 1970s and yet
remains much contested by some Indian historians even today. We ought use-
fully think with ‘early modernity’ and see what this does for Indian history, the
concluding chapter argues by reflecting upon material presented throughout
this book, and at the same time valuably bring into view what the Indian sub-
continent offers to globally minded historians of the period after Timur left
and before the colonial transition.
2 Belief
In 1469, a Punjabi woman gave birth to the boy who would grow up to be
known as Baba Nanak or Guru Nanak.1 His family were Khatris (a mercan-
tile caste) and were employed in the revenue-bureaucratic machinery of the
state as patwaris (village accountants). Consequently, Guru Nanak’s educa-
tion was geared toward an administrative or business career and he eventually
worked in service to the Lodi sultans for a time. His inner quest and interest
in mysticism was matched externally by travelling widely, often with his com-
panion Mardana, who had been raised as a Muslim. The guru is said to have
travelled to numerous holy places, periodic fairs and festivals, and famous
temples, mosques, and shrines on the subcontinent, and –as some sources
say –even as far afield as Baghdad and Mecca. His charisma, supposed per-
formance of miracles, and the message of his teachings earnt him a following
in what was becoming an increasingly crowded marketplace for salvation
teeming with devotional leaders and their movements, which were popular
across all sections of Indian society.2 A community of these followers settled in
Kartarpur in Punjab; they are known collectively as Nanakpanthis (followers
of Nanak’s path) and individually as Sikhs (lit. ‘learners’ or ‘students’). A few
years before Nanak’s death in 1539, Babur had defeated the Lodi sultan and
established Mughal rule in the north; thus, Nanak was witness to a pivotal
transition in early modern India.3 And, in the years and decades that followed,
his successors would continue to spread his message and continue to develop
new teachings amidst the political, economic, and social change accompanying
the spread and then the retreat of Mughal power.
The first of these, Guru Angad (d. 1552), was appointed directly by Guru
Nanak. The fifth, Guru Arjan Dev, was executed in 1606, possibly on the orders
of Jahangir –who may have been anxious about men with large followings,
particularly those who lent their support to rival princes or pretenders –for
1 The biographical-cum-hagiographical details have been culled from: Grewal, Sikhs, 6–8; Syan,
‘Merchant Gurus’, 309.
2 McLeod, Early Sikh, on ‘biographies’ of Nanak, and especially 70–73, on Sufi influences on this
corpus and their description of miracles.
3 Grewal, Sikhs, 9–10, for Nanak’s critical assessment of Babur’s invasion.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-2
34 Belief
the new Mughal emperor’s political authority remained fragile in these early
years of his reign (he ascended the throne in 1605).4 This led to the creation
of two rival Sikh lineages: one headed by Guru Arjan’s elder brother, Prithi
Chand, who believed a peaceful path was more in accordance with ‘original’
Sikh teachings, the other by the guru’s son, Guru Hargobind, who believed
that militarising the community in the pursuit of righteousness was neither
at odds with these teachings nor needless, but vital. The execution of the
ninth guru, Tegh Bahadur (d. 1675), gave further impetus to militarism. Guru
Gobind (1666–1708), the tenth and last guru in the Arjan-Hargobind lineage,
created a militant Sikh order called the Khalsa; its initiates would fight against
the Mughals and other opponents.5 Over the eighteenth century, a number of
Sikh kingdoms were established by the leaders of Sikh military units, while the
spread of the Khalsa meant the second of the two lineages became something
like the orthodoxy among the larger community, a process which continued in
the colonial period. Today, the followers of the teachings originating in Guru
Nanak’s verses and his leadership are known as adherents of a world religion
called Sikhism.
This brief sketch encapsulates several themes running through this chapter
and the next. In the first place, it calls attention to the early moderns’ hunger
for miracles and salvation and their thirst for righteousness, for this was the
context to the growth of devotional movements. Their origins may have lain in
new interpretations of scripture or wholly new theologies yet, secondly, many
of the era’s new congregations –Sikhism a prime e xample –also became social
or political movements in time.6 Third, is the relationship of communities of
belief to politics and to Indo-Muslim power generally, which is the subject
of the next chapter. Sikhism’s early history also reminds us, fourthly, why it
is often better to talk of ‘belief(s)’ rather than ‘religion’. Some early moderns
might be tormented by their conscience to abandon one faith for another,
suggesting the concreteness and boundedness of religions, but conversion
more often had other motivations (e.g., material gain, social mobility, polit-
ical expediency), and popular belief was more often a ‘fluid construction’ in
which ideas and practices from different communities could readily overlap.7
This is because what we might too easily describe as a singular and mono-
lithic religion (e.g., Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam) were in the past made up of
many different and sometimes rival theologies, ideas about the moral life, devo-
tional practices, rituals, and so forth, such as the two ideologically divergent
lineages formed among the community of Sikhs as early as 1606, each with
4 Eaton, Persianate Age, 270. Grewal, Sikhs, 63–64, examines the sources to reveal the mystery,
rather than any clarity, concerning who exactly ordered Arjan’s execution and the reasons why.
5 Syan, Sikh Militancy, especially 2–17. See, also: §6.3.2.
6 Calvinism, likewise, was not merely a religion but also a political movement, popular not only
among ordinary burghers, but also the nobility opposed to state centralisation: Spaans, ‘Low
Countries’, here 122.
7 The coinage is Kruijtzer’s in Xenophobia, 9. Khafipour, ed., Empires, 9–75, for primary sources.
Belief 35
their respective followers. This is to say nothing, furthermore, of individual

believers’ accommodation of the teachings of myriad local or mendicant holy
men and proselytisers with their own worldviews and traditions.8
A little over a decade and a half after Guru Nanak’s birth in Talwandi,
Martin Luther (1483–1546) took in his first breaths thousands of miles away
in the Holy Roman Empire. Luther would one day attack the Catholic estab-
lishment, much as leaders of some Indian devotional movements criticised
orthodox ritualists and priests, Nanak being among them. Luther thereby
became a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation, the unfolding of which
lay at the heart of religious wars waged across Europe between Catholics and
Protestants. We know far less (reliably) about Nanak than his contemporary,
but it seems unlikely the guru was the kind of masculinist bully Luther was,
for instance.9 Such parallels and contrasts remind us of the value of taking a
global approach, for Indian actors and developments were part of a bigger
picture, even as they had distinctive aspects. As for Nanak’s peripateticism,
for instance, this was extraordinary in its range (whether real miles travelled or
else imagined by his hagiographers), yet also in keeping with the early modern
uptick in mobility. Other threads linking early modern India with parts of the
globe both near and far include the spread of European imperialisms and, with
them, the spread of Christian proselytisers; the currents of millenarian thinking
that rippled across Eurasia from the Tagus to the Ganges; and the relation-
ship of this last and other developments to climatic and demographic change.
Over the course of these two chapters on belief, therefore, developments within
India are linked, compared, or contrasted to those seen –or not seen –in other
parts of the early modern world.
2.1 Hinduism
2.1.1 Brahmanisation and Bhakti
What is Hinduism? Often described as an ancient religion, such character-

isation belies a diverse range of beliefs and practices, themselves steadily
evolving and sometimes newer than we might first think. Indo-Aryan migrants
brought their tales of the Vedic gods to India; these were eventually recorded,
bequeathing us a body of texts known as the Vedas (lit. ‘knowledge’, composed
c. 1500–500 BCE). A corpus of texts known as the Puranas (lit. ‘ancient’) was
composed later, around 300 CE. Eventually transmitted in the Sanskrit lan-
guage (§9.1), all this wisdom was preserved (or guarded, depending on perspec-
tive) by a ritualist or priestly group known as Brahmans. By the early fifteenth
century, a self-conscious ‘Hindu’ identity had come into being –if not quite
in name –among this small minority of Indians steeped in Sanskrit texts and
8 On each of these points, Oberoi, Religious Boundaries, is instructive.

9 Roper, Martin Luther’s World, explores this theme.
36 Belief
Vedic knowledge, and was sharpened through the confrontation between this
group and ‘outsiders’ in the last pre-colonial centuries.10
But the Indo-Aryans and their gods did not enter an empty space. India
was home to a range of religious communities in ancient times; often very
localised, each had their distinctive deities, beliefs, and practices. It was with
these communities that Brahmanical religion competed, when not co-opting
their manifold local deities by giving them a place in the Vedic cosmos, as we
shall see. Thus, ‘Hinduism’ is best understood as an umbrella or as shorthand
for myriad beliefs that have steadily developed and been brought into relation
over time. Ultimately, it was neither a stable and monolithic ‘religion’ in the
premodern period, nor was it a category of wholly British colonial invention,
as has sometimes been claimed.
To understand ‘Hinduism’ in the early modern period and down to the
present, however, we must first grasp a process termed ‘Brahmanisation’.11
This developed out of the Vedic tradition, but also through the cannibalisa-
tion of local cults and non-Vedic traditions long extant in the Indian subcon-
tinent. By the seventh or eighth centuries, Brahmans were no longer merely
domestic priests who performed life-cycle rituals for royal patrons; they were
now integral to the ritual life of Hindu courts and officiated such ceremonies
as coronations.12 Brahmanical religion was reformed in another respect as
important new cults developed around the gods Shiva and Vishnu, spurring
the Hindu sects labelled as Shaivite (Shiva- worshipping) and Vaishnavite
(Vishnu-worshipping).13 A temple dedicated to Shiva was tended by a Shaiva
Brahman, who also perpetuated Shaiva literature, notably the Agamas and
Puranas. Sannyasis, known for penance and austerity, were Shaiva monks who
wandered in ochre-coloured robes, loosely draped tiger skins, or were some-
times entirely naked. Some wondered from place to place or between monastic
establishments (maths), where they might reside for longer spells. They were
by no means marginal: in the busy scene shown in Fig. 2A, Shaiva ascetics
from different parts of the subcontinent are congregating, conversing, pre-
paring and sharing bhang (an intoxicating drink made using the cannabis
plant), and receiving a royal party. Among the assembled are a group of
women; we shall return to the connection of elite women to maths elsewhere in
this book (see, e.g., §5.4.1). As for Vaishnavism, its most significant scriptures
include the Bhagavadgita, the Bhagavad Purana, and the Vishnu Purana.
Vaishnava devotees were largely urban-centred and from mercantile commu-
nities, advocated vegetarianism and veneration of the cow, and visited temples
10 Lorenzen, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’. See, also: §3.2.1. C.f. Nair, ‘Sanskrit Doxography’.
11 Sometimes called and/or conflated with ‘Sanskritsation’, it involved not merely the spread of
Sanskrit culture but also Brahman norms.
12 Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 15. For the non-sacerdotal roles of Brahmans, see: Wink, Indo-Islamic
World, 46–48.
13 Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 13.
Belief 37
Fig. 2A A Prince and Attendants Visiting Shaiva Holy Men (watercolour; Rajput;
eighteenth century), 1933,0610,0.2. © The Trustees of the British Museum
38 Belief
dedicated to Vishnu as Lakshmi-Narayan (his supreme form) or one of his

other incarnations, which were tended by Vaishnava Brahmans.14 Vaishnava
ascetics were known as bairagis.
Brahmanical religion is critical to understanding the religion we call
Hinduism, yet so, too, is Bhakti. Conventionally translated as ‘devotion’, this
may mislead us into thinking that Bhakti is ‘entirely private and quiet’ when,
as John Stratton Hawley observes, it ‘is heart religion, sometimes cool and
quiescent but sometimes hot –the religion of participation, community, enthu-
siasm, song, and often of personal challenge’.15 Institutions do not matter to
the bhakta (devotee) so much as fervid and direct divine encounter, their goal
being to enjoy an eternal companionship with such a highly personal god.16
In their quest, they have turned to poetry and song.17 The bhaktas who are
remembered were all poets, their verses are still sung today and many of them
were alive in early modern times: Kabir, Surdas, Ravidas, and Mirabai, whose
songs are sung in Hindi, Nammalvar and Antal (Tamil), Namdev and Tukaram
(Marathi), and Nanak (Punjabi).
Although we should be cautious of presenting Bhakti as a unitary
thing with a single, sweeping history, it is worth observing that devotional
movements –known as Bhakti cults –began life in the Tamil country in the
sixth century, with Nammalvar and Antal flourishing in the eighth century.18
These movements were manifold and soon spread or else sprang up in other
parts of India. They often centred on female deities (such deity-centred cults
known as saguna bhakti), but some saw the divine as formless or without any
attributes (known as nirguna bhakti). At the same time, we should not over-
look the ‘sociality’ of Bhakti and the importance of community to devotees
in favour of a ‘Protestant-inspired’ vision of Bhakti as devotion to a personal
god.19 All this, nevertheless, sharply contrasted with Vedic religion, whose
deities were male and whose adepts aimed not for divine companionship but
toward ‘merging in the unconsciousness of Brahman’, the Supreme Being or
Absolute. As we shall see, furthermore, Vedic religion was rooted in caste as an
ordering principle for society, which Bhakti had the power to disturb.20
Some medieval and early modern Brahman intellectuals were consequently
as troubled by the challenge posed by Bhakti, people’s neglect of their ritual
obligations, and unrestrained mixing of the castes, as they were by the coming
of Indo-Muslim rule (§3.2.1).21 Brahmanical or Vedic religion was by stages
either reconciled with Bhakti or else co-opted it in time, therefore, critical to
14 Grewal, Sikhs, 21–24.

15 Hawley, Storm, 2.
16 Ibid, 2.
17 Ibid, 2.
18 Ibid.
19 Burchett, Genealogy of Devotion, 5–8.
20 Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 6–7.
21 O’Hanlon et al, ‘Discourses’.
Belief 39
which was the Shiva cult at first.22 Indian goddesses were reconceptualised
as Shakti (corresponding to pure energy) and thereby brought into cosmic
union with Shiva (pure consciousness); male and female, Sanskritic and ver-
nacular were thereby harmonised. The union of Shiva and Shakti is commonly
represented as an icon found in temples –the Shiva linga (Fig. 2B): a cylin-
drical linga (an erect phallus symbolising Shiva) is sat within a yoni (a vulva,
representing Shakti). The reconciliation of Shaiva Brahmanism with Bhakti
also took the form of various local goddess cults steadily being appropriated
and absorbed into a new Shaivate pantheon. So, for instance, Shiva was figured
as the son of Dharma and the husband of Chandi/Durga and Kali/Ganga,
as well as guru or father to various Nath saints.23 Of course, not all these folk
deities were as readily accommodated as Chandi was, for some were accepted
with hesitance, others not at all.24 Nevertheless, the process of reconciliation or
co-option so described was part and parcel of Brahmanisation and the spread
of Shaiva Bhakti, especially from the eleventh to twelfth centuries.
Shaivism remained predominant until about 1500, when a new Vaishnavism
became more popular, spreading through intensive proselytisation and the
fervid contestation of rival Shaivite Bhakti and Tantric belief; Brahmanisation
then necessarily involved the appropriation of Vaishnavite devotionalism.25 One
notable expression of this Vaishnava Bhakti was Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas (c.
1575), composed in the vernacular Avadhi language (or eastern Hindi), yet
drawing on the Sanskrit Ramayana and its retellings in other vernaculars
(particularly Tamil). It centres on Vishnu’s incarnation as Rama and is far
more reverential toward him than the Sanskrit urtext.26 Rama –as well as
Vishnu’s other incarnations, such as Narasimha (Fig. 2C) –were popular in
the Vijayanagara Empire and also in the eastern Hindi-speaking area of north
India, whereas devotion to Krishna was even more widespread across north
India.27 According to the Bhagavata Purana, Vishnu was incarnated on earth
as Krishna, living an idyllic early life as a child and an amorous adolescence in
Mathura –all in disguise as a cowherder –before the time was nigh to defeat
the evil king. After succeeding in this task, Krishna led his cowherding people
to Dwaraka in Gujarat, where he spent his adult life. In his final years, Krishna
became embroiled in those events leading to the great battle on which the
Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, centres.28
22 Brahmans also played a key role in historicising the spread of Bhakti from south to north,
including Vaishnava Bhakti cults; see: Hawley, Storm, 59–98, 148–89.
23 Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 104. See, also: Chatterjee, ‘Goddess Encounters’, 1438–45, for the evo-
lution of the Chandi/Durga tradition and her place in pre-Mughal Bengali culture.
25 Orsini and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 42; Burchett and Rao, ‘Ascetics’, for a nuanced reading of
the dynamics between Vaishnavism and Shaivism, Bhakti and Tantra.
26 Asher and Talbot, India, 128.
27 Awadh has been ignored by scholars of Krishna bhakti in favour of Braj and Puri, Bengal,
Gujarat, and Rajasthan, a neglect addressed by Orsini in ‘Inflected Kathas’.
40 Belief
Fig. 2B A Monumental Shiva Linga in Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre

Photo: Jagjeet Lally
Mira Bai is among the most famous Krishna devotees of the period. She
lived in the sixteenth century and by 1600 had been included in Nabhadas’
Bhaktamal, a compendium of the lives of Bhakti poets. Such hagiographic
works and the songs attributed to Mira Bai are the major sources from which
her biography is constructed. She was betrothed to the son of the Mewar king
but refused to act as a devoted wife and honour her family, preferring to devote
herself to Krishna by singing at temples or conversing with wandering saints.
Surviving a poisoning by the king, who was mortified by her actions, she is said
to have escaped married life, first travelling to Vrindavan and then to Dwaraka,
both places strongly associated with Krishna lore. According to this legend,
she became absorbed into a Krishna image when Brahmans sent by the king
tried to force her return; she was never seen again.29
Vaishnava Bhakti poetry ‘that used the language of erotic desire in describing
the devotee’s longing for god’ was not a novel development of the early modern
period, having roots in medieval south India.30 Besides Mira Bai, two other
29 Ibid, 129–31.
30 Ibid, 130.
Belief 41
Fig. 2C Vishnu as Narasimha from Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre

roughly contemporaneous Krishna devotees deserve mention: Chaitanya (c.

1586– 1533) and Vallabha (c. 1479– 1531). Their competing movements or
sects (sampradayas) are today known as the Gaudiya Vaishnava and Pushti
Marg, respectively.31 Born in Bengal, Chaitanya was a Brahman whose
Krishna devotion centred on kirtan (group singing accompanied by percus-
sion) and the repetition of Krishna’s name to produce ecstatic and trancelike
states. Chaitanya focused on Krishna and his adolescent liaisons with the local
cowherds (gopis), Radha being his favourite among them; their love play was
‘understood as an allegory for the ecstasy of the mutual love between the soul
and god.’32 Vallabha was a Telugu Brahman residing in north India. By con-
trast to the focus on erotic love among Chaitanya and his followers, Vallabha
eventually fixed on the maternal love between the child Krishna and his foster-
mother Yashoda. He was able to convert Muslims to his brand of Vaishnava
Bhakti, not by showing them that the God of the Quran was a personal one
31 Four sampradayas stand out in Bhakti tradition. See: Hawley, Songs, 99–147.
32 Asher and Talbot, India, 131. See, also: Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 109–12.
42 Belief
like Krishna, but by demonstrating that his approach was a better way to that
God than Islam.33
Vaishnava Bhakti can thus be distinguished as being either of the orthodox
sort, propagated by Brahman intellectuals, or the often more popular (if not
necessarily radical) form associated with figures like Mira Bai. Such was the
influence of Vaishnava Bhakti that royal patronage was poured upon Brahman
intellectuals of the major sampradayas. From the perspective of ‘Rajput kings
in the growing Mughal imperium,’ Dalpat S. Rajpurohit argues, ‘patronising
new Vaiṣhṇava Bhakti institutions was a way to assert their rising royal
status in the new imperial paradigm and a means to cultivate relations with
a growing Bhakti “public”.’34 Following the weakening of the Mughal centre
came the rise of the regional kingdoms. Because the status of Bhakti and
relations with Bhakti sampradayas were so politically valuable to these regional
rulers, patronage of Vaishnava Bhakti in tandem with more orthodox forms
of Vaishnavism grew considerably.35 Taking inspiration from antecedents at
the Maratha court and in Orccha, Monika Horstmann argues, the grandest
of such projects was that of Amber/Jaipur’s dynastic house, which had been
Vaishnava since the early sixteenth century.36 Among the models its rulers were
expected to re-enact were those of the king Yudhisthira and Kalki, the tenth
and final avatar of Vishnu, who would end the Kali Yuga (§3.3.5). To realise
that ‘apotheosis of the king’, Horstmann notes, Indian rulers revived the Vedic
rituals that culminated in the horse sacrifice performed in the Mahabharata,
and also patronised Vaishnava Bhakti sects.37 As these dynasties received reli-
gious legitimation through the work performed by Brahmans, so competing
sects took the opportunity for dialogue with their rivals –afforded by royal
patronage –to project their group identity and thereby gain greater legitimacy,
too.38 Amidst the general upsurge in Bhakti in early modern times, therefore,
political changes in the latter part of the period proved critical to the ongoing
development of religious ideas and the standing of different groups.
2.1.2 Caste
What today is known as caste describes a hierarchical and highly stratified

system identified with Hinduism.39 Its building blocks are social function or
occupation as linked to a ‘birth group’ or jati, of which there are thousands,
often minutely distinguished from one another. Its organising principle is the
33 For a useful and concise critical survey of the Pushti Marg, see: Dalmia, ‘Hagiography’.
34 Rajpurohit, ‘Dadu Panth’, 926.
35 Horstmann, ‘Theology and Statecraft’, here 184. See, also: Hawley, Storm, especially 59–98,
148–89.
36 On Orchha, see: Pauwels, ‘Tale’.
37 Horstmann, ‘Theology and Statecraft’, 184.
38 Ibid.
39 There is nothing comparable in other parts of the world; see: Bayly, Caste, 28.
Belief 43
four-fold moral order known as varna, comprised of Brahmans (priests and

spiritual preceptors), Kshatriyas (rulers, warriors, as well as seigneurial landed
groups more broadly), Vaishyas (those involved in commerce), and Shudras
(various servile labouring groups). Those so hurtfully called ‘untouchables’, as
well as uplanders and forest-dwelling peoples officially designated as ‘tribals’
in modern India’s constitution, ‘occupy an ambivalent place below, outside, or
parallel to this varna scheme.’40 The moral and social order (dharma) is held
to revolve around the respect for the rights, and performance of those duties,
expected of members of each varna, each with their role to play.
Ancient texts –primarily the Rg Ved, the Bhagavad Gita, and the
Manusmriti –express the sanctity of caste and the principles of caste society.
‘All wellbeing and merit, indeed the preservation of the entire created uni-
verse,’ as Susan Bayly summarises the tenor of these texts, ‘depend upon this
stratified ordering of castes.’41 Such texts not only gave impetus to the right-
eous performance of one’s duty according to the caste bestowed by the divine,
thereby maintaining the cosmic order, but also to the reproduction of caste
society through, for example, endogamous marriage. Yet, they have also given
impetus to the pursuit of ritual purity and the avoidance of pollution (from
lower-evaluated castes), which have made caste inflexible and an instrument
of coercion and social exclusion.42 Caste is not wholly peculiar to Brahmanical
Hinduism, for one also finds ‘in the past and today a high level of sensitivity
to the nuances of caste, especially in matters of marriage and ritual pollution’
among ‘the millions who subscribe to India’s minority faiths –Islam, Sikhism,
Christianity, Jainism, and the ostensibly anti-caste neo-Buddhism’.43 Caste,
one scholar goes so far as to argue, ‘was fundamentally an order of settled
society’ across most of pre-modern south Asia and as far afield as Java.44
Whatever the antiquity of many jatis and the scripture relating to varna, the
contemporary caste system, so described, is of fairly recent origin. Or, to put it
differently, the hierarchical stacking of caste has become rigidified, the fluidity
between castes has seized to a great extent, and the regional variations in caste
and caste relations have been supplanted by something approaching a uni-
formity in the past two or three hundred years, while casteism has intensified.45
This development unfolded in stages, as Susan Bayly usefully delineates. The
40 Ibid, 9, for citation, and 8, 13–14.

41 Ibid, 14.
42 Ibid, 51–55.
43 Ibid, 18.
45 That said, Brahman intellectuals were elaborating upon older models to outline how to main-
tain the proper ordering of caste, and their role to that end, from at least late medieval times.
Their belief in the ‘demise of Hindu courts as arenas within which caste and corporate iden-
tities could be mediated’ ultimately ‘contributed to the sharpening of caste hierarchies in con-
temporary social theory’ that circulated and maintained their valence through to the colonial
period, and which had the effect of empowering Brahmans and their assemblies as sites for the
resolution of caste disputes. O’Hanlon et al, ‘Discourses’, 104, for citation, and passim.
44 Belief
first stage is of relevance to this book, for it was concurrent with the fragmenta-
tion of the Mughal imperial order after c. 1650 and the competition for power
often commanded by men from fairly non-elite backgrounds. These parvenu
kings turned ‘to the symbols and language of caste as a prop of their statecraft,
and especially to versions of these which emphasised power and beneficence.’46
They looked to the prior success of medieval Rajput and Nayaka warrior-cum-
seigneurial groups and consequently sought to affirm a similar martial and
regal (i.e., Kshatriya) identity, which they achieved through their association
with Brahman ritualists, who sanctified their political authority in courtly and
public rites that gave the king’s claim to political authority a seeming timeless-
ness and legitimacy.47 In the process, they sought to distance themselves from
their own humble origins and distinguish themselves from Shudras, meanwhile
empowering Brahmans and spurring Brahmanisation.48
The career of Shivaji Bhonsle (1630–80) was emblematic of such changes.
Shivaji hailed from ‘among the large, amorphous populations of non-Muslim
Deccani tiller-plainsmen who had come to be known by the names Kanbi and
Maratha.’ These groups’ beliefs centre on Bhakti cults and themes, giving little
prominence to Brahmans, while jati affiliation and their wider social norms
were fluid. ‘Maratha’ was being used at the beginning of our period to mod-
estly distinguish people who had improved their lot via military service from
the mass of rural people, or Kanbis. By the sixteenth century, its meaning had
already changed, for it became an honorific for those rewarded with rights
and land tenures by the Deccan sultans; Shivaji’s family were called Marathas
in this sense. As he carved out a domain of directly administered territories,
Shivaji naturally sought to embrace a Maratha identity (over or alongside
a Kanbi one) for what it signalled to those within and outside the area of
his authority. Shivaji then found it important to go further, for he wished ‘to
identify himself as a sovereign in terms that were intelligible both to his nom-
inal Mughal overlords and to the peoples of the Deccan and central Mughal
provinces from whom he was claiming military service and revenue dues.’ One
desire was to be invested as a thread-wearing Kshatriya like the grander Rajput
rulers, not least because this identity had valence amongst the Mughals. Shivaji
naturally sought to appropriate a Kshatriya identity for himself and his dyn-
asty, which he blended with other Mughal, Deccani, and Nayaka symbols of
lordliness with currency in the area of his authority.49
How did Shivaji accomplish his transformation from a self-made conqueror
into the embodiment of Kshatriya kingship? This was achieved against the
odds, for a dispute had broken out in the 1660s among the Brahman commu-
nity over the caste status and consequent entitlements to rituals of various
46 Bayly, Caste, 30.

47 Wink, Indo-Islamic World, 39–44, which sets this development in a very broad south and south-
east Asian context.
48 Bayly, Caste, 28–39, 50–51.
49 Ibid, 57, for each of the citations.
Belief 45
local groups. The debate would be ongoing, linked to beliefs about having
entered the kali yuga, but Shivaji seems to have settled it in his favour for
the time being.50 Enter: Gagabhatta –a Brahman pandit from the esteemed
holy city of Banaras (Varanasi), whose community held links to the presti-
gious Rajput court at Mewar. They were seeking new patrons following the
withdrawal of Mughal support to Banaras’ pandit communities and were thus
more agreeable to Shivaji’s requests.51 Willing to vouch that Shivaji acted as a
dharmic king by preserving the sociopolitical or moral order and by sponsoring
the performance of Brahman rituals, it followed that Shivaji deserved to be
recognised as a Kshatriya.52 A highly charged set of rites were performed in
1674, lasting nine days and nights, beginning with the upanayana rites to rec-
ognise Shivaji as a ‘twice born’ (i.e., higher caste), consisting of his investiture
with the sacred thread, followed by his anointing with sacred products, par-
ticularly those associated with the holy cow, such as milk and ghee (clarified
butter).53 Once completed, he was consecrated as chhatrapati (lit. ‘lord of the
umbrella’, for a chhatra was a ceremonial canopy that signified godhead and
kingship in Brahmanical tradition), with the performance of a Vedic fire sac-
rifice to reinforce his royal status, and his presentation with blessed bows and
arrows, elephants and horses.54 Indian society subsequently revolved around
‘lordly or Kshatriya-centred manifestations of caste values’ forged through an
alliance between would-be Kshatriyas and Brahmans.55
If this alliance had not been necessary in prior centuries, it is because kings
had not sought Kshatriya status, and caste disputes seem to have been rare
before the seventeenth century.56 The disagreement concerning the conferment
(or not) of Kshatriya status upon a humble-born tiller like Shivaji is signifi-
cant, therefore, for what it reveals about the malleability of caste and how this
was changing through the very manipulation of caste status. Indeed, there
were even larger consequences of the coronation of 1674 and the Kshatriya-
Brahman alliance. In the first place, the expanding Maratha state distributed
landed rights tied to castelike designations in accordance with the scriptures,
for a Kshatriya was meant to ‘issue and confirm jati and varna titles and order
his retainers and subjects in the idiom of caste’, or else ‘he is no true embodi-
ment of kingliness.’57 Secondly, the growing prestige of the Maratha swarajya
also resulted in the emulation of Shivaji’s investiture as a Kshatriya and his
necessary embrace of Brahmanical specialists by those countless other men
who were victorious in the competition for political control in the eighteenth
50 Deshpande, ‘Ksatriyas’. See, also, above: n.45.

51 O’Hanlon, ‘Speaking from Siva’s Temple’, here especially 267–68.
52 Bayly, Caste, 59–60. See, also: O’Hanlon, ‘Social Worth’.
54 Ibid, 59, for citation, and 60. See, also: Gordon, Marathas, 88–89; Kruijtzer, Xenophobia, 143–
44, for additional detail and nuance.
56 Deshpande, ‘Ksatriyas’, 96–101.
46 Belief
century.58 In these courts, thirdly, Brahmans’ roles were not limited to that of
ritual specialists; they also became bureaucrats and bankers. The most notable
example of this was the Brahman lineage of Bhats of Danda Rajpuri who, by
the 1740s, were the de facto rulers of the Maratha heartland, after turning the
office of the peshwa into their hereditary preserve.59 In numerous other pol-
ities –large and small, Hindu and also Sikh –Brahman scribal, mercantile, and
ritual specialists were employed because they possessed the skills to transform
lands acquired by conquest into functioning revenue-bureaucratic enterprises
yielding streams of cash absolutely vital to any ruler’s longer-term mainten-
ance of power (§5.4.4, §7.2.3), not to mention their role in officiating those
ceremonies and rites that conferred arriviste rulers with legitimacy.
Yet, the larger and long-term significance of this was tremendous, for
Brahmans did not become mere record- keepers. Rather, as Susan Bayly
highlights, jati and varna became more fixed into something like a system, so
that a more formal, castelike social order began to concretise.60 Toward the end
of the early modern period, even forest-dwellers, uplanders and tribals, and
those on the edges of sedentary society were being pulled ‘into the world of
jati and varna’, for such was the extent of state expansion and the reliance on
Brahman networks.61 This process might usefully be seen as part of the much
longer-term process of Brahmanisation, since the notions of caste that came
to hold sway were those emanating from Vedic texts, the hallowed guardians of
which were Brahman preceptors.
2.2 Islam
The Prophet Muhammad received those revelations contained in the Quran,
Islam’s central text, which Muslims believe to be the word of God. The singular
importance of the Quran may lend Islam some stability and unity relative to
Hinduism, given the latter’s many texts and multiple, constitutive traditions,
yet Islam has likewise never been a static religion, nor a monolith. Its history
reveals how Muslims have absorbed and reformulated manifold local beliefs
and practices, even as Islam was shaped by vernacular traditions in both its
localised manifestations and at large, as we shall see.62 Perhaps the single most
important factor in making Islam more complex was the sectarian split that
emerged after the death of the Prophet in the early seventh century. In essence,
the cleavage emerged over a dispute concerning the Prophet’s successor or
khalifa (caliph). Arranged on one side are Muslims known as Sunnis, who pre-
dominate in the world of Islam, and who hold that Abu Bakr was appointed
58 Ibid, 43.
59 Ibid, 67
60 Ibid, 76.
61 Ibid, 40.
62 Examples can be found throughout this chapter, but for a sketch of Islam’s reciprocal relation-
ship with India: Eaton, ‘Introduction’ [2]‌, 2–9.
Belief 47
as the first caliph after the Prophet’s death. According to those known as Shi‘is,
however, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, was the rightful caliph and
imam (spiritual leader). Over time, the dispute widened in scope into a major
theological rift; wars have been fought between proponents of the two sects.
In early modern India, the Mughals and the larger proportion of the Muslim
population were Sunnis, but some Mughal satraps –in Awadh and Hyderabad,
most notably –were Shi‘is from families who had migrated from Iran. Besides
the early Adil Shahis of Bijapur, who were Shi‘is, the Deccan Sultanates at
large were home to scores of migrants from Iran.63
2.2.1 Sufism
Growing in popularity and power in the medieval and early modern periods,
Sufism is a form of Sunnism (and less commonly of Shi‘ism) aiming for ‘a
direct personal encounter to the divine’.64 To achieve ‘direct communion
between God and man’, Sufis might embrace esoteric practices and techniques,
perhaps even borrowing from other religious leaders or groups (both of these
points are described below).65 Yet, as Nile Green reminds us, Sufis always
held that –at its core –their knowledge and practices had been ‘handed down
from the Prophet Muhammad through the saintly successors who followed
him.’66 They always wished to be seen as Muslim; rooted their thought and
action in interpretation of the Quran and the Prophetic tradition; and ‘gener-
ally followed the life ways of Islamic custom, offering regular formal worship
(salah), keeping the fast in the holy month of Ramadan, and abiding by what-
ever form of Sharia was observed in their community.’67 They also chanted
‘remembrance of God’ (zikr), meditated on God and different aspects of the
psyche, and cultivated ‘moral virtues (ihsan) through the observance of formal
rules of etiquette (adab)’.68 These were all supererogatory practices; they did
not take the place of the worship and moral codes expected of Muslims, but
were additional to, and often exceeded, them. Thus, some shaikhs might also
advocate fasting throughout the year, not only in the holy month of Ramadan,
or encourage charity beyond the level of zakat prescribed in Islam.69
There remained considerable space for creativity, however. Sufi masters
(khwajas, shaikhs) might combine Islam’s ‘high’ tradition with Muslim ‘folk’
beliefs, much as they might reflect a more religiously syncretistic or more
purist bent; myriad combinations were possible and Sufism was incredibly

64 Green, Sufism, 8.
65 The quote is from J.S. Trimingham’s classic work, as cited in: Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 135.
67 Ibid, 8.
68 Ibid, 8.
69 Grewal, Sikhs, 18. See: Lawrence, ‘Earliest Chishtiya’, 108–11, for those attributes expected of
Sufi masters as variously defined by scholars seeking to conceptualise Sufism.
48 Belief
multi-faceted as a result.70 A cult formed in eighteenth-century south India

around Shah Alimullah Qadiriya (d. 1788–89), for instance, who was revered
for his devotional poetry and the performance of miracles, some of which
linked him to the ghazi-pir tradition: effortlessly fending off sword blows,
possessing strength that allowed him to roll like a stone, and laying in a deep
sleep while a cobra spread its hood above his head –an image drawn from
the Vaishnavite tradition recognisable and thus impressive to local people.71
Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta motifs were, in fact, commonly embedded into
south Indian Sufism. And, furthermore, some Sufis also ‘inhabited’ the Hindu
cosmological landscape and partook in Hindu ritual activity. An example is
the santanakkuttam rite, whereby sandalwood paste is conveyed in procession
to the tomb of a deceased Sufi master much as Hindu caste groups carry pots
of the substance to goddess shrines and Hindu temples.72 Imbricated within
these traditions, shaikhs were more readily understood and accepted by the
local population, while such rituals also bolstered their charisma. Some Sufis
decried religious innovation and syncretism, however, favouring a more ‘aus-
tere and rigorous Islamic practice’, although few Sufis were so consistently
severe.73
The issue of devotionalism and miracles brings us to a second character-
istic, although here some caution is needed in how it is described. On the
one hand, Sufism has frequently been described as a form of ‘mystical’ Islam
led by Sufi ‘mystics’ as ‘charismatic lone stars or prophetic founders of new
religions’.74 There are numerous reasons for such representations. Some Sufis
were acclaimed as hakims or healers (§10.2) and exorcists. Sufi masters were
venerated for their virtuous lives, heroic deeds, and performance of miracles,
not least because believers found ready parallels between a saint’s miracles
(karamat) and the Prophet’s miracles (mu’jizat).75 Their charisma and miracu-
lous power aroused devotees’ reverence and ensured their continued veneration
well beyond their own lifetimes. Once departed, they became saintly
figures (walis) and the objects of tai’fas (saint cults), often centred on their
shrine complexes (dargahs), with annual festive celebrations commemorating
the date of their death or urs (lit. ‘marriage with God’).76 And to this can be
added the Sufis’ role in interceding between devotees and god, the place of
music and verse in Sufi worship (Fig. 2D), and the concomitant use in some
70 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 112.

71 Ibid, 112, 190.
72 Ibid, 115–49.
73 Ibid, 113, for citation, and 114–15, for further examples from south India. See, also: Eaton,
Sufis of Bijapur, 110–32.
75 Grewal, Sikhs, 18, for citation; Lawrence, ‘Earliest Chishtiya’, 106.
76 Eaton, ‘Shrine’, gives a detailed portrait of the rituals and ceremonies through which the cult
of Baba Farid was propagated, paying attention to the role of royal patronage at the tomb
itself but also touching on the construction of memorials to the saint through the Punjab coun-
tryside by agriculturalists, all indicating his wide and enduring importance.
Belief 49
Fig. 2D Dancing Dervishes (watercolour and gold; Mughal artist; c. 1610)

Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 55.121.10.18
brotherhoods of alcohol and narcotics like opium and bhang or hashish (can-
nabis products) to achieve ecstatic communion with the divine. All these things
were castigated by the most austere Sufis and Muslim clerics, and some more
moderate ones, too.77
On the other hand, to label Sufism as mysticism is misleading, Nile
Green argues. Sufism –or Sufi Islam, as Green thinks it should properly
be termed –can instead be defined in terms of the centrality of tradition.78
Sufis have long emphasised the importance of a master –who has already
77 See: Green, Sufism.

78 Ibid, 5.
50 Belief
trodden the path and is thus already part of the tradition –in directing these
practices and acting as a guide (pir) to his disciples (murids), whose absolute
obedience is of paramount importance. Since the medieval period, masters
and disciples have been organised into ‘brotherhoods’ or orders known as
tariqas (lit. ‘paths’), many of which created their own institutions, such as
lodges (khanaqahs).79 In emphasising tradition over mysticism, Green does
not aim ‘to deny that many Sufis underwent mystical experiences which they
subsequently held in high value’ but ‘to make the point that these private
experiences only acquired meaning and credibility through being absorbed
into the collective and collaborative venture of different generations of
Muslims who over the passage of time remained highly conscious of one
another’s exemplary actions and teachings.’80 A spiritual lineage of this kind
is known as a silsila (lit. ‘chain’).
The final defining aspect is Sufi Islam’s relationship with temporal power,
although this is more an acquired role than an intrinsic feature. Some Sufis
remained marginal actors and others were antinomian. Some preferred a
more ascetic path and to live outside any tariqa, not least because tariqa
Sufis accused them of departing dangerously from orthodoxy, resulting in
clashes, much as the Anabaptists clashed with the Lutherans.81 They are
known as ‘dervishes’, qalandars, or faqirs; Fig. 2E depicts a dervish in a
trance-like state, his simple fur or woollen garb and alms bowl symbols of
his renunciation of material concerns, as is the colour blue.82 They were
often mendicant and highly mobile, sometimes selling amulets, offering
songs of praise, performing divinations and feats of devotion (e.g., fire
walking, eating glass); and helped bridge Muslim culture to Indic religions
at large well beyond the urban centres in which Sufi lodges and hospices
were to be found.83 Yet, a widespread view held that shaikhs were closer to
God than warring, temporal princes could ever be, so that the former held
a stronger claim to being God’s representatives, the latter merely guardians
‘entrusted with a temporary lease on such power through the grace of some
Muslim saint.’84 Thus, by the Middle Ages, a Sufi ‘religious establishment’
had come into being and many Sufis possessed prestige and tremendous
power.85
79 Ibid, 8–9.
80 Ibid, 4.
81 The comparison is posed by Eaton in Sufis of Bijapur, 280.
82 On this last point, see: Lally, Silk Roads, 142.
83 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 76; Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 243–81.
84 Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 83. For a deeper analysis, centring on the similarity of Muslim
‘shrine-centred sovereignty’ with Hindu ‘temple-centred sovereignty’ as a vital context to
understanding shrine/temple destruction by Muslim armies in enemy territory, see: Moin,
‘Sovereign Violence’, especially 479–95.
Belief 51
Fig. 2E Portrait of a Dervish (watercolour and gold; possibly Bijapuri; early seven-
teenth century)
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 57.51.30
52 Belief
2.2.2 Saints and Sultans
The Mongol invasions and the aftermath of Timur’s death in 1405 gave
impetus to the migration of Sufis from central Asia. The Chishti, Naqshbandi,
Qadiri, and Shattari orders were among those spreading into south Asia.86
The Naqshbandi tariqa dates to the twelfth century but was structur-
ally renovated under the leadership of the politically-active (and powerful)
Khwaja ‘Ubaydullah Ahrar, whose descendants formed a distinct branch –
the Ahrari. Khwaja Ahrar’s centralising reforms and cultivation of ties with
local potentates brought the order considerable wealth and spirito-temporal
power. Reflexively, association with the order and its leader brought not only
legitimacy, but also resources and capital (financial, human, moral) to polit-
ical notables and dynasts.87 Take, for instance, Khwaja ‘Ubaydullah Ahrar’s
bestowal of the name Zahir al-Din Muhammad upon the would-be Mughal
emperor Babur. This initiated an important relationship between the Mughal
dynasty and the Ahrari tariqa, with Babur seeking support from the Ahrari
Sufis while fighting for his right to the throne in central Asia in the late fif-
teenth century, for example.88 The order expanded and set down roots in Kabul
before Babur’s conquest of that city in 1504, largely through the benefices
of endowments of property made by Timurid noble patrons earlier resident
in Kabul while the region was under Timurid rule.89 Thus, after 1504, Babur
capitalised upon and cemented relations with the Ahrari Sufis in the course of
establishing his authority in Kabul, and the Mughals would continue to strike
marriage alliances with the family members of the Ahrari khwajas into Akbar’s
reign.90
After the conquest of India, however, the Mughals’ largesse would shift from
the Ahraris to another order with long-standing links to Indo-Muslim rule –
the Chishtiya (§8.2).91 It was founded by Muinuddin Chishti (1142–1236) in
present-day Afghanistan and introduced to Ajmer in Rajasthan in his lifetime.
Nizam al-din Awliya (1238–1325) was a Chishti who went on to establish his
own branch or lineage of the order and is the most famous of all Sufi saints on
the Indian subcontinent today.92 His shrine complex lies around two kilometres
86 On their spread into the Deccan from about the mid-fourteenth century, and key doctrinal-
philosophical differences between the Chishtiya, Qadariya, and Shattariya, see: Eaton, Sufis of
Bijapur, 45–79. On the Naqshbandiya and the eventual ‘repatriation’ of offshoots of the order
from India to Afghanistan and central Asia: Ziad, ‘Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi’.
87 Gross, ‘Naqshbandiya’, 232–33.
88 Foltz, ‘Cultural Contacts’, 163; Moin, Millennial, 70–73.
89 Dale, ‘Legacy’, 181–82.
90 Ibid, 183. See, also: Dale and Payind, ‘Ahrari Waqf’. Note, the rulers of the fifteenth-century
regional sultanates also had ‘close personal relations with Sufi shaykhs and qalandars’: Orsini
and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 39.
91 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 205–17, for a useful primary source.
92 Lawrence, ‘Earliest Chishtiya’, 116–25; Ernst and Lawrence, Chishti Order; Currie, Shrine
and Cult.
Belief 53
due west, significantly enough, of the tombs of the Lodi sultans. Relations
were far from smooth between Nizam al-din Awliya and Alauddin Khalji (r.
1296–1316), one of the greatest of the Delhi sultans, yet the Chishti order
nevertheless became enmeshed in the life of the state at large. The courtier and
poet, Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), was at once among Nizam al-Din’s murids,
their tombs even built beside one another, and a publicist of Tughluq imperi-
alism. Some Chishtis even trailed the Sultanate armies on campaigns.93 If all
this formed the basis of the Mughals’ attraction to the order, this is neither to
say that Chishti thought was long before preserved in aspic, nor that Chishti
shaikhs traded on their tariqa’s pedigree alone. Important developments were
underway in the early modern period, partly in response to the reignition of
intellectual differences and competition within the Naqshbandiya in the wake
of the latter’s cooling relations with the Mughal centre during the leadership
of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624).94
As signalled by this discussion, a reciprocal relationship between saint and
sultan –‘cash and land for miracles and blessings’, as Green puts it –had come
into being by the late medieval period:
In almost every corner of the Islamic world, from the twelfth century on we
begin to hear more and more stories in which the Sufi saints were seen to use
their baraka [blessing] as a means of intervention in what in secular terms
would be seen as political affairs. They cured kings and courtiers of life-
threatening illnesses; they decided on the outcome of king-making battles;
they promised heirs to rulers who had no sons; they caused one town to
founder and another to flourish; they brought pestilence or plenty on tax-
able fiefdoms.95
As Indo-Muslim rule spread out across the Indian subcontinent, so, too, did
Sufis and Sufism. Gisu Daraz, one of Nizam al-Din’s successors, fled Delhi as
Timur’s armies advanced and eventually settled in the southern Deccan, where
Tughluq authority had recently been evicted. Two new dynasties now held
sway: the Sangamas and Bahmanis, each rising from fairly humble origins. The
former were non-Muslims, yet both soon styled themselves as ‘sultans’ in the
Indo-Muslim kingly fashion set by the Tughluqs in south India. In keeping with
‘northern’ tradition, the Bahmanis also patronised various Sufi shaikhs, who
presented the sultans with turbans and robes at their coronation ceremonies –
crowning them, essentially –which was highly auspicious and charged. Gisu
Daraz was among those who forged an alliance with the Bahmani sultan,
Firuz, and helped create a moral-theological infrastructure vital for the state.
In so doing, Gisu Daraz secured his fame and that of his lineage far beyond the
93 Asher and Talbot, India, 44. On the connection of Chishti shaikhs and Indo-Muslim kings
established from the early Sultanate times: Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration’, 251–54.
94 Alam, ‘Debate Within’.
54 Belief
Bahmani dynasty itself (and this despite a falling out between the two men).
This was thanks to the state’s institutionalisation of the shaikh’s cult via the
physical monument and economic base given over to it.96
Sufis were occasionally connected to the spread of Muslim power at the
state’s moving frontier, which was generally to be found beyond areas of
settled cultivation. They did so not only by providing blessings, but man-
power and military leadership. The Safavi order in Iran or those ‘warrior
Sufis’ allied to the late medieval conquest of the Deccan are significant
examples. Often, there is reason to be critical of the remembrance of Sufis as
ghazi-babas or ghazi-pirs (a ghazi might literally be translated as ‘holy war-
rior’) or shahids (martyrs), however.97 In the first place, some of the sources
available to us are works of hagiography, many written long after events pur-
portedly occurred, and hence cannot reliably be taken at face value. Second,
the era of the ‘warrior Sufis’ in Indian history was also rather short, Richard
M. Eaton argues.98 Thus, many warrior Sufis and Sufi martyrs of the early
modern period were fighting opponents within the domains of Muslim states
rather than on the boundaries of Muslim power. Such was the case of Shah
Alimullah Qadiriya, for example.99 In any case, Sufis were rewarded with
grants of land not subject to the state’s revenue demands, the income or
bounty from which they could support the tariqa and its institutions, and
which additionally served to incorporate them into the state as clients of a
sort.100 In addition to these ‘warrior’ and ‘landed’ Sufis there were ‘literate’
Sufis who composed poetic or literary works, like Waris Shah in Punjab,
but also treatises on religion and science, often reaching out to broader
audiences, as exemplified by the otherwise reclusive Chishtis of the Bijapur
Sultanate.101 Of course, a shaikh need not be only one or the other in life or
posthumous remembrance; his biography might combine intellectual and
literary talents with supernatural and martial powers as well as temporal
leadership and conquest.
Allegiance with royalty was not the only means by which Sufi orders spread
and secured their future. As their khanaqahs, shrine complexes, and kitchens
providing langar became public institutions, so visiting pilgrims –including
rich merchants –brought benefactions, large and small. Another way of
propagating and embedding the order was through marriage and procreation
with local communities, something revealed in the ethnogenesis narratives of
many central Eurasian tribes.102 Ultimately, ‘the sanctification of the Sufis had
its greatest impact in laying the foundations for a devotional Islam in which
96 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 33–58.

97 See, also: §3.1.1.
98 Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 19–44, looks at these issues in depth.
99 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 187–215.
101 The latter have been profiled by Eaton in Sufis of Bijapur, 135–74.
102 Green, Sufism, 100–01. See, also: Green, ‘Blessed Men’.
Belief 55
the veneration of saints deemed more accessible than a distant God provided
a vehicle for popular religious expression’ –accessible, moreover, not only by
men but also by women, not only by urban congregants in proximity of a
mosque but also the vast and dispersed rural masses.103
On the one hand, therefore, Sufi influence spread through Indian society
during the early modern period, reaching non-elites and also non-Muslims.
Evidence of this, and signs of how it was achieved, can be found in texts and
oral traditions. Everywhere across Afro-Eurasia, Sufism’s wider and deeper
spread from the late Middle Ages cemented both the sacred language of
Islam (Arabic) and cosmopolitan languages or lingua francas (e.g., Persian).
Yet, this spreading also necessarily involved the use, patronage, and very
development –linguistically, but also in terms of its social significance –of
countless regional vernaculars. In some places, Sufis were pioneers of this
vernacularisation; elsewhere, they followed rulers who adopted local tongues
(§9.2.1–§9.2.2).104 On the other hand, the significance of a Sufi legitimising a
ruler’s political authority declined from the sixteenth century. One cause was
a shift from early modern rulers in the Islamicate world ‘associating them-
selves with charismatic forms of Sufism in the sixteenth century’, only to
then move ‘in favour of a more legalistic Islam (whether Sufi or otherwise) in
the seventeenth century.’105
A prime yet peculiar example of the first trend is the emergence of the
Safavi order as a temporal power shortly after its conversion to Shi‘ism, which
underpinned changes in kingship palpable beyond Safavid Iran, not least the
Mughal world (§8.3) and in Java and Sumatra.106 A king’s patronage of either a
particular Sufi order or living/deceased holy man certainly did not cease after
the sixteenth century as the second trend took over; it must therefore have
had a much wider valence than merely being a means of political legitimation.
Indeed, Indo-Muslim kings continued to be buried in funerary complexes of
Sufi dargahs. Aurangzeb was buried beside his favoured saint at Khuldabad
in the early eighteenth century and the tomb of the first independent ruler of
Hyderabad –a Mughal satrapy –was later built nearby, the whole complex
dating back to the times of the Tughluqs’ southern expansion and subsequent,
successive patronage by the Bahmanis, Nizam Shahis, and Faruqis.107 All this
stands as evidence of the deep and manifold significance of Sufi Islam, and the
extent to which it was Islam in India.

104 Ibid, 103–12. Persian, of course, was initially a vernacular –but that time was long gone by
the period covered in this book.
105 Ibid, 129. On the latter trend, see: op. cit., 154–74; §7.3.3.
106 Ibid, 130–54, which roves over the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, the Mughal and Deccan
realms, the Malay states, Morocco, the Songhay Empire, and the Funj Sultanate. See,
also: Newman, Safavid Iran.
107 Michell and Philon, Islamic Architecture, 81.
56 Belief
2.3 Tantra and the Naths

Emerging roughly around the same time as Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and
Shaktism, Tantra ‘arose among nonconformist devotees of Shiva and
Shakti.’108 Shiva is the ‘all-powerful anarchic destroyer of worlds who delights
in transcending social and religious boundaries’; hence, the earliest Tantric
texts revolved around Shiva or his Tantric persona as Bhairava, associated with
cremation grounds.109 Shakti is divine feminine power, an all-pervading and
universal force, who is identified with the ‘Great Goddess’ (among Shaktas)
or else with Durga (among Shiva-Shaktas), and also with the bloodthirsty
warrior-cum-loving mother goddesses known collectively as the Matrikas
(‘Mothers’).110 By the seventh or eighth centuries, the Matrikas evolved into
the ‘seductive yet dangerous Yoginis’ –the shapeshifting, ‘reigning witch-like
goddesses of Tantric Hinduism’.111 Tantric gods were thus far from benign,
more often destructive or bloodthirsty, and associated with sex and death.
Tantra was not a separate religion as such; rather, it spread by influen-
cing and infiltrating India’s various belief systems –namely, orthodox or
Brahmanical Hinduism –as well as contemporary religious movements,
such as Buddhism and Bhakti.112 By the ninth to tenth centuries, Tantra had
spread across the Indian subcontinent and would continue to spread further
afield; Tantric Buddhism (Vajrayana) spread to southeast and east Asia, and
was important in the Ming court.113 Yet, paradoxically, it was the emphasis
on ‘ritual transgression of the orthodox codes of conduct prescribed by these
dominant traditions’, such as engaging with the taboo to harness ‘the repressed
powers of traditionally forbidden practices and substances’, that made Tantra
popular.114 Take, as a first example, Tantra’s affirmation of the female body and
the feminine energy. This runs counter to beliefs concerning purity/impurity
associated with Vedic or Brahmanical Hinduism by which, for instance, men-
struating women are deemed pollutive and prohibited from entering such spaces
as temple precincts.115 Taboo substances –meat, fish, and bodily fluids (men-
strual blood, semen, urine) and remains (ash) –are instead seen as powerful
substances by Tantric practitioners, to be consumed or brought close to the
body and also offered to the deities.116
108 Ramos, Tantra, 12. Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 27–40, provides a south India-centred
perspective on the history of Shiva-Shakti worship.
109 Ramos, Tantra, 27.
110 Ibid, 44, for citation, and 43–65.
111 Ibid, 54.
112 Ibid, 27–40; Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 40–44. Most recently on the interpenetration
and subsequent revivification of Bhakti in early modern times by Tantric, yogic, ascetic, and
Sufi currents, as well as changes in the religio-political and cultural realms, see: Burchett,
Genealogy of Devotion, especially 29–126.
113 Ramos, Tantra, 114–71.
114 Ibid, citations 12 and 9, respectively.
115 Ibid, 8, 20–21.
116 Ibid, 15–18.
Belief 57
Second, and against the emphasis placed by other Hindu and Buddhist
schools on worldly renunciation and austerity, yoga and meditation as means
to enlightenment, the Tantric view is that the path to moksha (liberation) and
nirvana need not lie in either abnegating or escaping this world.117 Instead of
transcending a world charged with power, Tantrikas (Tantric practitioners)
believe they ‘can sublimate it and magically transform reality itself’ by
channelling and internalising Shakti and identifying with Tantric gods.118 In
so doing, Tantrikas believe they can reach enlightenment/liberation or achieve
worldly success and supernatural power –to live longer, obtain worldly power
or riches, gain protection from evil, and even take flight or become invisible.119
To channel the Yoginis’ power, a Tantrika might feed them what Brahmanical
Hindus would deem ‘impure’ substances.120 All this was rather different to
orthodox Hinduism, which treated gods as external forces –gods, moreover,
who are seldom like the ferocious and sexually charged deities of Tantric trad-
ition –and which demarcated many of the very boundaries transgressed by
followers of Tantra.
One consequence was Tantra’s appeal to social groups marginalised by
Brahmanical religion by virtue of their gender (women) or social back-
ground (Shudras, ‘untouchables’).121 Tantra was also popular among those at
the opposite end of the social spectrum. Because of the emphasis on the sub-
limation of power in Tantric tradition, and as its female deities were believed
‘to offer protection for kingdoms against epidemics or enemy forces, and to
assist in the acquisition of new territories and the destruction of opponents’,
temples dedicated to the Yoginis were supported by royal patrons; this devel-
opment was particularly evident in the upper Gangetic plain in north India
between the tenth and fourteenth centuries.122 Hardly an underground or
even a subaltern movement, therefore, royal patronage was in fact a part of
Tantra’s spread since its earliest days, and this continued in the early modern
era. Having laboured to find Brahmans willing to declare him a bona fide
Kshatriya and perform the Vedic investiture rites at his coronation, Shivaji
nevertheless continued his family’s association with their patron goddess –
Tulja Bhavani, a Shakta deity –and sought Tantric consecration to grant him
an almost shamanic power and invincibility in war, to take but one example
from our period.123
To understand Tantra’s development in early modern times, we must make
sense of a new yoga tradition –Hatha yoga (‘yoga of force’). Although yoga
117 Ibid, 13
118 Ibid, 13.
119 Ibid, 15.
120 Ibid, 54.
121 Ibid, 18–19.
122 Ibid, 56.
123 Or so it is alleged/remembered in a Maratha hagiography and a Sanskrit account of the latter
rites, which is revealing in any case; see: Sarkar, ‘The Goddess’.
58 Belief
had long been practised by renunciant ascetics, early modern Hatha yoga texts
suggested it was available to anyone.124 Awakening Kundalini (‘She Who Is
Coiled’), which was an individual’s source of Shakti, was the key goal of Hatha
yoga practice. Kundalini is imagined as a serpent coiled inside the yogic body
that exists inside our physical frame and consists of energy centres (chakras)
linked by channels (nadis) through which life-force (prana) flows. She is aroused
through breath control and the performance of postures, rising through the cen-
tral nadi and flowing into the chakras, infusing them with power. Shiva resides
in the cranial chakra as pure consciousness (purusha), so that Kundalini’s
ascent eventually climaxes in a Tantric sexual rite within the body between
Shiva and Shakti.125 In contrast to earlier Tantric teachings prescribing the
ingestion or dissemination of bodily fluids, Hatha yoga texts suggest the value
of avoiding ejaculation and instead purposefully propelling fluids through the
body. The long-term aim of this internalisation and channelling of Shakti into
union with Shiva was either to trigger a liberated state or obtain worldly and
supernatural powers. This opened Tantra to those who had previously been
unenthusiastic about engaging in more transgressive acts. The visual represen-
tation of these ideas and practices became a frequent subject of artistic pro-
duction under royal patronage, while some Rajput rulers are known to have
practised Hatha yoga.126
The Nath order was a Tantric yogic sect mainly based in northern India and
founded in the later medieval period. The Naths ‘popularised the integration
of Tantric methods for raising Kundalini with Hatha yoga practices’ and ‘held
political sway with Rajput rulers’, while the Mughals –not only Akbar, but
also Jahangir and even Aurangzeb –were also ‘attracted to the spiritual and
physical discipline of Hatha yoga, along with the otherworldly reputations of
its practitioners and their alchemical elixirs.’127 This is revealed by Rajput and
Mughal paintings of Naths and textual evidence of discourse or dealings with
Nath practitioners, as well as the grants of land made to them.128 Aside from
the Naths and the practice of Hatha yoga, other forms of Tantra remained
popular in early modern courts, and not just those in the northern Rajput
and Indo-Muslim states or the southern Hindu kingdoms. As noted by Imma
Ramos, the ‘most compelling testament to the enduring appeal of the Yoginis
as mediators of supernatural power’ came from the court of the Bijapur
sultan, ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I (r. 1558–80). After defeating the Vijayanagara armies
in 1565, the Bijapur sultan set about preparing the Nujum al-‘Ulum (‘Stars
of the Sciences’), an esoteric work produced as a manuscript with pictorial
124 Readers of these Sansrkit texts were usually Brahman males (§10.1, §10.3), but some refer to
women and also to householders; see: Mallinson, ‘Hatha Yoga’, 779, and passim for a histor-
ical and theoretical guide to the evolving tradition and its texts.
126 Ibid, 72–80.
127 Ibid, 81–82.
128 Ibid, 81–85.
Belief 59
illustrations. One chapter describes 140 Yoginis and their power to grant a
ruler victory in battle.129
Tantra may have been at odds with Brahmanical Hinduism, not least because
it challenged the Brahmanical order and the concepts of purity/pollution, but
it was appealing to two other early modern religious communities. First, to
Bhakti leaders of various stripes, although the articulation of an anti-Tantric,
anti-yogi position was becoming more common in our period.130 Second, and
more reciprocally, to Sufis.131 Naths are thought to have frequented Sufi com-
munal kitchens while Sufi orders appropriated certain Tantric practices as
they acclimated to the Indian context. Hatha yoga appealed to Sufis because it
affirmed ‘corporeality and the harnessing of the body as a sacred instrument
and microcosmic mirror of the universe.’132 This is revealed by the translation
of the Arabic version of a lost treatise on Hatha yoga into Persian by the Sufi
master, Muhammad Ghawth of Gwalior, in the mid-sixteenth century, known
as the Bahr al-Hayat (‘Ocean of Life’). It circulated widely among Sufis, and
not only in India, for it was enthusiastically cited by an Anatolian Sufi master
who noted that yogic practices had been ‘absorbed’ into Indian Sufism.133 It
was also reproduced and illustrated for Jahangir (then Prince Salim) in the
last years of Akbar’s reign.134 Other pictures from courtly centres demonstrate
the blurring of Sufi and yogi identities. One link is the wine cup: forbidden
in Islam and Brahmanical Hinduism, it was popular among Sufis –both as
a metaphor for divine intoxication and as an actual consumable substance to
aid the passage into devotional, trance-like states –and among Tantrikas. (The
Tantrikas also consumed bhang).135 Hardly surprising, in this context, is the
fact of a Sufi poet, Waris Shah, reworking the story of a dejected and discon-
solate Muslim lover renouncing worldly concerns to become a Nath yogi, to
which we shall return.136
129 Ibid, 106–08. See, also: Hutton, Bijapur, 83–96, on the valence and possible meaning of yogini
images.
130 See: Burchett, Genealogy of Devotion, especially 169–94, which contrasts the yoga-ascetic
bhaktas of the Ramanandi sampradaya with the Tantric Nath ascetics, and 239–75.
131 It bears remembering, however, that the expression of Bhakti thought by Sufis ‘remained thor-
oughly within the framework of the Islamic mystical tradition, and such Hindu influences […]
seem to have been selectively borrowed only when they could serve as supporting buttresses
for this framework.’ –Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 152, for citation, and 151–55, for explication.
See, also: Gandhi, ‘The Prince’.
133 Ernst, ‘Islamization of Yoga’, argues of one Arabic-language version that it ‘tells us a great
deal more about its Muslim readers than it does about yoga’ (203). Earlier, Eaton in Bengal
Frontier, 77–82, observed that the work is not ‘syncretic’ (i.e., a new synthesis), but rather
places ‘two independent and self-contained worldviews […] alongside one another’ (81).
134 Ramos, Tantra, 87–90. Orthmann, in ‘Humayun’s Search’, speculates as to its even earlier
influence on the Mughals.
135 Ramos, Tantra, 90–95.
136 Deol, ‘Punjabi Poetry’, 149–52, for the poet’s murky biography.
60 Belief
2.4 Other Devotional Traditions: the Sants and the Sikhs
2.4.1 Caste and Anti-Clericalism
Bhakti and Brahmanical religion were not necessarily at odds, as we have seen.
Yet, some leaders emerging within the Bhakti milieu were highly critical of caste
and other aspects of orthodox Hinduism, not least the Sants or poet-saints.
The most famous was Kabir. He lived as an uneducated weaver in or around
Banaras and disparaged orthodox Muslim and Hindu praxis alike, as well as
their associated rituals and injustices (e.g., oppression of lower castes by upper
castes). He spoke of god as an abstract and transcendent moral entity some-
times referred to as satguru (‘true guide’) –certainly not a Vedic god, there-
fore.137 His aim was union with the divine, separation from whom was torment.
Kabir was highly influential, occupying an important place in the scriptures
of other Sant lineages or communities (panths) –viz., the Nanakpanth and
followers of Dadu Dayal or Dadupanthis –as well as the Ramanandis and
some Krishna devotees.138
A number of similarities link the Sufis and Sants, including the primacy of
devotion and the conception of God as without form and attributes (nirguna).139
Yet, there were also distinguishing features of the major Sant lineages from
Sufi Islam.140 Take, for instance, Ravidas, another outstanding Sant figure, who
was born into a leatherworking caste, and thus seen as ritually unclean in the
frame of Brahmanical religion.141 Ravidas, like Kabir and other Sant leaders,
belonged to a lower-evaluated caste group. They were generally critical of
the religious establishment. They questioned the role of priests, idol worship,
ritual, pilgrimages, the institution of caste, and hence the belief in reincar-
nation. Their devotional compositions reveal a resistance to Brahmanisation
(and associated Sanskritisation), yet also to the ritualist aspects of Sufism.142
Unlike their counterparts in Europe on the eve of the Reformation, these anti-
clerical reformers were mostly ‘outsiders’ to the ecclesiastical establishment.143

138 Pauwels, ‘Diatribes’, 291–92. Most recently on Dadu Dayal, see: Rajpurohit, ‘Dadu Panth’.
140 On the formation of these lineages, their distinction from one another and from Sufi orders,
and how Sant movements changed over time, see: Gold, Lord as Guru, especially 55–116,
173–220.
142 For nuance, see: Horstmann, ‘Sant and Sufi’; Pauwels, ‘Diatribes’, 291–92. For their part, cer-
tain Brahmans also issued anti-Brahman and anti-caste critiques. These have been described
by Novetzke as a ‘Brahmin double’ –that is, a ‘discursively constructed [“bad”] Brahmin’ that
helped to deflect or diffuse criticism and thereby enable ‘the [“good”] Brahmin performer or
composer to maintain a position of importance as a Brahmin in the world of bhakti and the
larger premodern public sphere’ –Novetzke, ‘Brahmin Double’, here 232.
143 See, for instance: Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 3–120, and passim; Wooding, Tudor
England, 87–119.
Belief 61
Fig. 2F Washerman listening to a Singer and Musician (watercolour by the Mughal

artist Bichitr, c. 1645)
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IM. 27-1925
The place of such poetry, sung in vernacular languages for a fairly non-
elite audience (Fig. 2F), is a point of intersection between the Sants and certain
Vaishnava Bhakti leaders of the times. Kabir –like Tulsidas and Mira
Bai –chiefly composed songs known as padas ‘with a refrain (teka) set to a cer-
tain rhythm (tala) and with a dominant mood (raga)’ that were classed not as
poetic literature (kabita) but as bhajans –‘a means to express devotion.’ If their
compositions are available to us today, it is because they were subsequently
committed to writing. In this process, and the modifications to early versions
that followed, a few hundred compositions exploded into the thousands that
are attributed to the major Bhakti poets, an exception to this phenomenon
being Tulsidas, who penned his compositions himself.144 Guru Nanak may
have been born into a high-caste family, but his thought –and hence the reli-
gion we call Sikhism –emerged within this milieu.
144 Bangha, ‘Writing Devotion’, 141.

62 Belief
2.4.2 Nanak and Sikhism
Sikhism vexes categorisation, however.145 Some view Nanak’s teachings as

derivative of those Naths popular during his lifetime in Punjab or else of Kabir’s
nirguna bhakti thought, yet this negates whatever contemporaries found so ori-
ginal and compelling that they became the guru’s followers, to say nothing
of the new customs and ceremonies that developed as Nanak’s thought was
propagated by his successors.146 Others see it as a new and syncretic tradition,
thus situating Nanak’s teachings in an inventive and competitive ‘religious
marketplace’ (to borrow from Samira Sheikh), teeming with Sufis and Bhakti
leaders of various sorts, among much else, except that this perspective ignores
the guru’s often critical engagement with other religious communities.147
Nanak lived in Punjab, where Shaiva, Vaishanava, and Shakta practice was
popular, as was devotion to Sufi pirs. Nanak had travelled to numerous holy
places, at the same time familiarising himself with a variety of vernacular or
folk traditions. He was conversant in the Vedic and Quranic teachings and in
the beliefs and practices of different communities of Hindus (including the
Nath, Tantric, and yogic schools) and Muslims (including various Sufi tariqas)
as well as Jains and Buddhists. Nanak questioned, however, why the body must
be put through arduous yogic exercises as Nath and Siddha devotees did, meta-
morphosing such external practices and others –such as decorating Hindu
deities with sandalwood paste, performing arathi (Hindu worship), and the
sama (spiritual concerts by Sufis) –into internal or mental processes. Similarly,
he shifted the exclusive, sacred space of temples and mosques into the access-
ible, inclusive, social world of the everyday, while defining the divine as a tran-
scendent, singular, eternal truth existing all around and within us rather than
somewhere else ‘out there’ (i.e., like Allah), and certainly not in any corporeal
or gendered manifestations (i.e., gods, deities).148
In this, we can discern a distinct ontology in Nanak’s thought, but also an
anti-clericalism.149 Born into a caste-Hindu family, the boy Nanak would be
expected to undertake his initiation (or ‘rebirth’) into the faith, marked by a
rite of passage ceremony (the upanayana) in which he would wear the sacred
thread for the first time as a marker of his being ‘twice born’. But a story
145 The same might be said of Eknath (c. 1533–99), who was a Brahman yet also a vernacular
saint-poet, against the orthodox/Sanskrit/Brahman versus popular/vernacular/low-caste dis-
tinction implicit in many studies of bhakti, described below. See: Keune, ‘Eknath’. On the
problems of this binary distinction, see also: Venkatkrishnan, ‘Devas of Banares’.
146 Most influentially, see: McLeod, Exploring Sikhism, 1–36. Grewal, Sikhs, 27–29, distinguishes
Nanak’s first-hand awareness not only of socio-economic realities, but also of the politico-
administrative system, as central to his unique critique of moral and spiritual problems and
to his philosophy. On new rites and customs: op. cit., 60.
147 Sheikh, Forging, 130.
148 Singh, First Sikh, 14, 17–18, 28–30.
149 For an introductory guide to Nanak’s thought, see: Grewal, Sikhs, 29–39; Singh, First Sikh,
101–50. See, also: Singh, ‘Gurmat’.
Belief 63
‘remembered’ (constructed?) in the Nanak Janamsakhis – biographical-cum-

hagiographical works on Nanak’s life, most written long after his death –show
him rejecting the ceremony and questioning its meaning in an act of ‘spon-
taneous unbelief’.150 Taking another example, in one of passage from the Adi
Granth, Bhai Gurdas used the term ulta khel (opposite play) to convey the
revolution Nanak ushered in, by which the four varnas would become one,
the rich and poor become equal, and the Ganges begin to flow upstream.151
The critique of Brahmanical religion encompassed a critique of caste and
untouchability, of notions of purity and pollution, questioning such beliefs as
strict vegetarianism and examining the implications of ‘impurity’ in the form
of misogyny and the exclusion of women. The subordinate position of women
in upper-caste Hindu society, it should be noted, was a particular source of
reproach in Sikh thought. Guru Amar Das (1479–1574), for example, railed
against sati, the practice of ritual self- immolation by widows upon their
husbands’ funeral pyres.152
A related issue concerns Nanak’s attitudes toward Muslim holy men and
theologians. On the one hand, Nanak is said to have preferred Sufis to those
Muslim scholars knowledgeable of Islamic religious and legal texts and col-
lectively known as the ulama (§3.3). On the other hand, he was nevertheless
critical of shaikhs who impeded direct devotion by creating a rigid order of
new rules, institutions, and practices (especially those around sainthood), not
to mention those who had accepted grants of land from Indian rulers and
thus lived in the pocket of the state (which he also condemned).153 In this, he
held common ground with his almost exact contemporary, the Catholic theo-
logian and luminary of the northern Renaissance, Erasmus (1466–1536), who
pronounced his own critique of hagiolatry.154
Credited with producing and disseminating –via the new technology of
print –the first English-language translations of the Hebrew and Greek Bible,
William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) is fairly typical of a growing swell of early
moderns who sought to challenge the hegemony of the religious establish-
ment.155 If Europe had such figures as Erasmus and Tyndale, early modern
India had Kabir and Nanak, whose message flourished even in the absence
of the printing press. Indeed, social critique and anti-establishmentarianism
is one of the threads linking Nanak and Kabir, another being their popular
verse and the place of kirtan in their devotees’ worship. In 1604, Guru Arjan
compiled some 974 hymns composed by Guru Nanak into the Adi Granth.
He worked with his amanuensis, Bhai Gurdas, who was born not long after
150 Singh, First Sikh, 72–73. The coinage is Huizinga’s from Autumntide, 245, in which he
describes a response to ‘life supersaturated with religious content and forms’.
151 Cole, ‘Sikh Interactions’, 250–59.
152 Grewal, Sikhs, 21.
153 Cole, ‘Sikh Interactions’, 250–59; Singh, First Sikh, 158–72; Grewal, Sikhs, 33–34.
154 Huizinga, Autumntide, 216–29, 261.
155 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 129–37, and passim.
64 Belief
Nanak’s passing and whose life cut across the guruships of the first five of
Nanak’s successors, making him an important witness and carrier of know-
ledge.156 Nanak’s verses frequently refer to their author as dhadhi (bard, min-
strel), referencing those wandering bards patronised to eulogise religious
figures, folk heroes, and those who had performed valorous deeds; or as shair
and kavi (poet or seer), these words deriving from Arabic/Persian and Sanskrit,
reflecting the open cultural milieu Nanak consciously inhabited, if not crafted
through his boundary crossings.157 Performance to crowds incorporating song
and entertainment, it might be noted, was part of popular religion outside
India, too.158
The hymns of Nanak’s composition are accompanied by those of other
Sikh gurus, all alongside verses by Hindu bhagats (saints), Sufi shaikhs, and
other popular poets and holy men –including Kabir.159 The text is not syn-
cretic, for its constituent elements are not blended but sit side-by-side –what
one scholar characterises as ‘a vertical expansion of the spiritual consciousness
shared by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.’160 A further aspect of the pluralism of
early Sikhism is demonstrated in the Nanak Janamsakhis. These were written
by Nanak’s followers long after his death and should be treated more as hagio-
graphic and historical works than as biographies. They remain a popular com-
ponent of Sikh devotional literature, however, and are revealing about how the
early Sikh community chose to remember and present the first guru. They exist
in a variety of renditions and were often produced in pictorial form or with
pictorial illustrations, the varied aesthetic forms of which reflect the local art-
istic traditions in the places of production, which was wherever in north India
significant communities of followers existed.161 The images of Nanak found in
these manuscripts project a kind of pluralism; so, for example, he is shown in
some pictures wearing a tilak (a mark on the forehead worn by Hindus) and a
seli topi (worn by Sufis).162
2.4.3 Sikh Sectarianism
There were limits to any such pluralism, however. The Adi Granth was the
first authoritative book of Sikh scriptures, marking a turning-point in the
156 They were accompanied by ‘the bards Balvand and Satta of the Mardana lineage to ensure
continuity in the singing and musical style.’ –Singh, First Sikh, 39. Issues of the authenti-
city of Arjan’s recitations to Bhai Gurdas were of sufficient importance to the panth from
the earliest days that a tale explaining how Arjan gave an accurate rendering of the bhagats’
teachings and compositions came into being; see: Deol, ‘Sikh Tradition’, 169. On compilation
and canonisation as a ‘collaborative’ ‘redrafting’ process, see: Singh, ‘Granth’.
157 Singh, First Sikh, 5.
158 Nobuyuki, ‘Mendicant Monks’.
159 Singh, ‘Sikh Music’, for a guide to hymns and devotional performance.
160 Singh, First Sikh, 39.
161 McLeod, Early Sikh, comprehensively analyses this corpus; Singh, First Sikh, 68–69.
162 Singh, First Sikh, 5. See, also: Luis, ‘Guru Nanak Shah Faqir’.
Belief 65
development of the Sikh community and of Sikhism as a tradition.163 Yet,

what was omitted is as important as what was included. The Adi Granth
compiled by Guru Arjan contained verses not only by Nanak, but also the
first four of his successors and four other figures (Satta, Balvand, Sundar, and
Mardana) associated with the early Sikh panth, as well as material attributed
to a group of Brahman panegyrists associated with Guru Arjan, thirteen
Sants (including Kabir and Ravidas), and two Sufis.164 Absent, however, is
anything composed by Prithi Chand, who was himself ‘a devotional poet
in the style of the early Sikh gurus’, although his compositions lacked lit-
erary greatness.165 Scholars have interpreted Arjan’s very desire to produce
a cannon (the Adi Granth), and his decision to exclude Prithi Chand’s verse,
as a means of limiting interpolation by such figures.166 After Arjan’s death,
Prithi Chand continued to contest the guruship –which passed not to him but
to Arjan’s son, Guru Hargobind.
A rival lineage was born, a key figure in which was Prithi Chand’s own
successor, Miharban, who had been educated by Prithi Chand and Arjan
in a broad curriculum and who possessed considerable literary talent.167 He
composed devotional verse and various exegetical discourses –on Kabir and
the bhagats, on Hindu bhakts and yogis, on Nanak –that reflect his efforts
to explain complex philosophical beliefs associated with the Nanakpanths.168
Over the seventeenth century, the rift between the gurus and the Prithi Chand-
Mirharban lineage solidified, described by scholars in terms of the ortho-
doxy or mainstream versus an unorthodox and marginal sect. Of course,
this is not a figment of historians’ imaginations, instead reflecting the way
the guruship and its outgrowth –Khalsa Sikhism –cast the Prithi Chand-
Mirharban lineage. They were known derogatively as the Minas (from mina,
meaning charlatan or scoundrel) and designated as a dissident group and
among ‘the panj mel, or five groups with which relations are forbidden, in
the earliest Khalsa rahitnamas (codes of conduct).’169 They were not the only
such group, however, and sectarian dissent probably climaxed in the seven-
teenth century. The Udasis (lit. ‘detached’) –who were more popular than
163 Whether or not its compilation was completed in one phase under Arjan’s auspices (as so
often portrayed) or much more gradually over a longer period, multiple recensions of the text
soon came into being, some incorporating extra material from diverse sources and traditions
or else altering the order of the work’s contents. Practically from the outset, therefore, the Adi
Granth was not a single, stable work. Questions of authorship, canonicity, and the history of
the text have been examined, most recently and in the face of hostility, by: Deol, ‘Adi Granth’;
Idem, ‘Non-Canonical Compositions’.
164 Deol, ‘Sikh Tradition’, 178.
165 Syan, Sikh Militancy, 52.
166 Ibid, 52; Deol, ‘Mīṇās’, 173–74.
167 In a similar same way, Angad’s sons saw his spiritual establishment at Khadur as their patri-
mony, forcing Amar Das to found a new centre at Goindwal; Grewal, Sikhs, 47–49, 62–63.
168 Deol, ‘Mīṇās’, 180–81.
169 Ibid, 173, for citation, and passim.
66 Belief
the Minas –traced their origins to Sri Chand, one of Nanak’s sons, and
sought to pursue an ascetic and renunciationist path, their theology rooted in
a Vedantic interpretation of Sikhism that would later put them at odds with
orthodox Sikhs.170
The relative success of the gurus in expanding their following was also a
factor. In Nanak’s time and immediately after his death, the Nanakpanths were
predominately Khatris, a relatively high-caste group and a marked contrast
with the largely low-caste followings of other Sants.171 In Angad’s guruship, a
community kitchen (langar) was established, and his disciples widened beyond
Khatris, encompassing those of lower social standing.172 That said, the geo-
graphic expansion and social diversification of the panth in Amar Das’ time
perhaps owed something to the Khatri’s trading networks, which were laced
over north India’s major entrepots.173 These developments continued under
Guru Arjan, who transformed the seat of the guru into a court, and the guru
himself into a king of kings and into God in human form. ‘Do not be misled
by his human form’, it is written in the Adi Granth, for ‘the Guru is the veritable
God (niranjan).’174
However, it was from Guru Hargobind’s pontificate that the guru’s estab-
lishment truly became a seat of temporal power in emulation of Rajput and
Mughal courts, complete with stables and horsemen for hunting (as much
as military defence), as well as ateliers filled with artists and litterateurs.175
Hargobind recruited men to form military contingents and constructed a
fort opposite the Harmandir Sahib (lit. ‘abode of God’) or what is nowadays
known as the Golden Temple in Amritsar (Fig. 2G).176 This fort he called the
Akal Takht (‘throne of the immortal’).177 Combining grandeur with spiritual
and political leadership that was compelling to a wide range of people, the
Sikh gurus attracted a large following, in turn facilitating their continued mili-
tarisation, their capitalising on a wave of popular unrest to contest Mughal
power, and hence their growth as a ‘state within a state’.178 Consequently, the
Prithi Chand-Mirharban lineage became more marginal to the larger Sikh
panth, although it was only in the later nineteenth or early twentieth century
that it became negligible.179
170 Singh, Heterodoxy, especially 82–109.

171 In spite of the gurus’ scorning Brahmanical rites and customs, many of these were maintained
by Khatri Sikhs: Syan, ‘Debating Revolution’, 1120–22. This is not surprising, being broadly
comparable to the position of Jewish Christians –as opposed to Gentile Christians –regarding
the maintenance of such rites as circumcision during Christianity’s first decades.
172 Hawley, ‘Sikh Institutions’, 316–22, on the origins and evolution of these kitchens.
173 Grewal, Sikhs, 48, 50, 52, 57.
174 As translated and cited in: Grewal, Sikhs, 57.
175 Fenech, Darbar, 87–121, specifically on Hargobind’s court, and passim.
176 The current structure, and it’s gilding, dates from the nineteenth century.
177 Syan, Sikh Militancy, 53–54.
178 Grewal, Sikhs, 67–81, for a survey of developments to the death of Gobind in 1708.
179 Deol, ‘Mīṇās’, 175, 178–79; Syan, Sikh Militancy, 49–53.
Belief 67
Fig. 2G The Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar

2.4.4 The Sikh Khalsa as a Social and Political Movement

Focusing on the ‘mainstream’, then, we ought to consider developments under
Guru Gobind, the tenth and last of the living/human gurus.180 Gobind became
a military leader of great renown. He created a militarised order of Sikhs
called the Khalsa in a public ceremony during the spring festival (Vaisakhi) in
Anandpur in 1699, to which Sikhs from across north India were invited. His
initiates swore to abide by the Khalsa’s newfound code of honour, as set out
in texts known as rahitnamas, and adopted five outward signs of their faith
and devotion, each with a practical and symbolic meaning.181 The process
of becoming a Khalsa Sikh ‘was not simply a process of displaying faith in
the Guru by adopting a particular dress code and wearing certain talismans,’
180 For a useful biography that contextualises the source material available for biographising
Gobind’s life, see: Rinehart, Dasam Granth, 17–36.
181 Grewal, Sikhs, 77. See, however: Singh, ‘Overview’, 24, for the debate on when these five art-
icles made their appearance and their origins/significance. See, also: Fenech, ‘Khalsa and the
Rahit’.
68 Belief
Hardip Singh Syan notes, but ‘a complex process whereby the novice became
a Kshatriya devoted to a monarch (i.e., Guru Gobind Singh).’182 This was a
very conscious choice on the guru’s part, and the Khalsa would be pivotal in
the next phase of Sikh panth’s struggle with political authority.183 That said,
it is worth noting that pro-and anti-Khalsa factions formed almost immedi-
ately, spawning a debate signalling the persistence of heterodox currents within
the Sikh panth, which would soon after be censured as ‘unorthodox’ and then
marginalised.184
Our concern here, however, is with Gobind’s theology. One highly contro-
versial compilation attributed to Gobind Singh is the Dasam Granth (‘The
Book of the Tenth Master’), although some see it as the work of his court
poets, while others deem its authorship resting somewhere else entirely, not to
mention the interlinked debate over whether it merits the term ‘scripture’ or
should merely be seen as ‘literature’.185 The controversy stems from the work’s
contents, most of which were composed in the 1690s. They range from praise
for a formless, timeless, transcendent god (as conceived by Nanak), to detailed
discussions of Vishnu and his avatars, stories of other deities and of the
goddess Durga. There is an ‘autobiographical’ account of Gobind that opens
with a long genealogy tracing the guru as a descendant of the noble and cour-
ageous Vishnu avatar, Rama, as well as a considerable number of stories about
women and their ingenious schemes in pursuit of illicit liaisons with men.186
The controversy may be unreconcilable, given the state of source materials and
the positions of various commentators, yet the debates pose issues that obscure
other aspects of the Dasam Granth, Robin Rinehart argues.
The anthology does exist, whosoever composed/composited it, much as the
guru did despatch some of his disciples to learn from Brahmans at Banaras,
who consequently formulated a new and distinct Sikh school with an ascetic
bent (the Nirmala).187 To make sense of the anthology in toto, we might
pause to consider Akbar’s engagement with pious and learned holy men from
different communities and his patronage of the translation of Indic literary
classics (§3.3.3). These projects do not reflect a departure from –and cer-
tainly not a rejection of –Sunni Islam.188 Rather, they provided a powerful
182 Syan, ‘Debating Revolution’, 1098.

183 C.f. Dhavan, When Sparrows Became Hawks.
184 There was a caste axis to the divide among Delhi’s Sikh community, with Khatri and Brahman
Sikhs troubled by elements of the new ethical code: Syan, ‘Debating Revolution’. See,
also: Singh, Heterodoxy.
185 See, for a careful examination of the historiography on the text as well as a disentangling of
these debates and their sources: Rinehart, Dasam Granth, 3–16, 36–49.
186 Rinehart, Dasam Granth, 4, for citation, and 23–36, for a descriptive survey of the contents.
187 Alam, Crisis, 154. Another ‘problematic’ and related text is the Prem Ambodh (c. 1693),
which includes a reworking of Mirabai’s story amidst those of fifteen other bhagats/bhaktas;
see: Hawley and Mann, ‘Mirabai’.
188 For a similar argument about Sufi engagement with Vaishnava lyric poetry as not quite syn-
cretistic, see: Orsini, ‘Krishna Is the Truth of Man’.
Belief 69
new set of concepts and imagery through which to present the Mughal king
(§8.2). In a comparable way, the Dasam Granth’s content reveals the salience of
Indic cosmographies and mythologies for Guru Gobind, his court, and/or his
(would-be) followers at large.189 In the ‘autobiographical’ account, for instance,
Gobind’s life is related in a much larger framework drawing on the Vedic con-
cept of the four yugas or ages and thereby presents Gobind Singh as a leader
and protector, one wielding temporal and spiritual power.190
Indic mythology is replete with gods and demons, with stories of the good
battling the bad to preserve dharma. In the compositions concerning Durga,
what matters –Rinehart insists –is not whether or not goddess worship is
advocated (‘against’ earlier teachings, if so). Rather, in a context where Shakti was
closely related to political power, goddess mythology plays an important role in
explaining the ‘proper maintenance of cosmic order and the nature of leader-
ship’.191 The most contentious compositions, however, are the stories of deceitful
queens and princesses and their sexual liaisons. Tales of women digging under-
ground tunnels or being shot out of cannons while chanting a special protective
mantra, all to steal away and be with their young and virile beloveds, or of
hoodwinking or even poisoning their old and fat husbands, seem perplexing at
first.192 They might, however, be usefully compared to such Indic literary works
as the Sanskrit Panchatantra, which aimed to ‘illustrate practical wisdom and
shrewdness rather than advocating a particular moral code.’193
In keeping with other parts of the anthology, these stories are largely
concerned with dharma. In the ‘autobiographical’ account, the maintenance
of dharma revolves around the ruler who leads armies to create conditions
in which the people might flourish. In the goddess compositions, dharma is
seen through the lens of the ongoing battle between good and evil, gods and
demons. And in these stories about women, the focus shifts to the dharma
‘of a ruler with respect to the issue of personal relationships, especially those
between men and women.’194
The result is neither a syncretic nor a heterodox pantheism, but certainly
one that creates a space for diverse theological ideas and literary forms to sit
side-by-side, thereby signalling the pluralism even at the heart of what was
becoming ‘orthodox’ Sikhism.195 To say such works are evidence of the ‘Hindu
189 Such cosmologies also figured in the Nanak Janamsakhis and in Mina literature, even as the
latter’s Mina authorship –and not the stories of Vishnu/Ram themselves –was erased to make
texts palatable to the larger panth: McLeod, Early Sikh, 64–70; Deol, ‘Mīṇās’, 182–83. See,
also: Fenech, Darbar, 148–64, which reads the Dasam Granth not in relation to cosmology, but
‘Indo-Timurid’ courtliness.
190 Rinehart, Dasam Granth, 50–66.
191 Ibid., 69, for citation, and 71–102, for a descriptive outline of the compositions referring to
the goddess, especially 81 on Shakti and the Matrikas.
192 Ibid, 114–41, for an overview of these stories.
193 Ibid, 142.
194 Ibid, 147, for citation, and 152–59, for a useful discussion.
195 Alam, Crisis, 154.
70 Belief
impress’ upon Sikhism, as some have simplistically proposed, or to take the

issue of authorship to task, is to miss the point, therefore. The anthology’s
contents not only reflect those challenges facing the Sikhs around the time of
its writing and compositing –namely, the fraught and increasingly conflictual
relations with the Mughal state –but also make use of extant and popular lit-
erary forms, cosmologies, and beliefs to make the case for Sikh leadership and
for Sikhism.
We shall revisit Sikh thought later in this book, focusing on discourses of
violence (§6.3.2). Worth noting at this point, however, is the broader land-
scape within which the trajectory of ‘orthodox’ Sikhism can be situated.
All the major Sant traditions emerged as supposedly ‘peaceful’ movements,
even expressing criticism of the hatha-yoga masters or tantrikas who sought
to harness supernatural powers to make violence or win wars.196 Yet, by the
seventeenth century, each of these Sant movements had developed military
wings: the spearheading by the Kabirpanth of the Satnami uprising in 1672,
the Dadupanth’s paramilitary of Rajput or ascetic warriors, and the steady
militarisation of the Sikh community from Hargobind’s time.197
Whatever the growing invective found in Sant Bhakti verse against hierarchy
and those elite interlocutors standing between the divine and the masses, or
the egalitarian teachings of Nanak, the world was not upturned and did not
collapse in the two or three centuries before c. 1750. Why? On the one hand,
this was because the radical messages of devotionalist preachers became
routinised into ‘religion’, blunting its charge, while also being subdued through
appropriation by powerful rulers (in the orthodox form of Bhakti, at least).
On the other hand, Brahmanism accommodated itself to vernacular audiences
and courtly patrons, yet also actively fortified itself in the face of these
critiques; hence the growing influence of Advaita philosophy, a kind of ‘big
tent’ Hinduism that could house (subsume?) numerous discrete beliefs, some
of its proponents striving to reconcile the seemingly opposite worlds of elite,
Sanskrit, Brahmanical culture and that of more popular, vernacular, Bhakti
currents.198 But the Mughals’ ‘self-conscious withdrawal from the position of
adjudication in many matters of dispute in theology and religious law previ-
ously occupied by dharmic kings’ also created a vacuum; ‘Brahman assem-
blies and centres of scriptural authority’ thus ‘asserted themselves to fill the
vacuum.’199 Banaras, the ‘city of Shiva’, was at once a site of imperial patronage
of Brahmans and became a new, unprecedented, and highly prestigious arena
196 Syan, Sikh Militancy, 17.

197 Ibid, 16. Gold, ‘Dadu-Panth’, examines the martial and ascetic tradition in that order as
a special case (vis-à-vis the Kabirpanth and Nanakpanth/early Sikhs). On the Sikhs, see:
§6.3.2.
198 Here, I draw upon: O’Hanlon and Washbrook, ‘Religious Cultures’, 134. See,
also: Venkatkrishnan, ‘Devas of Banaras’; Novetzke, ‘Brahmin Double’.
199 O’Hanlon and Washbrook, ‘Religious Cultures’, 136.
Belief 71
for the expression of a newly confident Brahmanic religious authority in con-

sequence of these early modern developments; the outcome was a new phase
of Brahmanisation.200
2.5 Conclusion
2.5.1 A World of Saints and Miracles

Written in the mid-eighteenth century, Waris Shah’s Hir Ranjha is perhaps the
most famous Punjabi-language literary work. Often described as the Romeo
and Juliet of Indian literature, being a tale of tragic romance, it blends the
culture of Punjabi oral storytelling with the Persian masnavi and qissa, which
is a kind of epic poem –probably intended for performance –popular in the
region.201 It revolves around Ranjha, who abandons his ancestral lands only to
arrive in the village inhabited by Hir, whose father employs the footloose young
man. Hir becomes entranced with Ranjha and the two meet surreptitiously for
years until their secret is revealed and Hir is married off, for Ranjha is deemed
inadequate as a groom because of his inferior social standing. Disconsolate,
Ranjha becomes an initiate of a yogic order and wanders the land, one day
chancing upon Hir living her new matrimonial existence. Waris Shah’s is the
most famous and commonly retold version of the story; others unfold in subtly
different ways. Ranjha’s use of his supernatural powers as a yogi in forcing the
hand of the king to permit their reunion is one alternate, the thwarting of the
tale’s happy ending by Hir’s poisoning at her family’s own hand is another.202
Waris’ poem captures many of the beliefs, holy and lay believers or ‘reli-
gious’ people, and the religious pluralism characteristic of the times. Its
dramatis personae, for instance, is cast widely from the larger set of actors
peopling the early modern religious landscape: Sufis, yogis, ascetics, Sunni
clerics, and Brahmans. Also significant is Ranjha’s becoming a yogi. Apart
from the drama of this act of renunciation, the discourses on becoming and
being a yogi serve as a vehicle for discussions voicing social critique –which
also appear in other parts of the poem –centring on norms regarding gender,
on caste and social status, and ultimately, on religious authority.203 All this
reflects, secondly, two key developments in the religious sphere of the times: the
popularity of devotionalist movements offering a more direct connection with
the divine and a kind of anti-establishmentarianism espoused by many of the
200 See: ‘O’Hanlon, ‘Speaking from Siva’s Temple’, who observes that the loss of imperial
patronage in the later seventeenth century, and then imperial fragmentation itself, adversely
affected the fortunes of Banaras’ Brahman intellectuals, who, ultimately, dispersed to the new
regional kingdoms (notably, the Maratha court), where they legitimated arriviste dynasties
(§10.3). See, also: Venkatkrishnan, ‘Devas of Banaras’.
201 Deol, ‘Punjabi Poetry’, especially 147–49.
202 Ibid, especially 142–45, 152–58.
203 Ibid, 163–68; Murphy, ‘Sufis’, especially 293–307.
72 Belief
leaders of these devotional cults or orders. Supernatural abilities and their link
to temporal power are yet another feature of some religious movements of the
period. And, finally, there is the fact of the story’s immense popularity. Aside
from its literary appeal and compelling plot, it reflects the plural landscape of
pre-colonial Punjab, where sporadic conflict rooted in a sense of difference
did occur, but differences between ‘confessional’ groups were more blurry than
they are today, whereas exchange and familiarity between different groups was
commonplace. Hence, the poet can call Ranjha a (‘Muslim’) mendicant faqir
and a (‘Hindu’) yogi ascetic, all in the same breath.
Johan Huizinga, in his rich historical portrait of northern Europe on the
eve of the Reformation (§11.2), painted a world of mendicant friars, of living
and deceased saints, of temporal princes hungry for miracles, and of people
readily lurching between disdain and irreverence for ‘religion’ and into sudden
ecstatic piety.204 Ordinary people and the high-born sometimes felt so inspired
as to forsake their homes and families to dedicate their lives to some holy man
or other, while some burghers in Europe ‘decorated the tall seat of honour
they erected for him with the costliest tapestries one could buy.’205 Crowds were
regularly stirred up by itinerant preachers, sometimes for days at a time. City
authorities might welcome the reconciliations and resultant peace brought
about by such figures as the Dominican, Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), yet
others forbade the entry of those preachers who railed against bad govern-
ment or were feared lest they kindle the bonfires of the vanities.206 Among the
latter was the infamous Dominican firebrand, Girolamo Savonarola (1452–
98). His radical preaching –often at odds with the Papacy –and prophecy of
Florence as the New Jerusalem so captured the imagination, that he exerted a
great influence over the city’s government and culture before he fell from grace
and was hanged and burnt as a ‘false prophet’.207
This was an enchanted world that held much in common with early modern
India, not only in Kabir’s or Nanak’s time, toward the start of the epoch, but
even in Waris’ time, at its end. Why might this be so? Many of those beliefs
described in this chapter were of long-standing and spreading over a longue
durée reaching into the Middle Ages or earlier (e.g., Brahmanism, Tantra,
Sufi Islam), even as there were important changes to their content and char-
acter in early modern times (e.g., the popularity of Kundalini yoga, Vaishnava
and Tantric themes in some branches of Sikh thought). Much of the religious
upsurge of early modern times, however, spoke to a more urgent hunger for
salvation or righteousness, even as it contributed to the persistence of ‘magical
thinking’ well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.208 How, then, do
204 Huizinga, Autumntide, especially 261–81. Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 3–22, paints a
similar picture of late medieval England.
205 Huizinga, Autumntide, 16.
206 Ibid, 14–16.
207 Weinstein, Savonarola.
208 See, for example: Oberoi, Religious Boundaries, 139–203.
Belief 73
we square this penchant for miracles, messiahs, and saints with the changes in
other dimensions of belief ? How does this compare to what was happening in
other parts of the world?
2.5.2 Religion and the Decline of Magic?
We might begin with the Reformation, being careful not to overstate the
extent to which it contributed to the ‘decline of magic’ in Europe, for this
would give a false impression of the persistence of magical thinking and its
causes in south Asia, in turn. The fulcrum of the early Reformation lay in the
German lands and Switzerland, where Martin Luther in Wittenberg, Huldrych
Zwingli (1484–1531) in Zürich, and Jean Calvin (1509-64) in Geneva –the
‘Three Men of the Reformation’ –formulated and propagated their thought.209
Eschatological currents rippled across early modern Eurasia (§3.3.5), forming
a critical backdrop to the Reformation. ‘Everything has come to pass and is
fulfilled’, Martin Luther reflected in 1530, drawing on the Book of Daniel,
for ‘the Roman Empire is at the end, the Turk has arrived at the door, the
splendour of popery has faded away, and the world is crackling in all places,
as if it is going to break apart and crumble.’210 This widespread belief that the
End Times were approaching made readiness not merely necessary, but urgent;
hence, the passionate impulse to reform the Church.
Among the signal events of the Reformation was Luther’s presentation of
his Ninety-Five Theses on Indulgences in 1517; such ‘protest’ against Catholic
doctrine and practice is what earned Luther, Calvin, and others the epithet
‘Protestant’. The Protestant reformers’ objections were several. First, that the
Papacy and Catholic Church was corrupt, profiting from believers by inventing
such notions as Purgatory, inflating the number of sacraments and feast days,
making those seeking confession enumerate their sins, and so forth. Moderate
reformers sought to prune the branches of a faith that had been ‘overloaded’
by so many new customs and such intricate hagiolatry. More fiery critics saw
the need for a wholescale clearance, for they felt impiety and superstition had
made a home in the medieval Church.211 Second, that much of this was possible
because the Bible remained in Classical languages; hence, the Bible ought to be
mediated in vernaculars known to the majority of the people, as Martin Luther
proceeded to do with his translation of the New Testament in 1522 and the
complete Wittenberg Bible of 1534, roughly contemporaneously with William
Tyndale’s efforts in English.212 The Protestant reformers presented something
new and radical, therefore, but they were not the only voices to enter the fray,
209 Recent treatments of these figures include: Roper, Luther’s World; Gordon, Zwingli.
210 Hsia, ‘Introduction’, xii.
211 See, here: Huizinga, Autumntide, 230–32 and 245, who uses the language of ‘overloading’
and ‘supersaturation’ of intellectual life with ‘religious content and forms’. See, also: op. cit.,
256–61; Hsia, ‘Introduction’, xiii.
212 Rublack, Protestant Europe, 8.
74 Belief
for Catholics and Anabaptists also prophesied reform. The Reformation could
have unfolded in numerous ways; it might never have happened at all.213
Protestant ideas ruptured Western Christianity, yet Protestant the-
ology/ideology was highly varied. This was partly because of the different
backgrounds and milieus of such men as Luther and Calvin; it was also
because Protestantism often took a national character as it spread across
Europe and from thence around the globe.214 Often, political motives and
social preconditions directed the pace and depth of change. It was not as much
from below in Henrican England as it was in the German lands, to say nothing
of its suddenness, whereas in Bohemia and Poland there was arguably a prior
movement for religious reform (or ‘First Reformation’) culminating in the
Hussite Revolution of the fifteenth century.215 In northern and central Italy, by
contrast, the spread of religious ideas had no sooner begun than it was quashed
and reversed, while Iberia was unscathed, instead becoming a bulwark of the
Counter-Reformation.216 Around the same time, furthermore, Mennonites and
Quakers and other small communities of believers (or ‘dissenters’, depending
on perspective) established themselves in Europe, later spreading to America
and beyond, and so the religious landscape was becoming very diverse indeed.217
And this is to say nothing of what was happening in the hearts and minds of
Europe’s non-Christians.
If the medieval Church possessed a ‘vast reservoir of magical power’, then
Reformation iconoclasm ought to have helped clear away magical thinking
to a considerable degree.218 In reality, things were more complicated, as Keith
Thomas demonstrates in a now-seminal monograph. The English Reformation
was not a persecution; within two or three generations, it became a popular
movement.219 The Protestant reformers were never of one mind, however, while
the masses clung to some of their old beliefs even as their houses of worship
were literally torn down and their liturgical texts rewritten, for they often
found little comfort in the Protestant notion of Providence as an explanation
213 Political change in Europe was another factor in the spread of Protestantism; see: Rublack,
Protestant Europe, 9–12.
214 Ibid, especially 20–55, 124–43, examines the role of place in shaping the two men’s distinct
theologies.
215 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, carefully analyses how the imposition of the new faith (and
the lightning-speed dissolution of the monasteries that accompanied it) was slow to gain
acceptance and take local root, meeting considerable resistance from English men and women
more literate in images than words and who were readily moved by the supernaturalism of
ritual that was being washed away by Henry VIII’s reforms. See, also: Haigh, ‘England’;
Palmitessa, ‘Bohemia and Poland’.
216 See, however: Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Europe, which sees Catholic renewal as neces-
sarily a ‘house of many mansions’ and takes the view from the periphery (e.g., England,
the Netherlands, Poland, Bohemia) rather than the Iberian and Italian core of European
Catholicism.
217 Rublack, Protestant Europe, 4.
218 Thomas, Religion, 45.
219 Ibid, 76, for citation. See, also: Marshall, Heretics and Believers.
Belief 75
for life’s violent upheavals (e.g., famine, epidemics, war, hardship).220 For its
part, the Church had possessed ‘its institutional framework, its systematic
theology, its moral code and its wide range of social functions.’221 From this
perspective, the Reformation created a yawning gap: the eradication of the
confessional, for instance, also meant the disappearance of the ‘social services’
accessible through private dialogue with a priest; hence, the persistence of per-
vasive beliefs in supernaturalism and recourse to magic and astrology, espe-
cially in times of need. Thus, divination, astrology, and occultism remained
vital across all levels of sixteenth and seventeenth-century English society, its
practitioners ranging from proverbial old wives to well-respected erudite eso-
teric thinkers, to say nothing of the enduring belief in the power of prayer,
talismans, and relics. Only in the long eighteenth century, thanks to a new kind
of science that replaced old superstitions, did magical thinking begin to recede
(though this process remains incomplete).222 Across the channel, in mainland
Europe, a similar experience unfolded in the many locales where Protestantism
took root.223 And in Catholic Portugal, ironically, it was via their participa-
tion in the Inquisition –otherwise arcane and regressive –that ‘Enlightened’
physicians and surgeons unseated popular healers and other practitioners of
‘superstitions’, who were charged with ‘magical crimes’.224
Much the same picture holds true of south Asia and the wider Islamicate
world, too, where even the inhabitants of the most remote places welcomed –
and continue to welcome –peddlers selling amulets and talismans.225 To pre-
view ideas examined in the coming chapters concerning magical thinking and
its connection with messianism and sainthood, and their impact on kingly
presentation, in turn, we might briefly delve into the Mughal imperial library.
This was so full of riches that its contents were repeatedly looted or sold off to
raise cash during the difficult decades that began with Nadir Shah’s invasion of
1739. Then, in 1858, its remaining contents –some 4700 volumes –were seized
as ‘prize’ (legitimate loot) by the Delhi Prize Agents following the suppression
of the Indian Rebellion and sold at auction. Of the total, approximately 1957
volumes of Arabic manuscripts, 1550 in Persian, and 157 in Urdu or other
languages found their way to the India Office Library in London, becoming
the ‘Delhi Collection’ now housed in the British Library.226 Of the Persian
220 Thomas, Religion, 51–150. As for religious material culture, some of the old lingered here, too.
And, whatever the Protestant emphasis on ‘the Word’, this did not do away with the power
of images, music, clothing, and things in devotional life so much as create a new Protestant
material culture shaped or imbued by Protestant values; see: Rublack, Protestant Europe,
211–33.
221 Thomas, Religion, 41–54.
222 Most recently, see: Hunter, Decline of Magic, which examines how science displaced supersti-
tion more fully than Thomas’ pathbreaking work could manage.
223 See, for instance: Rublack, Protestant Europe, 175–210.
224 Walker, Doctors.
225 Bayly, Empire and Information, 134.
226 https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/the-delhi-collection (accessed: 14 July 2020).
76 Belief
manuscripts, a very large number are mystical or magical treatises, signalling

the importance of such knowledge and its patronage to the Mughal dynasty
and to kingly authority.227
Venturing beyond the Delhi Collection and the Mughal world, we might
pause to examine copies of the Nujum al-‘Ulum. Their contents were intended
to form an encyclopaedic treatment of knowledges on astrology, alchemy,
medicine, magic, statecraft, and power.228 Their author or guiding light is likely
to have been none other than ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I. By ‘engaging with and inserting
himself and his sultanate into older astrological, cosmological, and geograph-
ical traditions’, Emma Flatt argues, he sought to align ‘himself and his sul-
tanate with powerful cosmic forces that were thought to act on daily life in
the physical world’.229 In all this, moreover, Indian rulers were not alone: the
court astronomer to the English monarch, Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), was also
an occultist and alchemist named John Dee (b. 1527), while the palace built
by the Spanish Habsburg emperor, Philip II (r. 1556–98), was home to sev-
eral laboratories where the king supervised alchemical experiments.230 Alchemy
and the occult were not viewed as ‘diversions from rulership’, Martyn Rady
summarises, but ‘were central to it, for the realms of magic and of hidden truth
were thought to hold the solution to how the world might be brought into con-
formity with the cosmic order’.231 Hence, the engagement of Rudolf II (r. 1576–
1612), the central European Habsburg ruler, with the occult text translated
from Latin to Czech as the Tabula Smaragdina (‘The Emerald Tablet’).232
Magic and religion had always held ‘parallel functions’, existing in com-
petition yet also frequently interrelated, and this is the key to understanding
the persistence of magic long in the wake of the Reformation.233 Another key
to understanding the limits of the Reformation-as-Revolution is to view it in
the context of the Renaissance, for part and parcel with the return to ancient
wisdoms was the sweeping tide of Neoplatonism –beginning with Florentine
writers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), and then spreading
north through the works of Paracelsus (c. 1493–1531) and Cornelius Agrippa
(1486–1535), to name but a few –that created a general climate for magical
thinking and magical activities against which radical Protestant reformers
227 Ursula Sims-Williams, ‘The ‘Delhi’ Manuscript Collection: A Snapshot View of Intellectual
Life in 1857’ –unpublished paper presented at ‘Beyond Decline: Globalisation and the
Transition to Modernity in the Middle East and South Asia, 1600–1914’, organised by Gagan
Sood and Coskun Tuncer, 19–20 June 2017. Khafipour, ed., Empires, 345–400, for primary
sources concerning the occult sciences in the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman worlds.
228 For a recent analysis and guide to these manuscripts, see: Flatt, ‘Nujūm’. See, also: Hutton,
Bijapur, 50–69.
229 Flatt, ‘Nujūm’, citation 235. See, also: Flatt, Living Well, 210–67.
230 Rady, Habsburgs, 107.
231 Ibid, 107.
232 Ibid, 107–15. Moran, ‘Courts and Academies’, especially 251–63, usefully sets these examples
into a wider, pan-European perspective.
233 Thomas, Religion, 633–40, for summary, and passim.
Belief 77
railed.234 Again, this picture extends beyond Europe to a degree. The cur-
rency of Neoplatonic thinking in Iran and south Asia even gives us licence to
think of a global ‘Neoplatonist Renaissance’ extending from the banks of the
Thames to the Ganges.235
The intellectually avant-garde authors of the Tarikh-i Alfi, for instance, were
polymaths with knowledge of theology, metaphysics, and philosophy, math-
ematics, medicine, and the occult sciences.236 They were also all connected to
Neoplatonic thinking and their Tarikh had all the hallmarks of Neoplatonism,
being rooted in normative theory known as akhlaq, itself moored in the thinking
contained in antique Hellenic texts blended with that from the Islamic(ate) world,
making it intellectually cosmopolitan, fairly non-sectarian, and thus a useful
‘practical philosophy’ for Indo-Muslim rulers.237 The Tarikh’s authors developed
the idea of sulh-i kull in the late sixteenth century, which evolved to become
the conceptual heart of Mughal political tolerance (§3.3.4).238 Finally, it bears
remembering that even Aurangzeb, who reformulated sovereignty around justice
and the law rather than charismatic or supernatural sources of authority, made
use of ‘magic’ when he sent a large army bearing banners and flags emblazoned
with scriptural verses and magical figures against the Satnami rebels in 1672. The
rebels’ leader had proclaimed the power to use spells to conjure an invisible army,
so the emperor was not afraid of fighting ‘magic with magic’.239
2.5.3 An Indian Reformation?
Having cut the Reformation down to size, does a truncated version of the con-
cept retain anything that might help us characterise what has been described
in this chapter? Contemporaries, for their part, drew equivalences between
Protestantism and Islam. Catholics like Guillaume Postel (1510– 81) saw
the evil as practically one and the same, whereas for Protestant states, like
England, finding common ground with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire
was a step toward building an alliance against their mutual Catholic enemies.240
The Protestantish-ness of Islam should not be confused for a ‘Protestant turn’
in Islam, however. It was only in the modern era, Francis Robinson argues, that
Muslims rejected magic in religious belief and practice, as well as embodied
forms of knowledge, in favour of textual exegesis.241 The Reformation in
234 Thomas, Religion, 223–31, 267–77.

235 Gommans, ‘Neoplatonic Renaissance’, for an excellent guide to a new research area.
236 Gommans and Husseini, ‘Neoplatonism’, 874.
237 Ibid, 875–81. On akhlaq, its place in the Mughal state, and where it met its limits, see: Alam,
Languages, 11–15, 46–80, 141–51.
238 Gommans and Husseini, ‘Neoplatonism’, 881–86.
240 See: Fleischer, ‘Mediterranean Apocalypse’, which surveys Postel’s career and thought;
Brotton, This Orient Isle, for a nuanced discussion of the Elizabethans’ attitudes to Islam.
241 Marshall G.S. Hodgson, by contrast, saw more similarity between the turn to Shi‘ism in
Safavid Iran and the Protestant Reformation: Venture, 33–34.
78 Belief
Europe had peculiar dynamics because the religious orthodoxy existed in

concrete institutions that formed the locus of the reformers’ opposition and
because print technology facilitated the dissemination of the new creeds. By
contrast, there was no counterpart to the Papacy and the Catholic Church even
in the worlds of Brahmanical Hinduism or Islam. As for the printing press,
which played such a vital part in Martin Luther’s challenge of Church ortho-
doxy and the spread of the Protestant creed, it did not make its appearance in
south Asia for some centuries. Once printing finally made inroads into south
Asia and the wider Muslim world in the nineteenth century, there was quickly
a much greater and deeper scripturalism, changing Muslim life, learning, and
consciousness, meanwhile diminishing some of the authority possessed by the
ulama, which constituted the Muslim Reformation according to Robinson.242
While this may be so, our subtler understanding of the pace of social change
during the Reformation and in its aftermath forces us to fine-tune the weight
placed on print technology as a means of spreading Protestant theology. We
should not forget that print had a greater impact in European (and colonial)
towns than the countryside, and that levels of textual literacy were higher than
in south Asia but not widespread, especially among girls and women.243 We also
should not so hastily assume that the production and dissemination of knowledge
in the form of manuscripts and via forms of orality was necessarily an obstacle to
a new textualism in the Indo-Islamicate world, nor overlook the extent to which
radical new messages flourished even without print in south Asia (§10.1). There
were other points of conjuncture, besides. These include: anti-clericalism and the
railing against ritualism; evangelicalism and intensive proselytisation; the inter-
twining of devotionalism with wider social and political movements; the insti-
tutionalisation of ‘protest’ in new orders and their institutions; an increasingly
competitive religious marketplace, made all the more so by sectarian divisions
and the strife to establish orthodoxies; and the appeal of dynasts to the legitim-
ating power of religious communities.
‘If the distinction between magic and religion had been blurred by the
medieval Church’, early Protestantism sought to deny ‘the magic of the opus
operatum’, much as the bhagats railed against the ritualism of Brahmanical
Hinduism and Sufi Islam.244 Nanak’s rejection of Hindu and Muslim ritu-
alism and of such beliefs as the ritual uncleanliness of women is strik-
ingly similar to radical Protestant reformers’ attacks on such practices as
‘churching’ women after childbirth (often involving shutting women up
indoors for a period of time and temporarily discharging them of sexual
obligations to their husbands). Nanak’s thought can also be linked to the
Protestant reformers’ scepticism concerning the supernaturalism –and
popular superstition surrounding –saintly intercessors and religious rituals
242 Robinson, Muslim History, 66–121.

243 Capp, ‘Gender and Family’, 27.
244 Thomas, Religion, citations 51 and 52, respectively.
Belief 79
(even where these were ‘parasitic’ beliefs, from the Church’s perspective).245
Given the persistence of magical thinking, however, it is as ironic as it was
inevitable that the Reformation crisis (re)created martyrs and saints in
Europe, much as the execution of Sikh gurus amidst Mughal-Sikh hostilities
was the genesis of the Sikh martyrdom tradition, not to mention anything
of those saintly idioms also inflecting Sikh devotionalism and the panth of
the Sikh gurus.246
We can also find conjuncture in the limits or resistance to religious change.
The enduring popularity of anti-caste movements should not lead us to believe
all were persuaded, much as, say, many English villagers saw no reason to do
away with the Catholic Church during –and were resistant to –the Reformation.
By the same turn, Brahmanical religion not only cannibalised Bhakti and Sant
movements and left its mark on Sikhism, but was perhaps allowed to do so by
willing and receptive individuals or groups.247 But there were major differences,
too; the state’s greater permissiveness in early modern India was possibly the
overarching one.
Having outlined some of the major developments in faith and belief in the
early modern period, their roots often reaching into the longue durée, this
chapter frames subsequent forays into where and how people lived and how
their lives were organised in the period from the fifteenth century, how they
navigated confessional and community differences, their relationship to polit-
ical and religious centres, the contexts of knowledge and cultural production,
and so forth. However, in another sense, the remainder of this book might
be taken as an attempt to make sense of ecstatic upheaval or of the enduring
hunger for talismans, miracles, and holy cures, for benedictions and saintly
intercessions –to make sense, that is, of the remarkable endurance of the
enchanted world and magical thinking outlined in this chapter. There was a
bridge linking early modernity to what came before, and this explains why it
was possible to carry over old beliefs into a new world, but some part of why
it was desirable or necessary must rest in the upheavals particular to the times.
The continuation of a trend toward concentrating populations in towns; the
spread and growing power of centralised states and of capitalism and their
(conjoint?) offensive against established lifeways; climate crises, dynastic over-
throw, and the appearance variously of messiahs and of foreigners from far-
away lands; the opportunities and challenges posed by new kinds of learning…
these were all sources of the dynamism of early modern times yet also precisely
what contemporaries found unsettling. Such themes are our concern in the
remaining chapters of this book.
245 Thomas, Religion, 38, 46–50, 60. C.f. Wooding, Tudor England, 135, for a woman-centred
interpretation of churching.
246 Gregory, ‘Martrys’, for a summary.
247 Wooding, Tudor England, 87–119.
3 Ideology
Born in 1616, Saiyid Zulfiqar al-Husaini was a Zoroastrian traveller who had
visited Kashmir and parts of Afghanistan, Hindustan, and Odisha by 1652.
He was well-placed enough to have met and conversed not only with Mughal
officials and writers, but also a diverse range of religious figures, including
Guru Hargobind, Chidrup Gosain, and Sarmad (a famous Sufi qalandar), as
well as numerous Catholic priests, Tibetan lamas, Brahmans, sannyasis, and
bairagis.1 Under a nom-de-plume, Mubad Shah, he penned the Dabistan-i
Mazahib (‘The School of Religions’). It was a new kind of text, differing from
works on Indian religions extant in the Islamicate world that largely repeated
received wisdom. Instead, Mubad Shah turned his interviews with holy men
encountered during his travels and his new readings of scripture into a wholly
new analysis, at once encyclopaedic and comparative. Indic religions were
tackled in the first chapter, followed by chapters on Tibetans, Jews, Christians,
and Muslims, with the final two on the Roshaniya and the Ilahiya, with forays
into particular sub-sects found within each of these chapters.
The discussion on the Ilahiya concerned the followers of the din-i ilahi (divine
religion) and its establishment by the Mughal emperor, Akbar (Fig. 3A, left).
Akbar’s din or religion had already long ceased to exist by the time of Mubad
Shah’s birth, but it was, significantly, the product of a series of dialogues with
learned men representing various religious communities invited by the emperor
himself. His successor, Jahangir (Fig. 3A, right), organised nightly sessions in
the early years of his reign –from 1608 to 1611 –where he likewise discoursed
with Brahman pandits, Sunni jurists, Jesuit padres, and even Jewish savants,
the fruits of which formed the basis of an only very recently discovered
handbook intended for his disciples –the Majalis-i Jahangiri (‘Assemblies
of Jahangir’).2 Such conversations had something in common with Mubad
Shah’s interviews, therefore, much as each of these men organised their
1 This brief sketch is drawn from Behl, ‘Book of Religions’.

2 See: Lefèvre, ‘Messianism, Rationalism’. The citation comes from op. cit., 319. Khafipour, ed.,
Empires, 55–75, for translated portions of the Majalis. For a Jesuit account of the Mughals from
the third mission to the court (with a useful contextual and critical introduction): Flores, Jesuit
Treatise.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-3
Ideology 81
Fig. 3A Facing Portraits of Akbar (left) and Jahangir (right) Praying (ink and water-
colour; Mughal artist; c. 1605)
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 29.160.19 and 29.160.20
understanding and reconciliation of religious difference through the frames

of their own cosmologies (Sunni Islam and Zoroastrianism). ‘Mubad Shah’s
strategies of distinction –naming, describing, classifying, judging, translating,
and polemicising –are found in a range of contemporary materials’,
Aditya Behl argues, ‘that also try to construct what [is] around them into an
orderly universe.’3 This meant a tension lay at the heart of such ecumenicalism,
the implications of which are examined toward the end of this chapter in
connection with Akbar’s din.
Thousands of miles away in Amsterdam, a seven-volume work running to
more than 3,000 pages and containing 250 plates was published under the title
Cérémonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous les Peuples du Monde (‘Religious
Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World’). It was the work
3 Behl, ‘Book of Religions’, 233.

82 Ideology
of the famous engraver, Bernard Picart, and the author and publisher, Jean
Frederic Bernard. Its volumes opened with Judaism and Catholicism, before
panning from the Americas to Africa via India, and only then ‘to return to the
familiar, to the many forms of Protestantism, before finally tackling Islam’.4
It was a product of the Reformation (§2.5.2), animated by the Protestant view
of idolatry and the attribution of corporeal forms and human frailties to the
divine as a departure from true faith, but its advent has recently been described
as marking ‘a major turning point in European attitudes toward religious
belief and hence the sacred’ because it ‘sowed the radical idea that religions
could be compared on equal terms, and therefore that all religions were equally
worthy of respect –and criticism.’5 This might be so, and Picart and Bernard’s
work is monumental in scale and achievement, but it ought to be remembered
that their first volume only made its appearance in 1723 –many decades, in
other words, after Mubad Shah’s Dabistan-i Mazahib (a literary prototype
waiting to be discovered) and approximately a century and a half after Akbar’s
inauguration of the din-i ilahi (a radical experiment in religious syncretism).
These facts place Picart and Bernard’s undertaking, as Rajiv Kinra puts it, ‘in
a much broader context of global early modernity, one in which Europe and
Europeans have no exclusive claim to the types of cultural tolerance, civility,
and humanism necessary for such a work even to be produced.’6
As we shall see in this chapter, ‘handling diversity with absolute civility
could be –and clearly was –a Muslim value, too.’7 Before we proceed, how-
ever, it is worth pausing to reflect upon the very different religious landscapes
of south Asia compared to Europe or even the Ottoman Empire, for these
differences have vital implications for the nature and the very need for reli-
gious toleration. Because there was no Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh religious
establishment quite like the Catholic Church, or even the kind of national
church established by Henry VIII in England, the relationship of the state
to religious authority looked rather different in south Asia compared to
Europe. At the same time, early modern India was highly multi-confessional;
new religious movements and sectarian division intensified competition in
the religious marketplace through the period, but this confessionalisation did
not lead to the increasing suspicion and animosity toward religious ‘others’
witnessed in (Counter- )Reformation Europe.8 As for India’s rulers, they
4 Hunt et al, Book That Changed Europe, 1.

5 Ibid, 1, for citation, and 211–46, for Bernard and Picart’s treatment of idolatry and of Indian
religions.
6 Kinra, ‘Handling Diversity’, 289.
7 Ibid, 289.
8 Tolerance is a state of mind which, in the European context, arguably only emerged during the
Enlightenment and is a modern attitude, therefore. Toleration, by contrast, is a social practice –
and one with a bumpy history in early modern Europe, much more so than in south Asia, it
seems. Marshall, ‘Religious Culture’, offers a useful summary drawing on Benjamin Kaplan’s
important work. Barkey, Empire of Difference, 109–53, presents the Ottoman Empire as some-
where betwixt Europe and south Asia.
Ideology 83
seldom sought to make their personal faith into the religion of the realm,
particularly Muslim sovereigns whose rule extended over a majority non-
Muslim population. To preview arguments made in Chapter 7, we might best
view the Mughal state not as strong and hegemonic, but as forged in a mutual
alliance between the ruler and his subjects, necessitating the centre’s on-
going bargaining with those numerous social elements who held the power
to uphold or contest lordship. This goes some way to explaining, on the one
hand, the state’s very limited interference in the religious lives of its subjects,
and, on the other, the state’s lavish support of religious groups through the
endowment of tax-free lands as well as more direct patronage of the kinds
seen in the previous chapter.
To be sure, we can discern a concern among south Asia’s rulers for heresy
and apostasy from time to time, as examples in what follows stand to show,
yet these were of a different order to those of their Ottoman and Safavid
counterparts and quite apart from Charles V’s proclamations of holy war
and his edicts against heresy.9 The state did not seek to restrict religious life
or freedom of conscience as it variously did in France and England, and
the concept of ‘dissenting belief ’ holds none of the usefulness that it does
in the European context.10 There were consequently no protracted Wars of
Religion or anything like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), nor were there great
emigrations of ‘dissenters’ to other kingdoms where they could practice their
faith (more) freely, as the Huguenots were compelled to do.11 There also does
not seem to have been a politically charged and popular Beeldenstorm or
‘Iconoclastic Fury’ of the kind witnessed in Antwerp, for instance, in 1566
and in 1581.12 Magical thinking endured, but there was nothing like the
popular irrationality that manifested as the persecution, prosecution, and
punishment of alleged witches, which seized the early moderns from the
Old World to New England, or even the ‘soulstealing’ and sorcery epidemic
that terrorised late eighteenth-century China.13 More importantly, there was
nothing like the irrationality of the Inquisition. That institution not only
represented an assault on freedom of conscience, the centrepieces of which
were ritualised displays of the sentenced and the executions of the unre-
pentant at autos-de-fé that contributed to more than a mere atmosphere of
fear and persecution. The Inquisition also (and necessarily) resulted in an
attack on certain knowledges and learning, and consequently curtailed the
circulation of ideas across the Iberian world.14
9 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 32–54, for primary sources.

10 Kaplan, ‘Coexistence’.
11 See, for instance: Hunt et al, Book That Changed Europe, 71–111.
12 Pye, Antwerp, 183–90.
13 On the witch craze, most recently: Gaskill, Ruin. Kuhn, Soulstealers, examines how mid-Qing
society was whipped into a frenzy by a sorcery scare.
14 It bears noting, however, that the Inquisition resulted in fewer executions than the wars
associated with the Reformation. For a recent, thoroughgoing treatment, see: Bethencourt,
Inquisition.
84 Ideology
Across the world, the early moderns’ piety and devotional observances were
neither the property of individuals nor carried on in private, which is a modern
view of belief, so much as they had a vital social and, often, political char-
acter.15 This chapter is about the relationship of faith communities to the state
and politics (ideology), focusing on three broad areas: whether (or not) empires
played much role in mass conversion; what contribution Indo-Muslim states
made to religious conflict (if any); and how we might read the Mughals’ (chan-
ging) conciliation with their non-Muslim subjects. The historiography relating
to each of these topics, and thus on early modern India as a whole, has been
tainted by Hindu and Muslim communalism and the Hindu-Muslim conflict
of modern times in ways that has frequently polarised discussion.16 Without
trying to falsely paint an overly rosy portrait of pre-colonial India, comparison
reveals that India was a world apart from Europe and the Americas, where
the forces unleashed by the Inquisition and the Reformation –and their inter-
action with a pivotal phase of state formation and empire building, in turn –
lay at the heart of religious change, societal upheaval, and political conflict and
bloodshed on a far greater order of magnitude.
3.1 Empires and Conversion

To say that the Indian subcontinent is home to a majority Hindu population is
too simplistic. In the first place, as we have seen, Hinduism is really a modern
construct, serving as an umbrella term for a vast array of beliefs and practices.
Hinduism is frequently elided with Brahmanical religion, not least because of
the latter’s spreading and cannibalising folk beliefs in a very long-run process
(§2.1.1), which was in turn contested by poet-saints such as Kabir and continues
to be contested to this day (§2.4.1). The other side of the coin, finally, is the
minority of the population who were not ‘Hindu’ yet whose number runs into
many millions –a minority in proportional terms but hardly insignificant in
absolute size. This minority was (and is still) constituted of people who might
be identified as Jains, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. India’s earliest Muslim
and Christian populations were largely to be found in coastal settlements and
their presence –either as short-term migrants or as settlers –was linked to
Indian Ocean trade.
Our present concern is with the growth of Muslim and Christian populations
in south Asia, which some have clumsily linked to ‘foreign’ imperialisms.17
Before proceeding, it is worth stating that imperialism was neither inherently
‘foreign’ to India, nor did Brahmanical religion and sects abjure the benefits of
imperial patronage. Quite the contrary, in fact, as one example stands to show.
The early Vijayanagra dynasties were Shaivite and supported not only Shaiva
15 See: Prange, Monsoon Islam, 167.

16 Alam, ‘Competition’. See, also: Metcalf, ‘Reflections’.
17 See: Kruijtzer, Xenophobia, 9–11, for a critical discussion of recent communalist projects
rewriting history in this direction.
Ideology 85
(and Vaishnava) temples, but also Shaiva monasteries (maths). These monas-
teries formed a growing web, so that the court’s (economic, political, symbolic)
patronage supported the articulation and spread of sectarian ideas into virgin
territory, while the relationships built by scholar-monks with a variety of social
groups on the ground helped expand the economic and social networks of the
Vijayanagara Empire far from its centre.18 This provides a clear parallel to the
spread of Sufi Islam described in what follows.
3.1.1 Islam
Islam began its spread from Arabia to the Indian Ocean world not long after
the death of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632). It was blown there on the mon-
soon winds, for the agents of its spread to the shores and coastal communities
of east Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and southeast Asia were merchants,
not sultans or holy warriors –what Sebastian Prange calls ‘Monsoon Islam’.19
Roughly corresponding to the present-day Indian state of Kerala, Malabar
was an important site in the world of Monsoon Islam (Map 3A). Malabar was
distinctive: from the twelfth century, it was neither ruled by the ancient Hindu-
Tamil dynasties of south India nor absorbed by the expansionist Muslim
Turko-Persian conquest states in north India, instead fragmenting into a few
competing states, their major ports being Mangalore, Cannanore, Calicut,
Cochin, and Kollam. The development of Hindu beliefs was consequently
idiosyncratic, especially when compared to other parts of India, as was Islam.
Indeed, as Stephen F. Dale and Sebastian Prange note, Malabar is different
from other parts of Muslim India both in terms of language (for Arabic, rather
than Persian, serves as the lingua franca of Muslim elites) and religious affili-
ation (with the preeminent school of Islamic law being the Shafiʿi, not the
Hanafi school linked to India’s Turko-Mongol dynasties).20 Malabar Muslims
were known as Mappilas –a broad catch-all term yet one used to distinguish
autochthonous Muslims from foreign (paradesi) Muslims residing in coastal
settlements.21
Once planted on India’s littoral, Islam revolved around the twin institutions
and spaces of the mosque and the office of the qazi or magistrate (§7.3.3),
spreading along the shoreline as new mosques were built and community
guardians settled in other ports.22 In such settlements, the growth of Mappila
communities was the result of intermarriage and the raising of a new generation
as Muslims, the conversion of (mainly low-caste) Hindus, and a slave popula-
tion (mostly from east Africa; §5.2.2). The result was that Islam was highly
acculturated to local beliefs and practices, many of which were retained.23
18 Stoker, ‘South India’.

19 Prange, Monsoon Islam, especially 2–7, 48–58, and passim.
20 Dale, Islamic Frontier, 24–26; Prange, Monsoon Islam, 14.
21 Prange, Monsoon Islam, 51–58.
22 Ibid, 92–157.
23 Ibid, 169–82.
newgenrtpdf
86 Ideology
Map 3A The World of ‘Monsoon Islam’
Ideology 87
Outsiders to the social and political order, which was dominated by a Brahman
oligarchy and Hindu kings, Muslims were nonetheless vital to the local
economy because of their participation in trade –and that is why Malabar’s
rulers did not thwart the growth of Mappila communities.24 Monsoon Islam
was, Prange argues, ‘an interstitial phenomenon that developed most dynam-
ically in the context of weak states, whose rulers were rivals to one another but
who shared in a wary suspicion of the great landed empires.’ Malabar’s rulers
included the Zamorins of Calicut, who were, in this context, dependent on
trade and thus on Muslims; the title ‘Zamorin’ is believed to be a corruption
of samudri raja (lord of the sea).25 It was ‘only where rulers saw it in their own
interest to provide and safeguard’ the physical and ideological spaces inhabited
by Muslims that ‘Monsoon Islam could take hold –and it was only rulers with
a clear stake in the fortunes of maritime trade who made this calculation.’26
Mappilas had close ties to Muslim communities in monsoon Asia’s key
ports –including Java and Sumatra, where Islam had spread by the dawn of
the early modern period –for Indian Ocean coastal settlements were nodes of
trade as well as cultural and intellectual exchange.27 Critical agents of these
exchanges were Islamic scholars, Sufis, and then laymen later on. The vectors
included literary texts –‘the Quran above all, but also hagiography, poetry,
jurisprudence, scientific writing and more,’ which ‘were the bearers of the new
religion and way of life both in Arabic or in vernacular translation’, Ronit
Ricci demonstrates.28 Conversion of local peoples and the larger process of
what has been called ‘Islamisation’, moreover, was an outcome of the process
of translation of Arabic-language Islamic texts, for this acculturated Islam to
local contexts in southeast Asia.29 Indonesia is one of Islam’s success stories,
on account of its vast Muslim population, thanks, in part, to these networks
and processes in early modern times.30 Islamisation in south Asia was no less
momentous, but the Mappila community remained small and concentrated on
the coast until well into the colonial period, and Malabar Islam was idiosyn-
cratic compared to Muslim south Asia at large, as already noted.
Thus, we must look elsewhere to understand large-scale conversion; namely,
those locales coterminous with the succession of Indo-Muslim states established
from medieval times. Generally, they originated in, and maintained links with,
the Turko-Persianate world –rather than the Arab world just described –a
further impact of which was to make south Asian Islam even more variegated
24 C.f. Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 71–103, which examines the embeddedness of Muslim
saints in south Indian states and societies.
25 Prange, Monsoon Islam, 182–206.
26 Ibid, 160.
27 Ibid, 207–78; Ricci, Islam Translated, 5–11, which describes the spread of Islam to these
locales.
28 Ricci, Islam Translated, 1.
29 Ibid.
30 For more on Islam’s spread in and around the Bay of Bengal and to the Malay-Indonesian
archipelago, see: Wink, Indo-Islamic World, 116–23.
88 Ideology
and complex than the monolith some might imagine. As they were ruled by
Muslims who hailed from beyond the Indus, these states have been the sub-
ject of colonial and communalist writers’ ire. An implication of such writers’
representation of Indo-Muslim states as a form of ‘foreign’ imperialism is to
see Islam itself as ‘alien’; this is not only problematic but also inaccurate, for
reasons we shall see. Another implication is to link these ‘foreign’ imperialisms
to the spread of an ‘alien’ religion and thereby explain the growth in Muslim
populations within India.31
In Europe, such a phenomenon as the conversion of Jews and Muslims
following the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition (1478), the
Reconquista of Spain (1492), and the expulsion of non-Christians, might be
explained in terms of voluntary conversion under extreme duress.32 Yet, as
Richard M. Eaton demonstrates so persuasively, one cannot convincingly
explain the growing number of Muslim believers in south Asia as the out-
come of forced conversion under the aegis of Muslim states, or as a volun-
tary act in pursuit of the patronage of Muslim rulers and elites, or even as
a quest for salvation by those pushed out of Hindu society by the prejudice
and poverty they had to suffer on account of their caste.33 These ideas can
explain particular localised cases; it is more of a struggle to fit them to the
emergence of large and widespread populations of Muslim believers.34 The
greatest concentrations of Muslims were to be found on the fringes of Indo-
Muslim states –namely, in western Punjab and eastern Bengal, which are
roughly coterminous with the modern states of Pakistan and Bangladesh,
respectively.
Bengal provides a key to better understanding the spread of Islam in south
Asia. In the early thirteenth century, Turkish armies advanced across north
India and, by 1204, had conquered the northwestern part of Bengal. This
movement of the ‘political frontier’ of Muslim power did not entail the con-
version of the local non-Muslim population to Islam, however. Bengal had
been ruled by Muslims for several centuries prior to the Mughal conquest
of the Bengal Sultanate’s capital in 1574 (Map 3B), yet it seems that wide-
spread conversion to Islam had not taken place. The relatively small number
of Muslims in Bengal were largely ashrafs –that is, urbanised and often immi-
grant elites –rather than belonging to the rural masses. A few decades later,
however, Muslim believers were recorded in the countryside for the first time,
and in large numbers. This fact is all the more surprising since the Mughal
dynasty ‘as a matter of policy showed no interest in proselytising on behalf of
the Islamic faith’.35
31 Eaton, ‘Introduction’ [2]‌, 9–14.

32 Bethencourt, Inquisition.
34 For the conversion of elite Rajputs to Islam during the Mughal era, see Sreenivasan, ‘Faith and
Allegiance’.
newgenrtpdf
Ideology 89
Map 3B Mughal Bengal
90 Ideology
Because they lived, moreover, in the east of the province in what had been
a forested and marshy hinterland in 1204 and remained so for centuries there-
after, some additional context is useful. Brahmanisation had progressed con-
siderably in west Bengal where indigenes had also hitherto been fully yoked
to the plough and, therefore, the fiscal system of centralised states.36 In east
Bengal, however, neither Brahmanisation nor settled agriculture had advanced
very far. What changed upon the Mughal conquest was not the advance of
Muslim armies deeper into Bengal where they wielded the sword and forced
local populations to convert. Rather, it was the presence of those Sufi pirs
accompanying the Mughals and their penetration of the forested interior
that proved pivotal. They won over both the local population and local
potentates –earning the latter’s patronage –through the performance of
miracles that demonstrated their supernatural powers (by offering protection
from tigers and the untamed forests, for example). Their charisma and other-
worldly power earned them considerable followings –sometimes thousands of
men strong –whose devotion meant Sufi shaikhs were valuable to the Mughals
and other rulers as a source of military manpower (§6.1).
In other words, society in east Bengal was open and receptive to the initia-
tive of powerful shaikhs. Their initiative extended to the pushing outward of
the agrarian frontier and the knitting of the local economy into the imperial
economy and the even larger, regional economy. Key to this was the spread
of wet rice cultivation, principally in the east, which had progressed to such
an extent that Bengal started producing vast surpluses and exporting its grain
across India and the Indian Ocean world.37
Critical to all this were the shaikhs. With the manpower under their
command, they were able to clear forest and turn it over to wet-rice culti-
vation, at the same time settling the land and using the rich proceeds from
it to support the community around the mosque. By winning over local
rulers, and given their links to the imperial centre, they were able to con-
struct mosques and received the support of the state to this end. Bengali
sources speak of ‘a model of patronage –a mosque linked economically
with the hinterland and politically with the state –that was fundamental
to the expansion of Muslim agrarian civilisation throughout the delta.’38
In time, pirs or their descendants transformed religious charisma into land-
holding rights: the Mughal state awarded tax-free lands to the trustees
of mosques and shrines, guaranteeing that their heirs would continue to
enjoy such rights.39 Upon effectively becoming petty landholders, they also
engendered Bengal’s ‘religious gentry’, and thereby helped establish Islamic
institutions in rural Bengal.40
36 Ibid, 184–93.
37 Ibid, 194–207.
38 Ibid, 218.
39 Ibid, 238.
40 Ibid, 219, for citation, 194–267, for analysis.
Ideology 91
Just as the Mughal state pursued its own political objectives by forming the
recipients of these grants into a dependent clientele (i.e., the gentry), so the
latter ‘had already formed dependent clienteles of their own.’41 Pioneer shaikhs
transformed forest into arable and –with the support of the Mughal state and
the force of their charisma –they formed village communities.42 They brought
Islam into the lives of local people, but the new ‘Islamic institutions proved
sufficiently flexible to accommodate the non- Brahmanised religious cul-
ture of premodern Bengal’, while indigenes likewise ‘made accommodations
with the amalgam of rites, rituals, and beliefs that were associated with the
village mosques and shrines then proliferating in their midst’.43 Indigenes first
included shaikhs and saints possessed with supernatural powers alongside the
deities they worshipped (e.g., Chandi/Durga), then elided or absorbed Islam
within their older cosmologies and culture, turning Islam into something
Bengali in the process.44 ‘Conversion’ does not adequately capture such a pro-
cess, therefore, even if formerly non-Muslim peoples came to adopt a sort of
Islam.45 Conquest by a Muslim imperial power, moreover, was insufficient to
usher in religious change; it was a complex interaction of the moving polit-
ical, agrarian, and Islamic frontiers in tandem –and in a context of economic
growth and a region little touched by Brahmanical Hinduism –that explains
why Islam flourished in east Bengal.
Can we generalise from east Bengal’s experience? In the first place, we might
fruitfully compare it to Kashmir, where the tensions between Brahmans and
non-Brahmans were expressed in the anti-Brahman poetry of Lalla Ded,
a fourteenth-century yogini, in turn nourishing the Rishis, a popular and
growing local ascetic movement that was eventually transformed into a Sufi
order.46 Secondly, the east Bengal example shows how the local came to be
knitted into the processes of commercialisation and globalisation. These were
not new processes yet, after about c. 1500, were attaining a scale and intensity
that produced novel –often distinctively ‘early modern’ –outcomes. This idea
is examined extensively in the following chapters, except to note the similarity
41 Ibid, 247.
42 This process had its limits; namely, where people retreated further into the forest, so that
non-Muslim, non- Bengali identities survived until relatively recently. See: van Schendel,
Bangladesh, 32.
44 Ibid, 270–303, for analysis more complex than can be adequately summarised here. This is, of
course, only one side of the story; namely, that concerning those indigenes who moved toward
Sufi Islam. The relationship to Islam and Mughal rule of those worshippers of Chandi/Durga
who did not absorb or acquiesce to Sufism have been revealed by Kumkum Chatterjee through
a rich study of Bengali literature. Initially, the Mughal regime was presented as a monster that
the goddess had to vanquish. With the passage of time and regularisation of Mughal rule,
there was a shift toward presenting the Mughals and their successors as having capitulated to –
and become devotees of –Chandi/Durga. See: Chatterjee, ‘Goddess Encounters’, especially
1449–63.
46 Khan, ‘Kashmir’.
92 Ideology
with western Java, where ‘Islam grew in tandem with deforestation, agrarian
expansion, and the establishment of small mosques on lands granted by the
state’ between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.47 ‘Early on’, as Karen
Barkey notes, Sufis likewise ‘played a major role in the colonisation of terri-
tory and in the conversion of Christians to a mild heterodox Islam’ following
Ottoman conquests in places like the Balkans, though the economic motiv-
ations differed in a landscape that was already under the plough.48
Eaton’s case study forces us, finally, to rethink the very process of con-
version and the role played by ‘foreign imperialism’, and thereby re-evaluate
those colonial-era and communalist interpretations that remain entrenched
in the historiography. In some respects, the creation of a Muslim community
in Gujarat sits somewhere between the Malabar and Bengal examples (and
shows some similarity to Ottoman Anatolia).49 It depended on successive
waves of migration by pastoral groups or else those linked to Indian Ocean
trade (Monsoon Islam); on the (re)settlement of Islamic scholars and sheikhs
from other parts of India or the Islamic world; and on proselytization by Sufis
and the establishment of their communities of converts in the region, some
of which preceded and some of which followed on the heels of conquest by
the Tughluq armies and under their successors, the sultans of Gujarat.50 Yet,
in other respects, the history of Islam in east Bengal is as distinctive as it is in
Malabar; key in this regard is its rural setting and its corrective to the view of
Islam as an urban religion.
3.1.2 Christianity
Christianity has an even older history in south Asia than Islam, for Christians
are thought to have settled on India’s western coast between the first and
fourth centuries, and they, too, were brought on the monsoon currents blowing
across the western Indian Ocean.51 Known as ‘Syrian’ Christians, they are so-
named because they are thought to descend from west Asian ancestors and
use Syriac as a liturgical language. They can hardly be called outsiders, cer-
tainly not by the early modern period, for they were well-embedded into local
society. The population of Syrian Christians was small yet significant, some
were wealthy and linked to trade and commerce, while others formed powerful
martial groups. They were rewarded for service to Kerala’s rulers with grants
of land and office but also reflected their social standing by acting as donors or
sponsors of Hindu shrines and temple festivals. They also had devotional cults
47 Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 313. See, also: Johns, ‘Sufism in Southeast Asia’. C.f. Ricci, Islam
Translated, especially 66–150, 183–215.
48 Barkey, Empire of Difference, 125–28, which also notes the prevalence of official policy of
forced conversion in some regions.
49 Ibid, 126–27.
50 Sheikh, Forging, 129–64; Balachandran, Narrative Pasts, especially 35–62.
51 Prange, Monsoon Islam, 37.
Ideology 93
around shrines and saints that resembled those of Hindus and Muslims, which
troubled Iberian Catholics.52
The ‘discovery’ (§10.4) by Cristoforo Colombo of the New World in 1492 and
by Vasco da Gama of a direct maritime route via the Cape of Good Hope to
Asia in 1498 paved the way for the spread of Spain and Portugal’s empires into
Africa, the Americas, and Asia. The Iberian kingdoms were Catholic powers
and the division of the world beyond Europe between them was sanctioned
by the Pope. They established (fortified) settlements after securing rights to
land from local rulers on which to do so, and these often contained places of
worship. There has consequently been a church in Kochi (Cochin) since 1503 –
just a few years after da Gama’s landing –with the simple wooden structure
replaced in 1516 by the building that stands today (Fig. 3B). But what exactly
was the relationship of Portuguese imperialism and Catholic evangelism in
Asia? And what success did they have with conversion?
On the one hand, the Syrian Christians’ faith and social standing made
them valuable to the Portuguese as the latter sought to build a presence in
Asia in pursuit of their commercial and ideological objectives –that is, spices
and souls. On the other hand, the Syrian Christians’ active links to west
Asian patriarchates (i.e., the Nestorian Church) threatened the monopoly of
authority over Christian communities the Portuguese state believed it had been
granted by the Papacy, which it sought to effect by installing its own priests.
Eventually, those Syrian Christians who were convinced to be pro Latinisation
were converted from Nestorian to Roman Catholic allegiance and exhorted to
abjure all un-Catholic doctrines and observances.53
Where any kind of Christian population did not yet exist, however,
wholly different strategies would be necessary to effect conversion. Once the
Portuguese had established settlements –at Goa, for example –they sought to
impose a religious monopoly through such means as judicial discrimination of
non-Catholic residents (e.g., escheat when Hindus died without male heirs).
Over time, especially from about the 1540s, such inducements to conversion
‘were replaced by more coercive measures, including a systematic campaign to
destroy the temples of the region.’54 It should be noted that the use of coercion
in Brazil was harsher still, involving enslavement. In spite of Portugal’s respon-
sibility for the spread of Catholicism made incumbent by agreements struck
with the Papacy, there had been little actual progress in effecting conversion –
only significant resistance.55
Among the ‘successes’, however, was the conversion of south Indian
fisherfolk of the Parava caste. They actively sought Portuguese aid against
the incursions of Muslim fisherfolk into waters in which the Paravas had
long possessed rights. This occurred in a context in which such groups had
52 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 243–57.

53 Ibid, 257–68.
54 Chakravarti, Apostles, 47, for citation, and 44–52.
55 Ibid, 178–88.
94 Ideology
Fig. 3B St Francis’ Church, Kochi

competed for the patronage of local rulers: some Paravas had previously been
drawn into state patronage networks and it was natural, therefore, to seek to
become Portuguese clients when the opportunity arose in the 1530s. There
followed ‘great ceremonies of mass baptism’ which, Susan Bayly has argued,
‘were really declarations of tactical alliance rather than religious conversions
as the term is usually understood.’56 The veracity of their Catholic faith is
doubtable: the first Jesuit missionary to arrive in Asia, Francis Xavier (1506–
52), found it necessary to re-convert some 15,000 locals in the 1540s, while
nineteenth-century Jesuits lamented the Paravas’ having failed to renounce
practices of worship drawn from the broader religious landscape of south
India.57
Progress in the first four decades of the Portuguese enterprise in Asia was
limited, therefore, even if the Parava community was something of a nook
for evangelism and mass conversion. A turning- point was the arrival of
Jesuit missionaries in 1542, Xavier among them. Accommodatio was ‘a prin-
ciple enshrined in Jesuit praxis from the very beginning’, Ananya Chakravarti
argues, which ‘enjoined the spiritual preceptor to adapt the Christian lesson
56 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 328.

57 Ibid, 321–36, 357–60, for the Parava-Portuguese missionary encounter.
Ideology 95
to the capacity and dispositions of his audience.’58 Realisation of this prin-

ciple ‘demanded from the missionary a sensitivity to the local realities of the
mission space and its peoples.’59 The English Jesuit, Thomas Stephens, reached
Goa in 1579, aged about 30. He sought to make Christian teachings knowable
in local scripts and tongues, the culmination of which was his Discurso Sobre
a Vinda de Jesu Christo (‘Discourse on the Coming of Jesus Christ’), written
in metre in the poetic local language of Marathi.60 Marking the beginning of
successful accommodatio that broached teachings and praxis, Stephens’ efforts
were redoubled by his protégé, Roberto Nobili (1577–1656). His career was as
remarkable as it was controversial, for he ‘played a role of spiritual preceptor,
guru, and miracle worker, of a Brahman sannyasi (i.e., renouncer, ascetic) a
hybrid role based on both local and European ideas of holiness and religious
competence’.61 All this is even more remarkable given the slender Portuguese
authority in the Indian Ocean world was slowly but surely contested by other
European powers after c. 1600, with the Dutch even competing with the
Portuguese over the Paravas in time.62
Conversion was often spearheaded by indigenous people themselves, how-
ever, who proselytised and readied catechumens for the Europeans to baptise
them.63 Catholic missionaries often overlooked non-Christians, especially in
the interior, fixing their attentions on the needs of Europeans, Eurasians (a
term for people of mixed European and Asian parentage), and Paravas in
Portuguese settlements on the littoral. The Paravas and other Christian ‘gurus’
provided many south Indians with their first contact with Christianity, thus
helping to spread those cults that had emerged around St Francis Xavier and
other Christian saints deep inland, often long before mission stations were
established in the interior. The popularity of devotion to bhagats and pirs
also played a part in spreading such cults, for this allowed Catholicism to slot
into existing systems of belief and worship. When missionaries succeeded in
performing mass baptisms in the interior, they not only produced converts to
Christianity, but became converts themselves –converts, that is, to a kind of
indigenised Christianity far removed from what they had practised in Europe
and believed they would propagate in Asia.64
58 Chakravarti, Apostles, 9. That said, accommodatio ‘provoked at least two centuries of disputes
between the Jesuits and other missionary orders and church hierarchy, and among the Jesuits
themselves’, as Županov notes in Disputed Mission, 5, for citation, and 22–24, for delinea-
tion of the different modes of accommodation, and passim, on the Indian or Malabar Rites
controversy.
59 Chakravarti, Apostles, 9.
60 Ibid, 200, 201, respectively, for citations, 201–23, for analysis of the text.
61 Županov, ‘Compromise’, 359–65, and 364, for citation.
62 Vink, Encounters.
63 Chakravarti, Apostles, 269.
64 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 380–419, which includes a discussion of Stephens’ protegee,
Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656), who went further than Stephens by adopting many of the cus-
toms and language of south Indian devotionalism in his mission, attracting consternation from
96 Ideology
Those Catholic missionaries allied to the Portuguese enterprise thus met with
less success than they might have hoped, either in numerical terms or when judged
against their own belief that pre-Christian (‘pagan’, ‘heathen’) practices had to be
dislodged and replaced with suitably Christian ones.65 The comparison with early
modern China, where Christianity made deeper inroads, puts this into relief even
more clearly.66 To return to the relationship of proselytisation and imperialism,
we again find that early modern rulers may not have activated mass conversion
directly, yet the work of those spiritual agencies allied to imperial states may have
supported the expansion and consolidation of empires.67 And lest we overlook
the power of indigenes to variously appropriate or resist European imperialism
and Christianity, their tools and institutions, Ângela Barreto Xavier points out
how local populations powerfully shaped the Portuguese Empire (or its epicentre
in Goa, at least).68
3.2 Imperialism and Religious Conflict

So much for conversion, but what about conflict? Belief has the power to shape
personal and group identities, loyalties, and lines of difference. But had religious
identities and a sense of religious difference formed by c. 1400 or c. 1500? If not,
were events and processes of the early modern period critical to their develop-
ment? Only by first examining these issues can we probe the link between imperi-
alism and religious conflict.
3.2.1 ‘Turks’ and ‘Hindus’
Only in the modern era did religious identities begin to resemble what are often
called ‘world religions’ (e.g., Hinduism, Sikhism, Sunni Islam). In the case of
Hinduism, as we have seen, this was a very long-term development, taking cen-
turies and culminating under colonialism, although still incomplete even today.
Or, to put it differently, this development had not advanced very far in the
final pre-colonial centuries. Processes of contrasting and thereby demarcating
this or that belief system off from others were underway, not least as actors
formed a sense of difference or experienced feelings of boundary-crossing or
alienness when moving outside of their communities or milieu –which they
were increasingly wont to do in early modern times –as evinced in travellers’
other Catholics, and which also analyses how missionaries reified –rather than eliminated –
caste status.
65 On the religious- epistemological encounter, see, also: Xavier and Županov, Catholic
cum-
Orientalism, 115–57.
66 Bailey, ‘Religious Encounters’, offers a useful overview of early modern Christian missions and
the missionary encounter in Asia.
67 Chakravarti, Apostles, 280–314.
68 Xavier, Goa.
Ideology 97
accounts from as far afield as the Qing Empire or the Persianate world.69 Yet,
these had seldom advanced far enough to speak of believers being ‘Hindu’
or ‘Sikh’ or ‘Muslim’ or ‘Christian’, as we shall see, let alone for any sense
of religious difference to find expression in ‘broad communal terms’ or for
‘essentialisations of social types’ to become ‘fixed in a racialist hierarchy’, as it
would in the colonial era.70
Indeed, Indians describing those invaders and migrants from beyond the
Indus many centuries ago did articulate a sense of the latter’s difference, but
in ethnic or political terms, rather than as Muslims or even merely as non-
Hindus.71 Often, they were described merely as turushka (Turks), since they
came from the Turkish lands or Turko-Mongol world. Or they might be
denounced as mleccha (barbarians), usually when they disturbed the socio-
political and moral order orchestrated by Brahmans.72 In early modern times,
therefore, few non-Muslims called themselves ‘Hindus’; when the rulers of the
Vijayanagara Empire called themselves sultans among Hindu kings, ‘they were
most probably declaring their paramount status among the non-Turkish [i.e.,
non-Muslim] polities of the peninsula’.73 To be Hindu, on this interpretation,
simply meant not being ‘Turkish’.74
Over the early modern period, however, the intensity of Hindu-Muslim
contact varied more dramatically and so representations of Muslims became
more varied, too.75 There was also a spatial dimension to this phenomenon,
for reports of temple desecration surfaced largely at the edges of the advan-
cing frontier of Indo-Muslim power, with implications for how Muslims were
described. Cynthia Talbot has examined Sanskrit and Telugu inscriptions from
southeastern India between 1323 and 1650, finding reference to Muslim groups
as Yavanas (from Ionian and referring to Indo-Greeks) and Shakas (a central
Asian group who displaced the Yavanas), which was the name given in the
ancient scriptures for non-Brahmanical ‘Others’; the concern was not for the
specifics of Muslim belief but that some groups ‘whether foreign invaders or
indigenous tribal peoples’ were ‘barbarians’ in the sense of residing outside
the Brahmanical tradition.76 If this demonised Muslims, it was in the sense of
their representation ‘as being like the demons of ancient myth who engaged in
69 Such processes were arguably central to Mughal sulh-i kull, which is examined in the next
section. See: Pye, ‘Sufi Method’, 914– 15. On boundary crossing and difference: Perdue,
‘Crossing Borders’; Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 175–242.
71 Or, by categorising what had formerly been seen as the distinct and competing schools of
Sanskrit learning into a unity, Indic specialists allegedly began to formulate a ‘proto-Hindu’
identity against some indistinct ‘Other’: Nair, ‘Sanskrit Doxography’, for a critical evaluation
of such arguments.
72 Eaton, ‘Introduction’,
73 Talbot, ‘Inscribing’, 91.
74 Ibid, 91.
75 Ibid, 107.
76 Ibid, 89.
98 Ideology
endless battle against the forces of good’; absorption into such mythological
categories erased the very distinctiveness of being Muslim.77 In periods and
places where Hindu polities were on the defensive, anti-Turk polemic was wide-
spread, but the language was more accepting in peaceful situations and when
the political and moral order was not disturbed, with Muslims even finding
praise for their military skills and the achievements brought by their adminis-
trative technologies. It should be noted that ‘conceptions of the Muslim were
never monolithic or uniform’, however, so that both antipathetic and tolerant
terms could be found in any particular phase.78 Such findings urge historians
to look ‘beyond Turk and Hindu’ to determine the other axes or lineaments of
identity and loyalty in early modern India, while reminding us to distinguish
Indic from Hindu and Islamicate from Muslim (§1.3.1).79
3.2.2 Muslim Conquest and Conflict
Indo-Muslim rulers held sway over a majority non-Muslim population and

naturally safeguarded Islam, yet these facts did not necessarily entail conflict
along communal lines. Although ‘the domination of Islam over Hinduism was
guaranteed in theory by the Mughal emperor, whose title always included the
sobriquet of “holy warrior” (badshah-i ghazi),’ Abhishek Kaicker notes, this
fact ‘does not appear to have been a source of discomfort to his Hindu subjects
(no matter how much it would disturb future generations).’80 At the same time,
even rulers such as Aurangzeb –who strove to ‘improve the lamentable state
of orthopraxy in his empire’ (§3.3.1, §6.3.1–§6.3.2, §7.3.3) –struggled to deal
satisfactorily with religious festivals and rituals that subverted Indo-Muslim
sovereignty in some way or other. These included Shiʿi practices of mourning
during Muharram, which Sunni authorities viewed as heretical, and the spring
festival of Holi, which was celebrated by Hindus and also Muslims, involving
licentiousness and ritualised subversions of the social order.81 Just as Indo-
Muslim rulers made little headway with conversion, so their efforts to deal
with potentially subversive expressions of their subjects’ beliefs were often
disregarded. Yet, it would be wrong to think of Indo-Muslim rulers as impo-
tent, for their aims were not narrowly restricted to the promotion of Islam, a
task in which they may have had little success, but rather the management of
diversity, in pursuit of which they patronised non-Muslim religious communi-
ties, as we shall see.
77 Ibid, 89.
78 Ibid, 108. Truschke, in Language of History, especially 66–211, offers an even broader and more
complex picture of attitudes towards Muslims and Indo-Muslim rule as found in Sanskrit his-
tories from across the medieval and early modern Indian subcontinent.
79 See: Gilmartin and Lawrence’s ‘Introduction’ to their Beyond Turk and Hindu and the rest of
that important edited volume.
80 Kaicker, The King, 160.
81 Ibid, 162.
Ideology 99
What about conquest itself ? Was it motivated by religious difference or

else might it be fruitfully analysed as a conflict arrayed along religious lines?
When it comes to the Islamic world, our understanding has long been col-
oured by the supposed ‘clash’ since the Crusades between Christendom and
Islam and the supposed alterity of Muslim states constructed by Europeans
over the centuries –what Edward Said termed ‘Orientalism’. The conquest of
Constantinople (Istanbul) by the Ottomans from the Byzantines, for example,
sent shock waves through Christian Europe, resulting in a fixation on ‘Muslim
iconoclasm’ (e.g., the conversion of the basilica of the Hagia Sophia into a
mosque), ignoring how the repurposing of certain structures was matched by
continuities (including of freedom of worship).82 The centuries of Muslim rule
over the Indian subcontinent was painted by European writers as an inter-
ruption from which colonialism could deliver Indians and restore their proper
(read: Hindu) ‘civilisation’.83 Note, as Eaton does, that the Spanish conquest
of the Americas has never been described as a ‘Christian’ conquest in the
way Sultanate and Mughal expeditions have so readily been called ‘Muslim’
conquest.84 Nevertheless, what is even more significant is how communalist
historians latched onto these racialised discourses for their own ends, drawing
out examples of temple destruction or desecration by Muslim conquerors
to paint the period from c.1000 to c. 1750 as an unwelcome ‘Muslim inter-
regnum’ and to tar Muslims –past and present –as alien, as intruders, and as
the despoilers of Indian culture, religion, and heritage.85
The memory and memorialisation of iconoclasm is highly emotive and
politically charged in contemporary south Asia, but like all remembrances,
what appears or seems so true can really be a distortion. To make sense of
this, Richard M. Eaton and Philip B. Wagoner try to put temple desecration/
destruction into its larger context. What, they ask, did victors do with the
cluttered built landscape, comprising structures from earlier occupants of the
land as well as the freshly defeated regime, and why?86 Wishing ‘to assert their
own claims to possessing the land and its people, the new rulers actually faced
a range of options’, for
They might continue to patronize pre-existing structures in the manner their

defeated rivals had done. They might rebuild them. They might redefine
them. They might imitate them. They might destroy them. Or, they might
ignore them altogether.87
82 Boyar and Fleet, Social History, especially 1–5. For a useful survey, see: Greene, ‘Violence and
Religion’.
83 The best analysis of these ideas and their legacy down to the present day remains: Metcalf,
‘Reflections’, especially 952–56.
85 Ibid, 3–10.
86 Eaton and Wagoner, Contested Sites, 40.
87 Ibid, 40. See, also: Moin, ‘Sovereign Violence’, 470.
100 Ideology
Against the notion of Muslim iconoclasts, therefore, we have evidence of

Muslims reinstating Hindu temples as well as other religious or royal structures,
for it was the ‘least intrusive form of active intervention in a built environ-
ment’.88 Acts of destruction or desecration, by contrast, were the most intru-
sive. And even more drastic was destruction followed by a reassemblage of
materials into new structures, this recycling of materials a part of establishing
continuities between old and new amidst the disjuncture of a new reigning
dynasty.89 Thus, desecration/destruction carried weighty political meanings
and had to be carefully planned and executed.90
To properly comprehend temple destruction/desecration, and to grasp why
it seldom had much to do with religious difference per se, we must first under-
stand the charged connection between incumbent temporal authorities and
particular religious structures (e.g., temples, mosques) or religious figures (i.e.,
deities or saints). Vijayanagara’s first rulers, for example, adopted a form of
Shiva known as Virupaksha as their family deity. This association of deity and
kingdom endured until later kings shifted their favour to Rama, an incarnation
of Vishnu, whose life-story –as told in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana –could
be powerfully linked to the city of Vijayanagara, and whose valorous fight
against the evil king Ravanna usefully served as an emblem for the empire’s
rulers.91 In smaller kingdoms, too, particular Hindu deities and the temples
dedicated to them were associated with particular ruling houses. Take, for
instance, the temple of Eklingji (a form of Shiva), not far from Udaipur. Built
in the tenth century, it was rebuilt in the fifteenth century and transformed into
a royal lineage temple ‘intended to validate the Sisodiya Rajput rulers, who
claimed the deity Eklingji was the state’s real ruler and the king his human
agent, the prime minister.’92 The impetus to destroy or desecrate temples was
like a two-sided coin. The powerful connection of religious institutions to the
scions of Indian dynasties explains one side; the other side had more to do with
the position of the conquering Indo-Muslim kings.
From medieval times, Indo-Muslim kings came to believe that the blessing
of Sufis was the key to their worldly success (§2.2.2). Royal patronage of Sufi
institutions and holy men like the Chishti shaikhs helped dynasties appear
‘legitimately Islamic and authentically Indian’.93 In this way, Indo-Islamicate
states were infused with a distinctive legitimising ‘substance’, which entailed
not only the sweeping away of political rivals, but also of their legitimising
substances. It follows that, where a Hindu raja’s legitimacy was associated
with a royal temple and his dynasty’s state deity (rashtra-devata, usually Shiva
or Vishnu), Indo-Muslim kings would naturally wish to destroy, desecrate, or
88 Ibid, 66.
89 Ibid, 67–68.
90 The discussion draws on: Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration’.
91 Rao, ‘Rama Cult’, examines this subject.
93 Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration’, 251–54, 267–68, and citation on 252.
Ideology 101
redefine that temple and its deity. In contrast, temples not connected to the
ruler or not serving as the wellspring of his authority were to be left unharmed.
Instead of seeing this as ‘Muslim iconoclasm’, Eaton situates these acts within
their Indic context: a connection of land or territory with a god or temple
and with a king and his dynasty was of such long standing that, ‘from about
the sixth century on, images and temples associated with dynastic authority
were considered political vulnerable.’94 The historical record thus abounds with
examples of Hindu (and Buddhist) kings in India and Sri Lanka carrying off
statues of state deities as part of the contestation of rivals’ political authority.95
From the late twelfth century, temple desecration occurred at the behest of
military officers or rulers at the moving military frontier of the Indo-Islamicate
states of the north. With the retreat of Tughluq imperialism and the emergence
of its successor states, temple desecration continued as a means of challen-
ging the political legitimacy of rival centres. Vijaynagara’s domination over
the Raichur doab and Tamil coast was contested by the Bahmani sultans
through acts of desecration, while the latter’s own successor states (Bijapur and
Golkonda) challenged the authority of the Orissan kings in this way in the later
sixteenth and seventeenth century. The Malwa sultans contested the renewal of
Rajput power in eastern Rajasthan in the mid-fifteenth century, followed in the
early sixteenth century by the Lodi dynasty’s efforts to reassert Delhi’s control
over Rajasthan, each associated with acts of temple desecration or destruction.
The Mughals, upon breaking out of the Lodi domains and into lands ruled by
Hindu rajas followed suit, sometimes even converting temples into mosques.96
Occasionally, where an Indo-Muslim king feared the renewal of a rival’s power
or was angered by the latter’s disloyalty, he might order the desecration of a
temple or deity. Hence, for example, Jahangir’s orders for the desecration of
an idol housed in a temple belonging to the uncle of the Mewar raja in 1613,
or Shah Jahan’s destruction in 1635 of the temple at Orccha patronised by
the father of a high-ranking imperial serviceman, Raja Jajhar Singh, who was
then in open rebellion against the centre, or Aurangzeb’s destruction in 1679 of
temples in Rajasthan associated with his political enemies.97
Balancing any temple desecration, however, were politically expedient acts
to win over local society: support for local religious institutions, whether for
the rebuilding or repair of particular temples so that worship was not disturbed
too long; permitting the building of new temples, so long as the poll tax on non-
believers (jizya) was paid; and the protection –sometimes even the patronage –
of non-Muslim religious institutions. Akbar supported the building of temples
by his high-ranking Rajput serviceman, Man Singh (Fig. 3.5; see: §9.3.1). Shah
Jahan, too, allowed Mughal officials to oversee (or even initiate) the renewal
94 Ibid, 255.
95 Ibid, 255–56.
96 Ibid, 257–60 for details of these examples of temple desecration, and 260 for discussion of
examples of the seizing of deities.
97 Ibid, 264–65. See, more recently: Pauwels, ‘Tale’, 288–90.
102 Ideology
of the local cult of Jagannath in Puri, Odisha, in ways that visibly connected
the annual festival to the Mughal state.98 Aurangzeb may have forbidden the
building of new temples, and instructed that they be torn down, but likewise
renewed the official stance ensuring protection of religious communities and
their existing buildings.99
If Muslims protected and even patronised non-Muslim sites, the reverse
was also true, with the Marathas patronising Muslim institutions, as Stewart
Gordon highlights. Whatever the fiercely anti-Muslim invective found in some
Maratha literature of the times, and though displacing Muslim officeholders
and claimants of landed rights was critical to the process of Maratha con-
quest, the Marathas nevertheless supported Muslim holy men, dargahs, Quran
recitation, and the celebration of Muslim festivals in mid-eighteenth century
Burhanpur and Khandesh. They did so in a spirit of political pragmatism
and in maintenance of the precedent set by the Deccan sultans and Mughal
emperors, being their heirs, after all.100 That said, Hindu kings might also try
and humiliate their rivals by destroying significant buildings associated with
a Muslim dynasty. Mosque desecration in the Muslim-ruled sultanates of the
northern Deccan by the authority of Vijayanagara’s ruler in the early sixteenth
century stands as one example.101 If there are fewer instances of mosque dese-
cration, however, it is because these structures were seen as politically inactive
and were thus insignificant as targets of a Muslim dynasty’s (Muslim or Hindu)
political rivals.102
Whether to conquer or to govern, Indian rulers not only had to forge
alliances across broad confessional lines (i.e., between Muslims and Hindus),
but also across sectarian lines (e.g., the Sunni- Shi‘i or Vaishnava-Shaiva
divides). This fact reminds us, vice versa, that Indian society contained multiple
axes of socio-religious difference and potential discord. Violent conflict with
religious communities holding opposing views was not the norm, except where,
for instance, rival Shaiva or Vaishnava monastic orders threatened temples and
other institutions. Taking another angle, the (Sunni) Mughals could present
their conflict with the Shi‘i rulers of Ahmednagar and Golkonda and their
expansion into the Deccan as a righteous struggle against heresy, even striving
to repress public demonstrations of Shi‘ism; hence, for example, Shah Jahan’s
order that the Qutb Shahis desist from including the name of the Twelve
Imams and the Safavid rulers in the Friday congregational prayers made in the
name of the sovereign (the khutba).103 But the entry of increasing numbers of
Iranians –mostly Shi‘is –into Mughal state service tempered open sectarian
conflict or pronouncements against heterodoxy, even as Sunnism retained its
98 Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration’, 262.

99 Ibid, 263.
100 Gordon, ‘Maratha Patronage’.
101 Eaton and Wagoner, ‘Warfare’, 38.
102 Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration’, 266–67.
103 Richards, Mughal Empire, 171–77.
Ideology 103
primacy in the north before the eighteenth century, when Shi‘ism began to
leave a greater mark on the religious landscape thanks to such men as Burhan
ul-Mulk, the Mughal satrap in eighteenth-century Awadh.104 Beyond courtly
and elite circles, popular riots occasionally broke out during Muharram festiv-
ities between Sunnis and the celebrants, who were predominately Shi‘i yet also
included some Hindus (participation by the latter hardly surprising given the
fluid nature of early modern Indian society), as occurred in Bijapur in 1596
and in Lahore in 1625, for instance.105
These were uncommon, however, and we must be careful not to over-
determine these riots as religiously motivated. Group protests occurring
around the time of Holi might tip into rioting and mob violence, but their
original impetus was often political rather than religious, or sprang not
from communal difference but petty rivalry, jealousies, or even suspicion
toward wealthy mercantile assemblies.106 The meaning of social violence only
becomes destructive, Sanjay Subrahmanyam observes, when it takes on the
hue of a grievance.107 And, moreover, communal and sectarian differences
did not produce anything like the assault on Catholic worship and the
passing of anti-Catholic laws during the English Reformation; the French
Wars of Religion between Catholics and the Huguenots (1562–98) or the
Thirty Years’ War between the Catholics and Lutherans in the Holy Roman
Empire (1618-48); or the intermittent yet generations-long conflict fought on
the borderland between the (Sunni) Ottomans and the (Shi‘i) Safavids that
finally ended in 1639.108
3.3 The State and Diversity

Was there a separation of political from religious offices in early modern
Indo-Muslim states? Two institutions are central to our understanding of this
issue. The first is the ulama, which was not a priesthood, as might be found in
Christendom, or a priestly caste, as per the Brahmans. The ulama comprised
men of learning educated in diverse religious schools (madrasas) who often
blended into society at large, not least by staffing the legal administration of
the state (§7.3.3), but sometimes stood out as public intellectuals and as part
of the literati. They were not of one mind and consequently did not form an
104 Chanchal, From Stone, 11–12. Reflexively, for their part, the Adil Shahis were likewise not
hard-line Shi‘is but fairly liberal; see: Eaton and Wagoner, Contested Sites, 134.
105 Kruijtzer, Xenophobia, 91–92.
106 Bayly, ‘Pre-History’, 194–201, offers an insightful reading of urban riots vis-à-vis those struc-
tural and institutional changes underway in the late Mughal period. See, also: Hasan, State
and Locality, 66–67, 69–70; Haider, ‘Holi Riot’, for an excellent critical analysis of two subtly
conflicting accounts of events in Ahmedabad in spring 1714.
107 Subrahmanyam, Tagus to the Ganges, 89.
108 Marshall, Heretics and Believers. Diefendorf, ‘Religious Wars’; Burkhardt, ‘Thirty Years’
War’, are useful introductions to the Continental wars. On the last, see: Greene, ‘Violence and
Religion’; Khafipour, ed., Empires, 97–106, for primary sources.
104 Ideology
establishment or organised faction per se, yet could be powerful, nonethe-

less.109 The second is sharia or Islamic law. There remains no singular opinion
on Islamic jurisprudence, which instead formed into schools of thought, the
most famous being the Hanafi, Hanbali, and Shafi‘i. While they all share the
Quran as one source of deriving the sharia, they differ in their use of ancil-
lary sources and the method of deriving legal advice from them in cases where
there is ambiguity.110 We might usefully see sharia not as a fixed code or monu-
ment, therefore, but as a ‘workable basis for judicial practice’.111 It could also
be interpreted to fit the context of its operation: Zia al-Din Barani (d. c.1360),
who served the Delhi Sultans, saw sharia ‘as requiring a king to manage the
interests of Muslims only’, whereas Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274), ‘who served
a non-Muslim Mongol ruler in Iran, interpreted the sharia as requiring a king
to ensure the well-being of all the diverse groups in his kingdom, and not just
the Muslims.’112
3.3.1 Justice and Charity
What place did sharia have within Mughal India, a majority non-Muslim state?
Being a Muslim dynasty, and one in competition with other Muslim rulers,
the Mughals’ conception of justice, government, and imperial sovereignty was
articulated through a framework structured by Islamic(ate) norms. One source
was sharia, interpreted along the more inclusivist lines set out by Nasir al-Din
Tusi. Others bore sharia’s imprint even as they were fairly cosmopolitan, not
least works of akhlaq and the conversations (malfuzat) of Sufi saints.113 The
conception of justice thus articulated was capacious enough to permit reli-
gious toleration without ‘compromising’ Islamic law.114 The sharia did not only
inform these ‘high-level’ concepts, however, for it had a vital role in actual legal
process across the empire, not least the resolution of day-to-day legal disputes.
109 Darwin, Tamerlane, 37–38, for some of the implications of this feature of Islamic society in
comparison with Europe. Lefèvre, ‘Messianism, Rationalism’, 324–34, details some of the
weaknesses in the historiographical treatment of the ‘ulama as a ‘class’ despite their diver-
sity, noting (on 325–26) that they still largely ‘tend to be assessed for their upholding of (or
divergence from) the so-called Sunni orthodoxy and their endorsement of (or disobedience
to) state policies, but too rarely for their own sake, as intellectuals whose initial formation was
possibly later challenged by exposure to alternative scholarly or mystical trends and the need
to earn one’s living’ –before providing a snapshot of a cross-section of the ulama from the
early Jahangiri era.
110 There were also important differences of opinion and voicing of dissent within a school, as
Burak has shown in Second Formation (especially 163–206) regarding the Hanafi school in the
Ottoman lands.
111 Eaton, ‘Introduction’ [2]‌, 22.
112 Ibid, 22–23. See, also: Alam, Languages, 46–54.
113 These also had a broader ‘audience’ than just the Muslim community only, although a nar-
rowly ‘elite’ one, nevertheless, see: Alam, Languages, especially 26–80.
114 Chatterjee, ‘Reflections’, 401–03, offers a useful summary of the historiography on sharia in
Mughal India.
Ideology 105
Ordinary justice was dispensed in sharia courts, of which non-Muslims also

made extensive use, alongside a range of other institutions in a state that can
be described as ‘permissively inclusive’ on account of the degree of legal plur-
alism (§4.2.3, §7.3.3).115
We shall return to Aurangzeb’s significant contribution to this development
of Mughal law, its causes, character, and implications, in later chapters. What
concerns us presently is one of Aurangzeb’s more controversial measures: his
reintroduction in 1679 of the jizya, a poll tax on non-believers in accordance
with sharia prescripts regarding relations between Muslim rulers and non-
Muslim subjects.116 At the face of it, reversing Akbar’s abolition of the jizya
marked the triumph of less conciliatory views of the sort associated with the
famous Naqshbandi shaikh, Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), over more ‘liberal’
ones, like those espoused by Aurangzeb’s rival for the throne, Dara Shukoh
(1615–59), whose thinking finds parallel in the work of another Naqshbandi
shaikh, Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan (d. 1781).117 It occurred against the backdrop
of the emperor’s expensive and protracted campaigning in the Deccan and the
political crisis that it created, in turn. Yet, the immediate motive was neither
economic, as per European rulers’ periodic harassment of Jewish communities
for cash, for the revenue from the tax was negligible in the grand scheme of
things. Nor was it to punish non-Muslims or to force their obedience, as per the
Safavids’ harassment of wealthy Hindu merchants and the curtailment of ‘non-
Muslim’ businesses (e.g., liquor sales) in the late seventeenth century.118 After all,
it was hardly worth Aurangzeb waiting out the first twenty-two years of his reign
to pursue something so heavy-handed as to backfire by churning grievance and
discontent. Rather, his motive was to placate (bribe, as Satish Chandra put it)
powerful sections of Muslim society –not the ruling elite, but the Sunni ulama –
who were looking for the emperor to signal his commitment to Islam.119
Alternatively, we might note that ‘in Hanafi jurisprudential thought, the
poll tax served as a legal obligation that gave formal status to a non-Muslim
group’, such that the re-imposition of the jizya ‘could simply be regarded as
part and parcel of Aurangzeb’s other attempts to discipline and mould the
many communities under his care by way of the law’.120 Yet, the decision was
neither a mere ‘meaningless gesture’, as Chandra described it, nor did the
emperor’s non-Muslim subjects accept it willingly.121 A Zoroastrian merchant
115 Chatterjee, ‘Reflections’, 403.

116 For the long view on non- Muslim subjects and the jizya from Sultanate times: Auer,
‘Regulating Diversity’.
117 Friedmann, ‘Islamic Thought’. See, however: Kinra, ‘Infantilising’, which presents a more
complex picture of Dara Shukoh via analysis of contemporaries’ assessments of the prince,
thus helping us move beyond the oppositional contrast of Aurangzeb as conservative, narrow-
minded, and unloved vs. Dara as liberal, cosmopolitanist, and widely adored.
118 Dale, Muslim Empires, 251–53.
119 Chandra, ‘Jizyah’.
121 Chandra, ‘Jizyah’, 338.
106 Ideology
and broker of Surat, Seth Rustamji Manikji, lamented the poll tax as an
instance of ‘tyranny’ falling disproportionately on the poor and took to trying
to ameliorate its effects. Add to this great numbers of Delhi’s non-Muslim
residents gathering under the balcony where the emperor heard pleas and
protests, where they made their demand for justice. These protests continued
in other venues throughout the city and, even once they had died down, local
opposition to jizya persisted until –after Aurangzeb’s death –the erstwhile
emperor’s closest (Muslim) nobles and advisors moved to re-abolish the tax,
which they effected in 1712.122
If legislating such discriminatory taxes reflected the influence and pressures
placed by Church upon State from time to time, we should note that princes
could more generally keep the clergy at bay by other means. Through its
patronage, the court provided a means of supporting not only the orthodox
religious establishment or Sufi tariqas linked to the ruling house, but a far wider
range of religious actors. A key institution was the grant known as madad-i
ma‘ash (‘aid for subsistence’) or sometimes as suyurghal (as it was called in
central Asia) and imlak (in the Delhi Sultanate). This was essentially a charit-
able grant by which the sovereign alienated his right to collect taxes, often in
perpetuity, thereby sparing peasants and zamindars from state interference.123
These were granted as acts of charity, most usually as a beneficence bestowed
upon religious and learned individuals or institutions (i.e., mosques, temples,
shrine complexes, monasteries), but sometimes as a means of supporting des-
titute gentlefolk. That said, recipients might go on to acquire zamindaris or
otherwise derive profit from revenue-farming estates. An important category
of these grants is known as waqf, which were bestowed upon institutions for
the repair and maintenance of religious buildings such as shrines, tombs, and
madrasas; for the subsistence of their staff; and for their charitable activities,
such as langar.124 Aside from the Mughal emperor, those zamindars and rajas
who held their territories as hereditary jagirs (§7.1.3) were free to make such
grants. Raja Anirudh Singh of Bundi, for example, gave an entire village in
madad-i ma‘ash to a member of the retinue of the Chishti shrine at Ajmer in
1689-90. Others, even smaller landed elites, made grants to their retainers or
Brahmans and other religious groups.125
3.3.2 Religion at the Royal Court
Aurangzeb’s ‘bribing’ of the ulama by re-instituting the poll tax was a response to
pressures steadily building, in fact, since the reign of his great-great-grandfather,
122 Kaicker, The King, 172–73, where it is noted that the tax was reinstated and abolished a
number of times in the early eighteenth century.
124 For an excellent and concise guide to waqf, its endowment and administration, and its rela-
tionship to urban life panning across the Muslim world: Deguilhem, ‘Waqf’.
125 Habib, Agrarian System, 363.
Ideology 107
Akbar. Akbar had briefly styled himself as leader of Muslims (badshah-i

islam), but his tenure was a failure, and so the emperor radically changed direc-
tion and pursued a more conciliatory policy toward non-Muslims.126 In 1575,
Akbar ordered construction of the Ibadat Khana (House of Worship). There,
he engaged Muslim theologians of various stripes in late- night dialogues
on religious matters, eventually extending invitations to Brahmans, Jains,
Zoroastrians, and Catholics, each expatiating and defending their beliefs.127
Akbar broke with the opinion of the ulama a few years later when –following
the bitter controversy regarding the emperor’s many marriages –he sent into
exile to Mecca two of the most important orthodox Sunni clerics at court.
Akbar then proclaimed himself the ultimate spiritual authority of the realm –
that is, for all peoples, of all faiths –in place of the ulama.128
Although lasting only a few years, the dialogues within the Ibadat Khana,
combined with Akbar’s parting of ways with Sunni orthodoxy, paved the
way for something entirely new.129 Termed muridi (discipleship) in the offi-
cial Mughal sources, and in others tawhid-i ilahi (‘divine monism’), ikhlas-i
chahargana (‘four degrees of devotion’), or, most commonly, din-i ilahi (‘divine
religion’), Akbar established his cult of personality in 1581.130 This devotion was
predicated on the melding of an eclectic range of influences (§8.2). In striving
to make himself the font of religion and justice, we might compare Akbar with
Henry VIII (r. 1509–47), who imposed his royal supremacy in the earlier part
of the century. In both the Mughal and Tudor realms, the reformulation of the
relationship between established Church and State necessitated the dangerous
sweeping aside of the clerical establishment to cries of heresy, yet differed in
one vital respect: Henry VIII’s was a wholesale dissolution of the monasteries
and saw the creation of an English Church headed by the monarch, whereas
Akbar’s creativity fruited within the confines of the palace walls.131
Ultimately, the resultant departure from Islamic prescripts and norms
scandalised and alienated part of the ulama. In the first place, there was the
fact that his Muslim disciples’ worship of Allah was to be direct and unmedi-
ated. Second, was the nature and extent of the devotion and veneration of the
emperor himself, almost tantamount to idolatry and certainly a kind of heresy.
One ritual commenced at noon on Sundays, when neophytes swore to sacrifice
life, property, religion, and honour –the four degrees of devotion –in the ser-
vice of their pir, Akbar.132 These men removed and placed their turbans at the
murid-padshah’s feet and prostrated themselves in submission and shedding of
126 Khan, ‘Religious Policy’.

127 Moin, Millennial, 133.
128 O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom’, 905.
129 Truschke, Culture, 13–14, where it is noted that Jahangir continued to converse with diverse
holy men.
131 See: Marshall, Heretics and Believers, especially 163–302.
108 Ideology
their own conceit and desire, to then be raised up by the emperor, who placed
turbans on their heads to mark the commencement of their new life. They even
wore a portrait image of the emperor in their turbans.133 Finally, there were
other practices –generally drawn from Brahmanical or other Indic customs –
that were not strictly ‘Islamic’, such as abstaining from eating meat.134 The din-i
ilahi has been hailed by some liberally minded and well-meaning historians as
a pantheistic project or syncretic new religion, borrowing from the religious
traditions of the Mughal world to bridge the differences dividing the Mughal
emperor’s subjects. In actual fact, it was much more limited in scope than that,
being a project of bonding a small number of intimates at court.135
In early modern India, the early Mughals were not unique for engaging with
diverse beliefs. The Mughal emperors from Humayun to Jahangir were ecu-
menical, interested in esoteric knowledges, and had catholic intellectual tastes,
in such respects sharing much in common with Akbar’s direct contemporary,
‘Ali ‘Adil Shah (r. 1558–80), sultan of Bijapur. The keeper of the Bijapur royal
library was a Brahman pandit, employed alongside some sixty men skilled in
calligraphy, gilding, illumination, bookbinding, etc.136 Curious to learn about
other religions, ‘Ali Adil Shah even requested the Archbishop of Goa send
priests to educate him about Christianity.137 His successor, Ibrahim Adil Shah
II (r. 1580–1627), went well beyond toleration of an eclectic range of reli-
gious and philosophical beliefs. Such was his ecumenicalism, he even took the
Brahmanical title of jagatguru (spiritual master of the universe) and adopted
the dress of yogis, having developed a fascination with those mystical Hindu
traditions that were at this time also melding with Sufism (§2.3).138
It bears remembering that the actual number of disciples of Akbar’s new
religion was small, consciously restricted to a select group of courtiers, and the
whole enterprise ultimately died with the emperor.139 It seems dubious, more-
over, to describe Akbar’s din in the benign language of syncretism, pluralism,
or hybridity, as a project in cosmopolitanism or the making of a composite cul-
ture.140 By placing it in a longer trajectory, from Babur’s to Shah Jahan’s reign,
133 Richards, Mughal, 47–48.

135 On this last point: Asher and Talbot, India, 155. For a classic presentation of the polarisation
of the debate and its implications: Alam, ‘Competition’.
137 Ibid, 134.
138 For a portrait of ‘Hindu- Muslim’ ‘cultural syncretism’ under Ibrahim Adil Shah II’s
auspices: Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 89–105; Eaton and Wagoner, Contested Sites, 156. For a
more complex picture: Fischel, Local States, 163–79.
Note that the king-as-yogi theme was already becoming widespread just before Ibrahim
Adil Shah II’s time, influencing work by one of Vijaynagara’s rulers yet also evident in the
presentation of Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat (r. 1526–37): Narayana Rao et al, ‘New Imperial
Idiom’, 75–77.
139 For the context to this decision: Truschke, Culture, 41.
140 To this can be added the conceptual limitations of ‘syncretism’; see: Stewart, ‘Translation
Theory’; Metcalf, ‘Reflections’, 960.
Ideology 109
Akbar’s din appears as one of a series of engagements with esoteric and often
embodied forms of beliefs and practices regarding discipleship, sainthood, and
sacred kingship (§8.3). Broader still, the Mughal and Deccani courts’ celebra-
tion of the Hindu spring festival of Holi, as well as Dussehra and Diwali in
autumn, was part of the maintenance of alliances and the performance of sov-
ereignty in what were ultimately plural or cosmopolitan states. Similarly, the
Safavids perpetuated the pre-Islamic springtime festival marking the new year
(Nowruz, lit. ‘New Day’) and, in a subtler departure from Islamic and toward
local customs, the Ottomans created new and highly public celebrations around
an Islamic rite of passage (i.e., the imperial circumcision ceremony).141
A great deal has been written about syncretic cultures created in imperial
courts, from the Habsburg Empire to the Qing Great State, perhaps more to
do with the richness of the documentary record than the actual significance of
these endeavours. Critically examining the marriage of Indic and Islamicate
elements at the Mughal or other courts, it is worth reflecting on what they
actually represent and thus how they can best be described. Does the fusion of
different cultural forms mark a celebration of diversity in the empire or does
it, in fact, represent the effort of making more palatable (and more visible)
the very fact of imperialism? Does it represent the imperial centre’s patronage
of the distinct cultures of empire or a bid to exert a mastery over them, even
suppress them through control in some cases? Can terms such as syncretism
distinguish deep engagement from mere lip-service paid to interest groups?
Cynicism about the matter of intentions aside, the latter questions point to
the power dynamics inhering within the amalgam itself –the relative agency
and (a)symmetrical relation of different ingredients, the relative freedom and
beliefs of stakeholders in the process of creation, what is lost or suppressed or
subordinated in consequence, and so forth.
3.3.3 Translation and Cross-Cultural Encounter
One novel site of inquiry that is yielding more complex ideas about culture,
power, and kingship is Akbar’s and his successors’ patronage of literary trans-
lation –specifically, the translation into Persian of Sanskrit texts, as revealed
so brilliantly by Audrey Truschke. This endeavour represented a self-conscious
expansion of pre-Mughal cross-cultural exchange of this sort, such as the
Lodi sultans’ patronage of Persian translations of the stories contained in the
Panchatantra (‘Five Tales’), which had already entered the Arabic corpus as
the Kalila wa Dimna (Fig. 3C).142 A landmark was the translation of the
Sanskrit Mahabharata into Persian at Akbar’s request in the 1580s, roughly the
141 This sliding spectrum of accommodation of local festivals within an essentially Islamic
calendrical-ceremonial framework, and the extent of innovation (vis-à-vis extant and new
rites and celebrations), is surveyed in: Blake, Time, 76–106. See, also: Kruijtzer, Xenophobia,
101–02, on Deccani courts.
142 Truschke, Culture, 10–12, 64–66.
110 Ideology
Fig. 3C The Monkey Tries Carpentry, from the Kalila wa Dimna, (ink and watercolour;
possibly Gujarati; early sixteenth century)
same time as the birth of the din-i ilahi. The result was not only the Razmnama
(‘Book of War’), a text that found its way into the curriculum of royal princes,
frequently reproduced with accompanying miniature paintings, with portions
of it reworked by Mughal literati as part of an ongoing engagement with the
epic.143 The result was larger than translation and these repeated encounters; it
was the remaking ‘of a Sanskrit epic into an imperially potent part of the Indo-
Persian tradition.’144 The same may be said of the remaking of the genealogy
of (Hari) Krishna into the Persian Harivamsa (‘The Legend of Hari’), the style
and character of its accompanying illustrations also embedding it within the
Indo-Persianate tradition (Fig. 3D).
Akbar opened the floodgates: a wide range of texts were translated in
the ensuing years, from stories and narratives to astronomical and math-
ematical treatises.145 This also sparked parallel efforts by other members of
143 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 456–7, for excerpts.

144 Truschke, Culture, 101.
145 Ibid, 101–41.
Ideology 111
Fig. 3D Krishna and his Brother (Balarama) Fighting the Enemy, from the Harivamsa
(watercolour and gold; Mughal artists; c. 1590–95)
112 Ideology
the imperial elite, among them Abdul Rahim Khan-i Khanan (1556–1627).
He was son of Akbar’s erstwhile regent, Bairam Khan, and an important
patron of the arts in his own right.146 He commissioned an illustrated
version of the Razmnama (Fig. 3E). In the next century, Dara Shukoh
(1615–59) sponsored an urgent translation of the Upanishads from Sanskrit
to Persian as the Sirr-i Akbar (‘The Great Secret’), having taken a broader
interest in Hinduism.147 Yet, his resulting proclamations about the original
textual source of monotheism (i.e., a Vedic text) would be used against him
just two years later in 1659, when he was captured, charged with heresy, and
executed in the course of the war of succession fought against his brother,
Aurangzeb.148 Indeed, even in Akbar’s court, the emperor’s accommodatio
was not universally esteemed. A high- ranking but embittered courtier,
Abdul Qadir Badauni (1540–1605), helped translate the Ramayana, but
would later become famous for penning and secreting away a chronicle,
the Muntakhab al-Tawarikh (‘Selected Histories’), published to consider-
able notoriety after his death. A fairly orthodox if not hard-line Sunni,
Badauni found the enterprise reprehensible and was sharply critical of
Akbar’s kingship in the Muntakhab.149
By the 1590s, the tensions with orthodox Sunnis of the prior decades had
calmed, however, and Abu al-Fazl set about composing the Akbarnama (‘Book
of Akbar’) and its companion, the Ain-i Akbari (‘Institutes of Akbar’), through
which he espoused Akbar’s universal sovereignty.150 In order to demonstrate
Akbar’s command over all aspects of Indian life, Truschke observes, Abu al-
Fazl necessarily had to digest the Mughal court’s forays into Sanskrit learning,
which is both interlaced throughout the Ain and given explicit attention in two
of its five constitutive books.151 In these years and those that followed, some
courtiers would marvel and others balk at such political claims, as well as those
made by Akbar in commissioning works –the Persian Ramayana, not least –in
which writers and artists more or less subtly presented Akbar as another incar-
nation of Vishnu and linked Mughal royal identity to that contained within the
great Indian royal epic.152
For their part, Sanskrit intellectuals celebrated their relationship with
the imperial court by writing panegyrics addressed to the emperor but also,
146 Ibid, 88–92, discusses the work of Sanskrit specialists for members of the wider imperial elite.
147 Gandhi, ‘The Prince’.
148 Faruqui, ‘Dara Shukoh’. Khafipour, ed., Empires, 240–60, for documents pertaining to the
war of succession.
149 Truschke, Culture, 205–09, in which is outlined Badauni’s grudging willingness to translate the
text versus his reluctance to be complicit in the text’s use to promote ‘Akbar’s vision of royal
authority as transcending multiple religious traditions’ (209).
151 Ibid, 145–65.
152 Ibid, 204–05
Ideology 113
Fig. 3E Cosmic Fire Hurled at the Pandavas, from the Razmnama (watercolour and
gold; Mughal artists; c. 1616–17)
114 Ideology
interestingly, by authoring works for their own communities in which favour-

able assessments of the Mughal imperium can be found.153 Neither type of
outpouring was premeditated as an outcome of these engagements and is all
the more remarkable given that some were penned by Jains. Jain monks had
entered the Mughal court in the 1560s and they partook in those dialogues
described by Mubad Shah and in the Majalis-i Jahangiri, yet a disagreement
between Jahangir and the monk, Siddhichandra –who refused to renounce
his asceticism and thus take a wife and an administrative post as the emperor
demanded –led to his admonition and banishment from court. Although this
harsh measure was short-lived, Jains shortly afterward fell from grace and
were exiled from Mughal towns and cities, with Brahman scholars receiving
the lion’s share of imperial patronage in their stead. And yet, Siddhichandra
and five other Jains wrote biographies favourable to the dynasty, many put-
ting pen to paper long after Jains had lost favour at court –a windfall to
Mughal kingship more durable than the Mughal-Jain interaction itself, in
other words.154 Mughal toleration, these events also signal, sometimes met its
limits, even as very few were punished for their lifestyles and views, harshly
or otherwise.
Aside from the kinds of works already described, Akbar and Jahangir
both ordered the production of Sanskrit grammars of Persian, each accom-
panied by a bilingual (Sanskrit- Persian) lexicon: Vihari Krishnadasa’s
Parasiprakasha (‘Light on Persian’) of the late sixteenth century and Kavi
Karnapura’s Sanskritaparasikapadaprakasha (‘Light on Sanskrit and
Persian Words’) of the early seventeenth. One influence was the ‘deep link
between philology and power in India, where grammatical correctness
was integral to royal authority.’155 Another was the existence of mul-
tiple Sanskrit-Persian lexicons from the fourteenth century onward that
‘sought to make sense of the spread of Indo-Persian dynasties and culture
through the tools of Sanskrit language analysis.’156 By drawing on these
traditions and deploying ‘the intellectual resources of Sanskrit’, therefore,
the Mughals were able to advance ‘their imperial ambitions and comment
on the rapidly expanding Indo-Persian cultural order’ within the Sanskrit
intellectual ecumene.157 By no means, it should be noted, were they the only
Indo-Muslim dynasty to pursue such a project: the Ahmadnagar sultans’
153 Ibid, 65, 81–88.

154 Ibid, 167– 202. Khafipour, ed., Empires, 107– 23, for part of Siddhichandra’s text. See,
also: Orsini and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 20, on the similarity of Jain illustrated manuscripts
and illustrated Persian codexes as an example of other cross- cultural, cross-
linguistic
exchanges.
156 Ibid, 92–93.
157 Ibid, 93, and 93–96 for further analysis.
Ideology 115
sponsorship of Sanskrit works was likewise linked to power but in a subtly

different way –namely, as part ‘of the conceit that they were actually
Brahmins from Pathri.’158
3.3.4 Religious Toleration in the Mughal Empire
Was there a larger, ideological context to the enterprises just described?

And, moving out of the rarefied and exclusive space of the court, were there
implications for society at large? Placed in a global context, the Mughals do not
seem to have been especially intolerant: there were neither institutions like the
Inquisition nor restrictions upon entrance to further education or government
service like those in parts of Europe.159 On the contrary, Mughal toleration
aroused admiration from Europeans, and not only those who were religious
minorities in their homelands. Even men such as Sir Thomas Roe –a diplomat
of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, who left a widely-cited account of
the Mughal Empire –could see that Timurid rule stood favourably against the
sectarian persecution and violence in his own nation.160 Religious strife and
persecution in Europe in fact continued long into the Enlightenment, ‘when
Europeans were supposed to be tolerant, and in genteel society toleration was
celebrated, and demanded, as a hallmark of civilised behaviour.’161
Insofar as lofty Enlightenment ideas became embodied into a ‘code of
civility’ that the everyman could comprehend and mimic, this process unfolded
more or less quickly in cities versus towns and in different parts of Europe.162
For their part, as rulers of a multi-ethnic empire from the fifteenth century,
the Ottomans came to rely not on cultural codes or mores but on the law to
incorporate diverse groups. Though not according them equal status to Sunni
Muslims, Jews and Christians of various sects were given special dispensation
to practice their religions and preserve their autonomy over certain commu-
nity matters within their community or millet. This was not quite toleration
so much as inclusion, and that through the definition and institutionalisation
in the law of essential ‘difference’.163 As the bonds of inclusion so achieved
wore thin in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so this sense of difference
supported the ‘growth of ethnicity’ and its translation into the languages of
nationalism, rupturing the Ottoman Empire.
From the 1580s, the Mughals took an approach looser and hence more fra-
gile than the Ottomans. They embraced the notion of sulh-i kull, ‘universal
peace’ or ‘absolute peace’ with all religions; translation of the Mahabharata
and other works was part and parcel with this new ideology, code of civility,
158 Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, 60.

159 Kinra, ‘Handling’, 260.
160 Ibid, 255–59.
161 Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 335, for citation, and 336–43.
162 Ibid, 344–50.
163 Barkey, Empire of Difference, 92.
116 Ideology
or ‘political theology’, as it has variously been described.164 It had Mongol

antecedents, an equivalent ‘discovered’ by Renaissance humanists, and hence a
short-lived variant in the early Ottoman polity, while considerably pre-dating –
as an idea and actual behavioural practice –the European codes engendered
during the Enlightenment.165 It encompassed, broadly speaking, ‘the balance
and compromise necessary to maintain the stability and peaceableness of the
social order within a ruler’s dominions’, Rajeev Kinra states, which ‘involved
the promotion of intra-community harmony, even among different ethnic or
sectarian categories of Muslims, just as much as it required the promotion of
respect towards the non-Muslim other.’166 In exercise of this absolute civility,
the Mughals accommodated diverse groups within an expansive conception
of ‘political Islam’, one more expansive than the Ottomans’ respect for the
freedoms of Jews and Christians as Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book –that
is, the Bible). In fact, by largely according the rights of Muslims and non-
Muslims, the Mughals prefigured by almost three centuries the edicts of 1839
and 1856 that granted Jews and Christians such rights and freedoms in the
Ottoman world.167
Rather than the whimsy of Akbar and one of his grandsons, Dara Shukoh,
Kinra shows that sulh-i kull was part of Jahangir’s repertoire of power –
hence, those night-time dialogues described in the opening of this chapter,
as well as his interest in Indic languages. It also mattered to Shah Jahan and
Aurangzeb.168 Kinra also strives to show, more significantly, that sulh-i kull
percolated downward to the emperor’s representatives, whose careers often
stretched over the wobbliness in kingship and kingly identity associated with
regnal change, and who recognised the mundane benefits of toleration, such
as the smooth functioning of commerce and the economic prosperity that
resulted.169 He does so by demonstrating the praise in Hindi poetry for men like
Abd al-Rahim Khan-i Khanan, whose period of office extended from Akbar’s
into Jahangir’s reign, while also drawing attention to the careers of Hindu sec-
retaries like Chandar Bhan Brahman and Raghunath Ray Kayastha (d. 1664),
whose careers reached into Aurangzeb’s reign and whose attitudes reflected the
same respect for Islamicate cultures as their Mughal patrons showed for Indic
ones.170
Sulh-i kull was an ideology, but in what sense? On the one hand, Akbar’s enter-
prise might be compared to a near-contemporaneous project commissioned
by the staunchly Catholic monarch, Philip II of Spain: the publication of
164 For a recent, world historical survey of the concept and its deep origins, see: Moin, ‘Oath’.
165 Casale, ‘Mehmed the Conqueror’.
166 Kinra, ‘Handling’, 261.
167 See, instructively: Barkey, Empire of Difference, 109–53.
168 Kinra, ‘Handling’, 261–74, and 280–88. Khafipour, ed., Empires, 457–77, for Dara Shukoh’s
writing that speaks of sulh-i kull.
169 On this last point, see: Kinra, Writing, 113.
170 Kinra, ‘Handling’, 274–80.
Ideology 117
the Polyglot Bible (1569–73). Benito Arias Montano (1527–98), its editor,
worked with Lutherans and other Protestants to provide texts in Hebrew and
Aramaic, Greek and Latin that would appeal to Christians across confes-
sional divides, thereby softening the divisions and stirring of religious-political
opposition within the Habsburg domains. The project was also intended to
help position its patron, Philip II, as the prince most interested in establishing
pietatis concordiae (‘religious harmony’ –the project’s motto), strengthening
his own hand and, by extension, that of the Catholic Church (even though
the Papacy was offended by, and rebuked him for, his efforts).171 A copy of the
Polyglot Bible was delivered to Akbar by the Jesuits in 1580, only a few years
after its publication in Antwerp, its illustrations as much as its text inspiring
developments in the Mughal court (§9.3.2).172 An eschatological bent pervaded
the thinking of both monarchs, framing their exploits, as we shall soon see.
On the other hand, it bears remembering who the intended audience for the
Sanskrit-Persian works was in Akbar’s time. Their creation won the emperor
some (self-serving?) praise from those Hindu and Jain communities connected
with the translation enterprise, but this was not the immediate audience. The
real audience was the ruling elite –the real lynchpins of the Mughals’ power and
authority –rather than society at large, differing in this respect from Philip II’s
new Bible edition. Translations of Sanskrit works into Persian helped reorient
the Persophone world inhabited by the Mughal elite around the Indian sub-
continent, which was especially valuable as the imperium continued to attract
migrants from Iran and central Asia, while also offering up a wellspring of
Indian beliefs and traditions for the fabrication of a distinct sovereign identity
for the Mughals (§8.2).
A cynic might venture that Akbar and Jahangir’s engagement with India’s
diverse communities and the creation of new knowledge had a more pragmatic
purpose. Conquest was one thing; actual mastery over Indians meant ‘knowing
the country’ and, reflexively, that Indians be able to comprehend their overlords.
This might explain the accretion of Indian knowledge into the Ain, a text
proclaiming the emperor’s universal dominion, as well as the commissioning
of bilingual grammars and lexicons. This also explains the structure of the new
knowledge. Although the Mahabharata’s translators preserved many Sanskrit
words, they also injected Persian poetry to provide a Persian courtly context
for the work; Persian masters thereby advanced the language’s hegemony
over Sanskrit (see, however: §9.1). Although largely reproducing much of the
text’s theological framework, they also departed from it, variously replacing
Brahma with the monotheistic Islamic God, placing Allah in equivalence with
his Hindu counterparts, or suggesting that Hindu Gods were intermediaries
between humans and Allah, for instance, thereby reconciling Sunni Islam with
171 Parker, Imprudent King, 88–89. See, also: Koch, ‘Solomon’, 284.
172 Pye, ‘Sufi Method’, for a powerful recent analysis of tahqiq or ‘verification’ of divine truth,
which lay at the heart of the engagement with different religious traditions and the policy of
sulh-i kull, which is described, below.
118 Ideology
other faiths (and omitting what could not be accommodated, as Siddhichandra

found out to his cost).173 Although Akbar and Jahangir tried to move Sanskrit
knowledge from the realm of the foreign to the familiar, therefore, one cannot
ignore the possibility –as Edward Said put it –that ‘cultures tend to make
representations of foreign cultures the better to master or in some way control
them’.174 Indian historians of the modern period have certainly been attentive
to these very issues, examining the colonial state’s ‘ethnographic gaze’, the rela-
tionship between knowledge and power, and what Nicholas Dirks terms the
‘cultural construction of power’.175
If historians of early modern India have been uneasy about pursuing such
avenues, the same cannot be said of the practitioners of the so-called New
Qing History.176 Qianlong (r. 1735–1796) was an important patron and was
curious about his non-Han subjects in the imperial periphery, which was
in the process of being conquered and incorporated during the Ten Great
Campaigns era. Pamela Crossley and Evelyn Rawski, for instance, each high-
light the influence of Confucian scholars, Jesuit missionaries, and the empire’s
different minority cultures (Buddhist, Shamanic, and Muslim, pastoral and
nomadic, to say nothing of so many ethno-linguistic groups) in the production
of Qing imperial ideology and claims to universal sovereignty, as manifested
in culturally-hybrid artistic and literary works.177 Others have been attentive to
the significance of the emperor commissioning dictionaries, botanical surveys,
and new maps, seeing these in complement to the conquest and pacification of
territory on the erstwhile imperial periphery; all were part of the exertion of
Qing domination (§10.4). Cultural production was a means of articulating the
Qing emperor’s embrace of his diverse subjects as befit a universal monarch,
even as it bolstered the centre’s control over a multiethnic empire and helped
sharpen the distinctiveness of Qing imperial identity.
Or, to put it a final way: did ideology seek to shape reality? In fact, the
opposite was perhaps as accurate; sulh-i kull reflected the fragility of Mughal
power, its dependence on the participation of a diverse range of powerholders,
many of whom were able to preserve their autonomy vis-à-vis the ruling centre,
and hence its inability to punish infidels let alone eradicate sectarian and con-
fessional diversity. It would be wrong to dismiss it as Mughal gloss on the
hollowness of imperial power, however. The moves made by Akbar in the
1580s involved reducing the power of the orthodox ulama, creating tensions
that endured and intensified even after Akbar’s death, and risked the kind of
dissent that spurred rebellion in the Gangetic region in the early part of the
1580s, suppression of which preoccupied the later part of Akbar’s reign.178
173 Truschke, Culture, 115–19.

174 This observation is made by Truschke in Culture, 164, who cites Said’s Culture and Imperialism.
175 Cohn, Colonialism; Dirks, Castes, for the ethnographic gaze; Dirks, Hollow Crown, 5, for
citation.
176 For an introduction to these developments in Qing history: Rawski, ‘Reenvisioning’.
177 Crossley, Manchus; Rawski, Last Emperors.
Ideology 119
These moves came, in other words, from a position or feeling of strength of a

(limited) sort. It would also be wrong to see sulh-i kull as totally inconsequen-
tial to Indian society at large. Upon those rare occasions when the state did
interfere with the religious lives and freedoms of its subjects, as Aurangzeb did
by legislating the jizya, Indian community and political leaders were quick to
remind the emperor of the ‘peace with all religions’.179 It would be wrong, more-
over, to doubt the seriousness of sulh-i kull, overlooking what its progenitors
believed and how this motivated those cross-cultural interactions and ideas
developed in the 1580s, by looking only at the ideology in instrumental terms,
at the same time ignoring how an abstract idea could become a behavioural
practice, how something written about in a few imperial texts could become
embodied by the elite in the course of a generation or so.180 Because a key
context to the projects of the 1580s was the coming of the Islamic millennium
and the prospect it held for renewal under the leadership of a righteous king,
this section concludes by examining the currency of these ideas and similar
longings across the early modern world.
3.3.5 Anticipating Salvation
Prophesies relating to the long-awaited appearance of a messiah or of the End

Times lay at the core of early modern Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thought.
Being ‘at once social, intellectual, and political’, as one scholar notes, they
‘constituted a cornerstone of public life’.181 They were articulated in an experi-
mental, inter-confessional milieu and in the context of inter-imperial rival-
ries among, most especially, the Habsburgs, Valois, Venetians, Ottomans, and
Safavids as they ‘fought their ideological and military battles for universal
sovereignty’ and for whom apocalyptic prophecies thus ‘served as “building
blocks” of early modern state formation’.182 In anticipation of the closure
of Islam’s first millennium and the beginning of the second, millenarian
thinking flowed like a steady and swelling stream from Islam’s ninth century,
the torrent enlarging toward the approach of the year 999 (1590/1 CE); hence
the continued traction of a digest of Muslim apocalyptic lore composed by
‘Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami (d. 1454) that circulated widely in Ottoman courtly
circles and eventually became absorbed into the court-sponsored legend of the
Ottoman dynasty.183 The hard years of the late Suleymanic era were about to
tip into crisis with the onset of the Little Ice Age in the Ottoman Empire in
179 See, here: Rajpurohit, ‘Dadu Panth’, 932–33, for details of a letter purportedly written by
Shivaji to Aurangzeb. See, also: Moin, ‘Oath’, 729–30.
180 Moin, ‘Oath’, 730.
181 Green-Mercado, ‘End Times’, 1.
182 Ibid, 2; Fleischer, ‘Mediterranean Apocalypse’, 19–20, and passim. The crossing between
Jewish, on the one hand, and Muslim and Christian apocalyptic thought, on the other, is
examined in: Goldish, ‘Messianic Movements’.
183 Fleischer, ‘Mediterranean Apocalypse’, especially 42–48. See, further: Flemming, Essays,
203–25.
120 Ideology
the late sixteenth century, so it is easy to see the appeal of messianic ideas.184 It
was from the ‘troubles of the Last Days’, after all, that a renewer (mujaddid)
or ‘rightly-guided one’ (mahdi) would deliver renovation (tajdid) that ‘would
compass religious and political institutions’ and the ‘establishment by con-
quest of a universal empire that would be literally as well as figurately millen-
nial’.185 More broadly, these ideas of a ‘millennial kingdom’ held promise from
Morocco to the Mughal and Deccan kingdoms.186
In the Christian and Jewish world, millenarian or chiliastic ideas were not
related to an impending millennium so much as a broader form of apocalyptic
thinking drawn from the Old Testament, frequently linked to the belief that
society was so corrupt as to be nearing its destruction, as variously propagated
by such figures as Guillame Postel (a reader of al-Bistami’s work), Menasseh
ben Israel (d. 1657), Peter Serrarius (d. 1669), and countless others.187 It
was also common to look to events for signs or prognostications; thus, the
Reconquista and expulsions of Jews and Muslims from Iberia were seen as an
eschatological event, as were only so many victories (or defeats), while some
Christians even saw the Safavid monarch, Ismail, as a messianic saviour.188
Rather than being swept away by the ‘discovery’ of ancient wisdom and the
intensification of knowledge production and exchange of which Renaissance
humanism was but one part, or by the Reformation and the manifold currents
of renewal, devotionalism, and anti- clericalism spreading across Eurasia,
the proliferation of such thinking was nourished by these developments.189
Frequently exhibiting a high degree of synchronicity or interconnectivity and
intertextuality, the result was a tremendous upsurge in Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim millenarian thought and activity across a great swathe of the sixteenth
and seventeenth-century Old World, yet also spreading to the New World,
where Habsburg universal monarchy was nourished by the messianic theology
of such Catholic missionaries as Gerónimo de Mendietta (1525–1604).190
What, then, was the impact of these highly prevalent beliefs on political
authority? In a time when statecraft was ‘not yet completely circumscribed
by bureaucracy and protocol’, as Huizinga observed, rulers could ‘shirk con-
vention at any time and seek their policy guidelines elsewhere’.191 In western
184 White, Climate of Rebellion, especially 78–103, 126–62.

185 Fleischer, ‘Mediterranean Apocalypse’, 19, for citation, and 46, for a synopsis of key elements
of Muslim millennialist thought.
186 Subrahmanyam, ‘Turning’, which seeks to break out of the Mediterranean of Charles V and
Philip II’s time of Fleischer’s analysis.
187 Goldish, ‘Messianic Movements’; Fleischer, ‘Mediterranean Apocalypse’. C.f. Phelan,
Millennial Kingdom.
188 Fleischer, ‘Mediterranean Apocalypse’, 31–32, 38–39; Subrahmanyam, ‘Turning’, 139–43.
189 Bast, ‘Messianic Kingship’, 159. See, also: Gommans and Husseini, ‘Neoplatonism’.
190 Such melding even breached the boundaries of these three religious systems, as seen
in the folding of Vishnu avatars into Muslim millenarianism in seventeenth- century
India: Subrahmanyam, ‘Turning’, 152–54. Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, on Franciscan eschat-
ology in Spanish America.
Ideology 121
Europe, we find fifteenth- century sovereigns seeking advice from such

‘visionary ascetics and popular preachers’ as Dennis the Carthusian, Vincent
Ferrer, and Olivier Maillard.192 In this context, temporal princes did not ignore
highly prevalent ideas spouted by charismatic preachers about the End Times.
On the contrary, they were highly susceptible to the power of such messages,
often eager to absorb their influence. Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–
1612), for instance, ordered the construction of the new city of Hyderabad in
the auspicious year of 1000 (1591 CE). Virtually every early modern monarch
in Christendom entertained the claim that his was the throne of the last world
empire.193 Of them, however, the Habsburgs made the greatest use of this trope,
some of the Habsburg monarchs –notably Maximilian (r. 1486–1519, as Holy
Roman Emperor) or Philip II of Spain and its empire –actually imbibing this
‘messianic mindset’ to a greater degree, while influential constituencies out-
side the court also interpreted the conquest of the New World apocalyptic-
ally.194 Such ‘open embrace of the irrational in the form of dreams, prophesies
and occult knowledge associated with the Middle Ages’ was not, as already
suggested, entirely at odds with early modern developments.195
The absorption of chiliastic ideas into dynastic ideology or modes of kingly
self-presentation was one outcome (§8.3).196 Yet another was to wield the lan-
guage of apocalypticism to contest imperial authority, either by using it to
highlight social and moral corruption under current government or by seizing
upon popular enthusiasm for the appearance of a saviour to present oneself as
the true king. Take, for example, Augustin Bader, who viewed the Habsburgs
as the Antichrist. This was on account of their disinterest in the conversion
of Jews and the persecution of Anabaptism, which he held as the true Creed.
Becoming the leader of a small messianic movement in south Germany in the
1520s, Bader effectively turned Habsburg millenarianism on its head, using such
ideas to counter their authority.197 His and many other messianic movements
were ephemeral, often precisely because their existence was damning enough
for the ruling centre to take action. Here, the career of Ahmad Sirhindi (d.
1624), sometime protégé of Abu al-Fazl, is instructive.198 The experience of
Akbar’s court convinced Sirhindi of the emperor’s digression from the true
path of Islam; like others of the gentry class of ulama across north India, he
feared a personal material loss connected to the spiritual loss to the commu-
nity of Indian Muslims should the Mughal court continue down this road.
192 Ibid, 21.

193 Bast, ‘Messianic Kingship’, 159–60; Wooding, Tudor England, 410.
194 Bast, ‘Messianic Kingship’, 160– 62; Parker, Imprudent King, 91–95; Phelan, Millennial
Kingdom, here especially 16–28 and passim.
195 The words are Rebecca Boone’s in her study of Mercurino Gattinara, Grand Chancellor
to Charles V, as cited in: Bast, ‘Messianic Kingship’, 158. On the competing claims of the
Ottoman and Habsburg monarchs, see: Şahin, Empire and Power, 74–87.
196 See, also: Bast, ‘Messianic Kingship’, 158–60.
197 Ibid, 162–68.
198 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 160–75, for a useful primary source.
122 Ideology
Sirhindi became a leader of the Indian Naqshbandiya, writing hundreds of

letters in guidance of lay disciples and imperial nobles, proclaiming himself
the mujaddid-i alf-i thani (‘renewer of the Second Millennium’) in the 1590s,
who would ‘reverse the downward descent of Islam and the growing separ-
ation of the Prophet Muhammad from his community.’199 Sirhindi was eventu-
ally hauled in front of Jahangir at an imperial audience in 1619 on charges of
heresy, imprisoned for a year to cure him of his ‘madness’, thereafter returning
to imperial favour to travel with the imperial camp on the tour of the Deccan.200
With the Islamic millennium at the forefront of popular consciousness,
Ottoman imperial ideology was succoured by millenarian ideas even as the
Ottoman world was destabilised by six major rebellions in central and southern
Anatolia in the years 1511–38 alone, support for which was broad but largely
rural (i.e., pastoralists, peasants, and members of the provincial cavalry).201
In early modern England, the tumultuous swell came later. It was Elizabeth
I’s time on the throne that ‘produced a small army of pseudo-Messiahs’ –
William Hacket (d. 1591), most infamously –before a peak in uncontrolled
and somewhat anarchic prophecy in the Civil War era (1642– 51).202 Yet,
not all movements posed such a problem to central authority. Consider the
Mahdawiyah, founded by Saiyid Muhammad Jaunpuri (1443–1505), a Chishti
shaikh from Jaunpur claiming to be the long-awaited mahdi. His supporters
were not low-born and the movement was not a popular revolt; they were
mostly drawn from the political and religious establishment and their target
was the ills of that very establishment. As the movement evolved and quieted
down, however, its followers –spread as they were through the domains of
the Mughals and Deccan sultans –posed little threat and so it was largely
absorbed.203
A different theory of cyclical time and renewal can be found in Indic pol-
itical thought and was no less important to the articulation of political cri-
tique. This was the idea of the four yugas or eras, starting with the satya or
krita yuga (‘age of truth’ or ‘golden era’), through the treta and duapara yugas
(silver and bronzes eras), and culminating in the kali yuga (‘age of strife’ or
‘black era’), before the cycle is said to begin anew. Passage through the yugas
was marked by the successive decline of dharma in the sense of moral order
or righteousness. Prevalent by the medieval and early modern eras was the
view that the world had entered the kali yuga. ‘Much of the evil around could
be explained in terms of the kali yuga,’ J.S. Grewal notes, but the meaning of
evil varied according to the changing times.204 By the eleventh century, one of
199 Richards, Mughal, 99.

200 Ibid, 98–100.
201 Fleischer, ‘Mediterranean Apocalypse’, 56. For a survey of millenarianism in the Ottoman,
Safavid, and Mughal empires, see: Blake, Time, 141–73.
202 Thomas, Religion, citations 133 and 149, respectively, and 132–46 for discussion of English
messianism.
203 MacLean, ‘Mahdawiyah’. See, also: Subrahmanyam, ‘Turning’, 146–48.
204 Grewal, Sikhs, 22.
Ideology 123
the first Muslim scholars to engage at length with Hinduism, al-Biruni (973–
c.1070), wrote in his monumental Tarikh-i Hind (‘History of India’) that the
era was associated with the abolition of the four varnas and the Brahmans’ loss
of dignity (§2.1.2), the proliferation of sects and the destruction of temples,
oppression by rulers and rebellion by the weak against the great.205 Indeed,
those Brahmans who declined participation in Shivaji’s coronation did so on
the grounds of their belief that the world had entered the kali yuga –an epoch
so corrupted that the varna order had ceased to exist, entailing the absence of
true kshatriyas (warrior castes, and hence kings).206 In such belief was also an
opportunity, for Brahmans filled the void as the self-appointed upholders of
caste order, while their assemblies acted to resolve caste disputes.207 Finally, it
was this same belief of the kali yuga being nigh that animated Sikh thought,
too, evidence of which can be found in the Dasam Granth and numerous other
texts.208
3.4 Conclusion
Our beliefs not only dictate the mundane rhythms and confines of daily life;
they also frame our response to the sudden appearance of existential threats,
be it the approach of a conquering army from distant lands or the arrival of
a radical preacher espousing a vision of casteless society. They might be grad-
ually modified in response to the absorption of new ideas or else accommodate
old and new side-by-side, as we have seen in this and the previous chapter,
but also come to reflect wide-ranging or deep changes in the very structures
within which we live. Even in our largely secular times, the appearance of
Extinction Rebellion prophets, or a messiah such as George Monbiot or Greta
Thunberg can stir global, grass-roots, and large-scale collective action and ini-
tiative into being. Environmental change is, and perhaps always has been, a
cause of changes in the content, character, or fervency of faith and devotion.
Throughout history, religious ideas like the Apocalypse, the coming of the mil-
lennium, or impending Judgement have been used to make sense of climate
convulsions.209 One acute and incredibly bleak period of cooling and crisis
lasted for about a half-century from 1560, roughly mapping such phenomena
as the reigniting of the European witch craze and the Calvinist Revolution,
the latter marking the evolution and survival (rather than the outbreak) of the
larger Protestant Revolution.210
205 Ibid, 22. For a contextual sketch of Muslim scholarly interest in Hinduism, see: Faruqui,
‘Dara Shikoh’, 35–42.
206 O’Hanlon, ‘Social Worth’.
207 O’Hanlon et al, ‘Discourses’. See, also: O’Hanlon, ‘Speaking from Siva’s Temple’,
208 See, for example: Rinehart, Dasam Granth, 53–56.
210 Ibid, 90–108.
124 Ideology
The early modern period was roughly coterminous with the Little Ice
Age (§1.2.1), of which the turbulent decades from the 1560s marked but one
episode.211 Another distinct phase is discernible in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, when climatic catastrophe plunged many parts of the world into crisis.
Apocalyptic thought flourished in this context; it is no surprise that there was a
millenarian upsurge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.212 In the second
quarter of the eighteenth century, a final upheaval was linked to the flurry of
evangelical, revivalist religious movements that led to the ‘Great Awakening’
in north America, which has been compared to the kind of devotion earlier
espoused by Bhakti cults.213 Yet, this was also a critical moment for the devel-
opment of new regional patriotisms closely linked to religious belief in south
Asia, many of a liberationist character (e.g., the Sikhs in Punjab).214 We might
be critical about shoehorning Indian developments into an analysis that is ten-
tative at best, crude at worst, and somewhat Eurocentric in spite of the glo-
balist overtures of recent scholarship. This is a moot point, however, for Indian
historians have hardly linked changes in belief or particular ideas to struc-
tural factors at the macro-regional or global level. This book is as much about
examining points of convergence and divergence in historical experience as it
is about presenting hypotheses for further inquiry.
To conclude, it is worth prospecting to the next two chapters, linking these to
what people believed while also beginning to tease out, reflexively, the impact of
structural factors on the development of personal and collective beliefs. There
may not have been an intrinsic ‘spirit of capitalism’, as Max Weber postulated,
but the marketisation of more and more economic activity –particularly from
the sixteenth century –did shape a ‘market culture’ dictating the lives of most
people and navigated by them on a daily basis. Growing population stoked
inflationary pressure, with the rise in prices an incentive to cultivators and
manufacturers to increase output, though these effects may have been milder
in some parts of the world, for inflation was negligible in places like south
Asia.215 ‘Commercial society’ was nevertheless coming into being in numerous
locales across the early modern world, to which we shall return in Chapter 4.
Crucially, this productive expansion generally outpaced monetary expan-
sion, so that the early moderns frequently had to rely on credit, thereby imbri-
cating themselves in chains of credit/debt obligations. These linked hundreds
or even thousands of individuals and households, for everyone owed someone
else, as accounts were seldom settled in cash, and because ready coin was fairly
211 Ibid, 29–30, 61–62, on the variable length of the Little Ice Age in the historiography, which
is either elongated to the fourteenth to early nineteenth century or contracted to the late six-
teenth to early eighteenth centuries, thereby either book-ending or being nested within the
early modern era.
212 On the relationship to apocalyptic thought: ibid, 116–19. See, also: Parker, Global Crisis.
213 Hawley, Storm, 2.
214 Jenkins, Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith, 138–58. On the latter, see: Bayly, ‘Pre-History’.
215 Moosvi, People, 35–80.
Ideology 125
limited despite steady monetisation. In this respect, market relations –buying

and selling –were deeply personal and social, a different but crucial part of
early modern sociability explored elsewhere in this book. It required trust and
a reputation for reliability or fairness and justice; this meant contemporaries
in England, for instance, combined classical and Christian notions to ‘describe
the ethical human relationships involved in the “serial sociability” of the cul-
ture of credit.’216 It also meant a weight in religious and ethical discourse was
placed not on the pursuit of personal advancement or wealth and worldly
goods, but on preventing social decline, for chasing a single debtor or failing
to pay even one creditor could create a domino effect that toppled household
after household.217
The social character of production and exchange persisted through the
early modern period, even as it was slowly changing under the surface because
of the spread of market relations. Our data for pre-colonial India on key
trends (e.g., on prices, wages, and inflation, as well as population and demog-
raphy) are very limited, so it is more difficult to articulate the precise mechanics
of market expansion, let alone convincingly link these to any ascertainable
change in dispositions, ethical values, cultural norms, and social relations.
Yet, we can discern a comparable penetration of the market into society that
was deeper than before, ushering the advent of a commercial society in India
as in the larger Islamic world, other parts of Asia, and in Europe. In India,
too, cultivators relied on rural financiers through each harvest cycle, artisans
worked in fulfilment of advances made by creditors, soldiers were frequently
paid in arrears and relied on moneylenders who travelled with the war-camp in
the interim, and, eventually, regional potentates and warrior-kings forged close
relationships with bankers out of necessity (on this last, see: §5.4.4). These
facts and comparisons call for us to write social histories of the market, money,
and credit in early modern India, where we might look to the complaints of
urbanites or the work of official censors, magistrates, and others tasked with
the regulation of the market or upholding fairness and justice in transactions
to do so.
How, we might also ask, did what people believe frame or else come to be
reshaped by the advent of far deeper and wider commercialisation in India?
How did people cultivate and signal those qualities and make manifest those
ethical values underpinning ‘commercial society’?218 Here we might return to
where we started our exploration of faith and religious belief: Nanak and the
early Sikh panth. The Khatri caste pre-dated the advent of Sikhism; Nanak was
born into a Khatri family in imperial service, after all. The attraction of Khatris
to Nanak’s panth requires some explanation. True, all of Nanak’s successors
were Khatris involved in trade, but the ‘conversion’ of Angad and Amar Das
to Sikhism –the former having been a Durga pujari (worshipper), the latter a
216 Muldrew, Obligations, 146, for citation, and 123–47.

217 Ibid, 148–95, 272–312, for a considerably more complex analysis than can be summarised here.
218 See, also: Bayly, Rulers, 168–73.
126 Ideology
devout Vaishnava –is all the more confounding when we consider their social
status, let alone broach why other elites might have followed the Sikh creed.219
This is because Sikh thought was not far from ‘Sant bhakti of the nirguna
strand, associated with poets such as Kabir, Ravidas and Dadu Dyal,’ whose
relatively lowly social backgrounds shaped their anti-establishment themes
and their fervent critique of ‘the corruption and contradictions of Brahmans’,
other holy men, and kings.220 Sikh literature reveals that early ‘Sikhism was in
many respects a mercantile bhakti religion’, Hardip Singh Syan argues, insofar
as a significant proportion of followers were discernibly of the Khatri caste and
lived in those north Indian entrepôts into which Khatris had been migrating in
late medieval and early modern times.221 Shadowing this migration, Sikhism’s
own spread must have been linked to the needs of a community whose commer-
cial operations –from retail to banking –integrated ‘Kabul, Lahore, Sirhind,
Thanesar, Delhi, Agra, Gwalior, Lucknow, Allahabad, Fatehpur, Jaunpur,
Patna and Dhaka’.222
Sikh literature is replete with mercantile metaphors and themes. Whereas
much bhakti poetry expresses the relationship of a devotee to her lord as like
that of a courtier to his king, the gurus’ compositions recast this bond as a
client relationship akin to that of a merchant with his banker.223 Sikh bhakti is
also frequently allegorised as an entrepreneurial task. ‘In early Sikh thought,
the Sikh guru was not depicted as an average Sant guru,’ but as ‘a teacher
who would protect the material welfare of his Sikhs irrespective of the wider
economic climate.’224 In these ways, the scriptures reconciled devotion with a
commercial spirit, even as they reminded merchants of the illusion of wealth
hiding ‘the predatory presence of death.’225
If this helps explain Sikhism’s appeal to Khatris, other sources reveal
the role of Khatri mercantile families in leading and coordinating sangats
(congregations) outside Punjab, not least the hukumnamas (letters of command)
sent by the Sikh gurus to these communities spread across north India from
around the early seventeenth century.226 These documents reveal that the
Khatris were sent instructions and entrusted to provide sewa (service) to these
sangats, as well as to send donations back to the gurus, in return for which their
rozgar (business) would be protected and maintained. By the late eighteenth
century, ‘the extensive chain of north Indian sangats gave the Sikh gurus a valu-
able network of goods and services to finance their courts and projects.’227 The
219 Syan, ‘Merchant Gurus’, 307, 310–11.

220 Ibid, 307.
221 Ibid, 308, 312.
222 Ibid, 312.
223 Ibid, 315–19.
224 Ibid, 328.
225 Ibid, 320.
226 Ibid, 308, 321–27.
227 Ibid, 326,
Ideology 127
sangat in east Bengal was even requested to send a war elephant, for example.228
By the eighteenth century, in testament both to problems afflicting the gurus’
courier (masand) system and the prominence of Khatris as leaders of sangats
and as creditworthy and well-trusted agents in north India’s credit and banking
networks, monetary transfers were made by the use of bills of exchange (hundis)
(§5.3.1).
The urban dimension is worth highlighting. Bhakti devotionalism, Sufi
Islam, and Sikhism had an impact that was highly diffuse, yet their leaders
often targeted communities –whether relatively elite, like the Khatris, or
those lowlier artisans who flocked around Kabir –found in towns and cities.229
The Khatris became important patrons of Sikh temples and institutions as
leaders of north Indian sangats, much as those militarised Vishnu –and
Shiva-worshipping ascetics (bairagis, gosains, sannyasis) used the proceeds
from the sale of their services to Hindu and Muslim dynasts to invest in
north India’s burgeoning commercial centres.230 Towns and cities became
important nodes of religious networks, themselves imbricated in networks
of trade, banking, and imperial administration via the agency of Khatris
and Kayasthas (§7.2.3) or because festivals and seasonal fairs (melas) had
historically grown up around pilgrimage centres like Haridwar, while reli-
gious actors and institutions were widely and often consciously entangled in
commerce and (urban) politics.231
Alongside the largesse amassed via Sufi dargahs like Nizam al- din
Awliya’s in Delhi or at Hindu temples, there was the impact of a new and
highly performative style of early modern kingship that made a public
spectacle of pilgrimage (§8.2–§8.3), at the same time giving religious itin-
eraries a new prominence and resulting in large beneficences at such
centres as Ajmer or Banaras, transforming their townscapes. Among the
newly empowered warrior lineages like the Marathas, the sponsorship
of regional pilgrimage cycles to the most venerable tirthas or holy places
across India –namely, Kashi/Banaras, Prayag/Allahabad, and Gaya –from
the sixteenth century onwards was critically linked to the process of state
building and expansion.232 If the pressures unleashed by the Reformation
and confessionalisation and, later, by secularisation upon urban culture in
Europe were largely absent in south Asia, there were numerous respects in
which developments were more comparable.233 It is thus to towns and cities
that the next chapter turns.
228 Ibid, 326,

229 Malekandathil, ‘Introduction’, 9–10.
231 Dale, ‘Empires and Emporia’. Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 80–82, for details of major north
Indian melas.
232 For a survey focussing on south India: Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 47–63.
233 See: Clark, ed., European Cities and Towns, 177–99.
4 Urbanism
A decade into his reign, Shah Jahan began to grow restless for a new capital.
Agra had been the seat of Mughal rule for the better part of the past forty
years, its connection to the Mughal dynasty older still.1 Babur had laid out a
Persianate garden, Akbar replaced the old Badalgarh fort with a new palace-
fortress (Fig. 4A), and Shah Jahan had lately commissioned the spectacular
riverside funerary complex –the Taj Mahal –following the death of his beloved
first wife, Mumtaz, in 1632. Meanwhile, Mughal noblemen had purchased
plots on both of the Yamuna’s banks and laid out their own mansions and
gardens.2 Agra was not without beauty or splendour and its place in the his-
tory of Mughal rule was deepening, therefore, but the river presented risk in
the form of flood damage or the erosion of structural foundations, while the
consequence of successive building projects within the city was to create an
unruly hodgepodge. Shah Jahan was a connoisseur of architecture and longed
for a place to construct a city that not only projected Mughal imperialism, but
also produced the perfect order. Summoning his architects and astrologers,
therefore, he asked them to discern the most auspicious site for a new capital
and the precise day, hour, and second the first slab should be laid.3 They chose
a site currently out of use but in a place with such an accumulated host of
advantages, that it had served as a capital city for successive Indian and Indo-
Muslim dynasties for hundreds of years: Delhi.
Delhi lies within a region roughly enclosed by the Sutlej and the Yamuna,
at the nexus of the Indus and Ganges systems and of the dryer northwest and
the humidity of Bengal –a gateway between two different worlds that afforded
the site military and economic advantages (§6.3). Different parts of the huge
expanse known as Delhi were associated with its successive rulers, such as the
tombs of the Lodi sultans (just southwest of the modern monument, India
Gate), but the last major complex of the Sultanate era within the larger city was
the Tughluq capital of Firuzabad, begun in 1354.4 The government of the later
1 Koch, ‘Agra’, for a rich and concise survey. Koch, Taj Mahal, offers greater detail.
2 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 184–87.
3 Ibid, 27–29.
4 Ibid, 9–12.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-4
Urbanism 129
Fig. 4A Agra Fort’s Ramparts

Delhi Sultanates remained in the city after Timur’s invasion, even though it left
Delhi a ‘burnt-out shell’.5 Despite remaining a prize eyed and won by Babur,
the first four generations of Mughal rule did not stimulate building works to
definitively leave the dynasty’s mark on the city’s urban fabric, let alone make it
the Mughal capital.6 This was due to a combination of such factors as the inter-
regnum in Humayun’s reign and Akbar’s strategic decisions to shift the centre
of Mughal rule sequentially to other sites (to Agra, in 1565–71 and 1598–1648,
to Fatehpur Sikri, in 1571–85, and to Lahore, in 1585–98) –decisions that seem
less peculiar when we remember that the Safavid and Ottoman thrones were
also repeatedly relocated.7
Situated on a bluff beside the Yamuna in a northern part of Delhi, the emperor’s
new city would be known as Shahjahanabad (the Abode of Shah Jahan), one
of its centrepieces –the ‘Qila Mubarak’ (Auspicious Fortress) –constructed
5 Hambly, ‘Tughluqid Delhi’, especially 51–54.

6 There were Mughal constructions in Delhi before Shah Jahan’s time, a notable example being
Humayun’s Tomb; see: §8.3.
7 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 12. Sharma, Mughal Arcadia, 90, on this last point.
130 Urbanism
of imposing red sandstone on a prime riverside spot (Fig. 4B).8 Work began in
haste in 1638. Princes and noblemen were granted land for their own mansions
and were expected to ensure labourers broke ground and began construction
without delay.9 Prominent and wealthy women also had a role in giving form
to space within the city confines.10 Among the most significant were Nawab
Akbarabadi Begum, who created one of the city’s most important bazaars, and
Princess Jahanara, the emperor’s eldest daughter, who held the title of padshah
begum (the most senior woman in the imperial harem and head of the imperial
household). She possessed a vast fortune amassed from sources fairly typical
for a Mughal noblewoman: gifts, inheritance, and investments plus the income
from her jagir and such sources as toll collection.11
Leading from the palace-fortresses’ Lahori Gate all the way to the Fatehpuri
Masjid was a 40-foot-wide thoroughfare constructed in 1650 at Jahanara’s
instruction; it was the main axis of the city and, by extension, the empire.
The Nahr-i Bihisht (Paradise Canal) flowed all the way down its middle,
watering shade-giving trees, while each side of the boulevard was lined with
shops. The entire length was known to contemporaries as a bazaar but was
also punctuated at intervals by chawks (squares) that each catered to par-
ticular needs or groups like specialist marketplaces found in towns and cities
across the early modern world. Construction of the octagonal space known as
Chandni Chawk (Moonlight Square) was sponsored by Jahanara, as were the
surrounding caravanserai, bathhouse, and garden. Its name derives from the
reflective pool at its centre that shone in the moonlight, yet also became a part
of the city dwellers’ fondness for wordplay –on the Hindustani word for silver
(chandi), in this case, since jewellers and moneychangers were also located here.
Its fame was such that the entire boulevard became known as Chandni Chawk
(Fig. 4C), a usage that survives to this day. In this vast stretch, one could buy
kebabs and sweetmeats, gems and perfumes, household pets and quadrupeds,
one could find moneychangers and astrologers or cures for coughs, syphilis,
and impotence, and one could stop at coffeehouses, at wine shops, and at other
places to hear news.12
8 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 36–44, for a detailed description of its construction, spatial organisa-
tion, and how spaces were used. Its other names were the Urdu-i mu’alla (Exalted Camp) or
Qila-i mu’alla (Exalted Fort). For a useful plan of the primary structures within the walled city,
before the noble mansions were built: Noe, ‘Morphological Survey’, 242.
Mughal palaces, funerary complexes, and gardens in Agra, Lahore, and Delhi formed
prototypes for those raised in the Deccan following the Mughals’ gradual southward expansion
and contrasted with those of the Bahmani and Deccan Sultanates eras, a rich visual survey of
which is offered by Michell and Philon, Islamic Architecture, 47, 67, and passim.
9 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 30–31. Only juvenile princes lived within the confines of the Qila
Mubarak complex.
10 Dadlani, From Stone, 70, for the mosques sponsored by wives of Shah Jahan, such as the
Fatehpuri Masjid and the Akbarabadi Masjid.
11 Findly, ‘Mughal Women’, for an excellent guide to the sources of income and kinds of
investments made by a number of prominent women.
12 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 55–56, 116–20.
Urbanism 131
Fig. 4B The Qila Mubarak, Viewed from Top of Chandni Chowk

Seventeenth-century Mughal writers praised Shahjahanabad and claimed it

overshadowed the Ottoman capital at Istanbul in size and scale, although their
commentary should be taken with a pinch of salt.13 Its significance in the his-
tory of the Mughal dynasty means there is far more material on Shahjahanabad
than other Indian cities but, by the same turn, its history is hardly representative
of the variety of urban centres found across India. It anchors this chapter’s
exploration of the place of towns and cities in the experience of early mod-
ernity, therefore, but with an appreciation of the diversity of urban spaces and
lifeways across the Indian subcontinent and around the globe. Indeed, a crucial
caveat to this chapter concerns the very importance of towns and cities relative
to the countryside. ‘Cities were islands in a rural sea’, notes the historian, Peter
Burke.14 Cities and towns were home to a very small proportion of the world’s
population in the premodern period, being also smaller in size and fewer in
number than in c. 1800, at the tail end of the period surveyed in this book. Only
in 2008, in fact, did the proportion of the world’s urban population outweigh
13 Ibid, 192–93.
14 Burke, ‘Patterns’, 108.
132 Urbanism
Fig. 4C Street Plan of Chandni Chowk (watercolour with Persian annotations in ink
and French translations in pencil; Indian artist; c. 1770s)
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London, AL.1762
that of the countryside.15 Yet, this should neither distract us from an important
phase of urbanisation underway in the early modern period by which the popu-
lation, size, and complexity of urban centres increased, nor should it negate the
relative significance –economic, cultural, religious, political, ideological, intel-
lectual –of urban space, the built environment, and its inhabitants.
What kinds of urban centres could be found in early modern India? Why
did they exist and in what relation to one another or to larger structures like
empires? Were some or all of these growing in size and/or number in this
period? Who owned urban land or held responsibility for the urban fabric?
Who lived in cities? Why did they do so? Where and how did they live? Were
social relations harmonious and how was conflict or unrest dealt with? How
did the residence of different groups give form to the city as a physical place
but also within the imagination? How, reflexively, did people experience the
city? What opportunities did the city afford for work and play, by day and
at night? What about the dangers? But, above all, did this produce a dis-
tinctly urban identity or subjectivity? And can it be called ‘early modern’?
This chapter is guided by these questions, the first section of which sketches
the broad pattern of urbanisation in the long term with attention to the
15 Clark, ‘Introduction’, 1.
Urbanism 133
relationship of towns to the countryside, the variegated experience of urban

growth and change, and the variety of urban spaces. The remainder of the
chapter considers the impact of such urbanisation by delving into town and
city life.
4.1 Urbanisation
4.1.1 Global Trends
Following three or four centuries of steady urbanisation, the rate of growth

stagnated or even declined with scarcely any new urban centres established in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The causes were numerous and their impacts
were unevenly distributed: places at greater remove from era-defining pandemics,
the political instability of the post-Mongol period, and economic volatility and
precarity managed to buck the downward trend (e.g., Japan and the Mayan, Inca,
and Aztec empires).16 Over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European cities
recovered from the worst effects of the Black Death, their populations steadily
growing before stabilising in the seventeenth century.17 Over the later eighteenth
century, a warming climate and an ‘agricultural revolution’ meant more food –
nourishment that helped renew population expansion –although the instability
of the decades of the General Crisis combined with epidemic disease and exten-
sive warfare until c. 1815 to check urbanisation.18
This picture more or less extends to other parts of Afro-Eurasia, with an
urban revival attributable to the resumption of agrarian expansion and com-
mercialisation, as well as globalisation and imperial expansion, whether of
colonial empires like Spain’s or Britain’s, or imperial states like those ruled
by the Ottoman and Mughal dynasts. Thus, large cities burgeoned, many new
towns were established and thrived, and market towns and periodic centres
also proliferated. The eighteenth century saw strong urban growth sustained
in some places (the Ottoman provinces and Japan, for example), redistri-
bution between larger and smaller centres elsewhere (the heartland of the
Mughal Empire), and a slanting of urban growth away from interiors and
toward the maritime rimlands of continents (as in west Africa and much
of the Indian Ocean world), although this last trajectory was perhaps of
longer standing and merely more appreciable –if not actually amplified –
after c. 1700.19
What is canvased by these trends? A strong start in many regions gave
way to a more variegated picture across the later early modern world, so that
urbanisation can hardly be said to be a consistent feature of the early modern
16 Ibid, 9–10.
17 Except England, which continued to urbanise in the long seventeenth century.
18 Burke, ‘Patterns’, 119–20.
19 Clark, ‘Introduction’, 10–11.
134 Urbanism
experience in all parts of the globe.20 Add to this that neither the essential
layout of many existing cities nor the drivers or character of urbanisation was
radically new, unlike in the medieval and modern periods.21 Unfolding in con-
junction with the steady envelopment of economic activity by the relations of
market exchange, which entered a new stage even if not wholly novel, we can
thus speak of the early modern phase of urbanisation as a maturation and
consolidation. That said, certain dimensions of early modern urbanisation and
urban life were by degrees distinctive: new or evolving ideas about the ideal
city; the influence of such ideas upon the layout of new or existing towns and
cities or upon the use of urban spaces; and the flowering of civic identities and
urban cultures. This we may call the lived experience of urban spaces, an urban
subjectivity, or more simply denote it as urbanism.
What of India? The layout of new capitals and town-building under royal
or aristocratic patronage was not a uniquely Muslim phenomenon but was
certainly a recurrent feature of the history of Indo-Muslim states. Towns
emerged or grew more organically as part of a phase of urbanisation trace-
able to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, if not earlier.22 Then, from
the seventeenth century, there was not a radical break so much as a palpable
uptick in the pace of urbanisation, plus a moderate change in the character of
some cities. The latter was due to factors ranging from new ideas about how
to affect the virtuous life through the urban fabric, to new styles of kingly
performance flowering across the early modern world. The latter, it might be
noted, necessitated urban plans –and permanent or temporary structures,
such as gateways –conducive to such spectacles as the royal entry into capitals
as different as Florence, Vienna, Paris, Madrid, Istanbul, Moscow, and
Shahjahanabad, or the processions for the sixtieth birthday of the Kangxi
emperor held in Beijing and the funeral of Elizabeth I in London.23
Indian urbanisation thus seems to have been linked to those larger
processes –such as commercialisation and globalisation –that were more rap-
idly gaining ground after about c. 1650 or even c. 1600 and left their imprint on
state, society, and economy in manifold ways, as we shall see. Indeed, the size
and number or frequency by which towns appeared on the Indian landscape, as
20 See, further: Clark, European Cities, 109–37, for a rich survey of the ebb and flow in Europe,
c.1500–c.1800.
21 On the overlaying of new buildings on existing urban layouts, and the replacement of older
structures –such as walls and gates –with new variants, see: Blondé and Van Damme, ‘Early
Modern Europe’, 241.
22 The idea of a Ghurid-era ‘urban revolution’ that continued into the Delhi Sultanate period
originated in an essay by Mohammad Habib published in 1952, although the interpretation
was soon critiqued by Irfan Habib and others, with evidence of an even deeper beginning of
this phase of urbanisation compiled by yet other scholars; see: Malekandathil, ‘Introduction’,
5–6; Asher and Talbot, India, 57, 93–96.
23 Mulryne et al, Architectures of Festival; Burke, ‘Culture’, 442–43; Lincoln, London, 1–4. This
being said, festivity surrounding royal entries and kingly movement linked early modern cul-
ture to the late medieval past, as so clearly shown by Ruiz in King Travels, especially 68–145.
Urbanism 135
well as their tendency toward merging into something approaching a conurba-

tion, seems to have been most pronounced in the agrarian heartland of empire
in the Indo-Gangetic region and in the settlements and ports of peninsular
India oriented toward intra-Asian and Euro-Asian trade.24
4.1.2 Urban Centres and Economic Life

Urbanisation was deeply intwined with the economic transitions that bridged the
late Middle Ages with the early modern period.25 Scholars of the European past,
among them Max Weber, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel, viewed the city
as the fountainhead or harbinger of capitalism and modernity in a largely feudal
and ‘backward’ landscape.26 By contrast, Robert Brenner criticised such ideas,
proposing –less favourably –the view of cities as parasites that thwarted the
countryside’s economic transformation. Both sets of approaches separate town
and countryside rather sharply, something more recent scholarship on Europe
and China has sought to nuance while unsaddling urbanisation from the notional
process of ‘modernisation’.27 A centrepiece of research in this direction of the past
twenty years or so has been the small town, as opposed to cities and major mari-
time ports. Small towns often mediated between the countryside and the larger
centres while also serving as hubs of capital and loci of proto-industrialisation.
They grew rapidly to c. 1650 or c. 1700, their expansion checked toward the end
of our period by explosive city growth. Where they served specialist functions and
were connected to new transport infrastructure, however, some small towns could
avoid being cannibalised and some even continued to flourish.28
Indian historians have long described the life and anatomy of particular
cities, but they have not been so interested in urban history per se until rela-
tively recently, so these newer conceptions of rural-urban relations and of the
role of towns and cities are only beginning to appear in the historiography.29
Irfan Habib’s scholarship remains a crucial reference point for those interested
in towns and cities, for example, but his analysis bears the imprint of older
ideas (e.g., Brenner’s). Habib considered the dynamism of urban places mar-
ginal and thus insignificant, yet fixed on the exploitative character of the
urban-rural relationship, so that urbanisation represented a parasitic develop-
ment spurred by a feudal regime (the Mughal state).30 By contrast, Rajat Datta
24 Sharma, ‘The City’, 29–31.

25 Blondé and Van Damme, ‘Early Modern Europe’, 245–50, on rural-urban transfers as drivers
of urbanisation. Comparably, see: Malekandathil, ‘Introduction’, 9–10, on the role of iqtadars
(§7.1.2) in facilitating rural-urban transfers in India.
26 Faure, ‘Town and Country’, offers a Chinese historian’s perspective on Weber’s ideas.
27 Miller, Urban Societies, 210–11.
28 See: Clark, ed., Small Towns.
29 Gaborieau, ‘Indian Cities’, offers a concise, agenda-setting survey by focussing on Indo-
Muslim urban centres.
30 See, for instance: Habib, Agrarian System, 89–90; Habib, ‘Capitalistic Development’. See,
also: Moosvi, People, 120–22.
136 Urbanism
has lately homed-in on qasbahs to paint a fresh portrait of early modern Indian
urbanisation. These were small(ish) towns and marketing centres constitutive
of a ‘rural-urban continuum’, Datta argues, for their inhabitants consumed
the foodstuffs and manufactures of villages, thanks largely to those merchants
whose operations interwove rural supply with urban demand.31 In some cases,
mahajans –so often seen as creatures of the town –did not merely provide a
rural-urban nexus through their extension of credit to rural cultivators and
urban artisans, but were involved directly in farming and running shops in
qasbahs selling the productions of the village oilseed or sugarcane press or its
gur (jaggery) manufactory.32 The growth of qasbahs continued much longer
and they fared much better than small towns in Europe, as we shall see, below.
This had something to do with the so-called ‘portfolio capitalists’, the sale of
tax farms to military and mercantile specialists, and the acquisition of rural
real estate by Banias (§5.4.2–§5.4.4).33
At this level of the urban hierarchy, such towns became engines of proto-
industrial growth in the countryside and exhibited a rurban character; we
might more appropriately speak of ‘rurbanisation’ than urbanisation.34 And,
more broadly, the Mughal state and its successors might even be conceived
as ‘polisocracies’ –where government was affected through the medium of
towns –resulting in the proliferation and expansion of urban centres, as well
as an increase in urban-centred crafts and lifeways; hardly a venal aristocracy
bleeding the countryside dry as much as the promotion of an urban-forward
way of life that critically depended on the rural sector.35 All this suggests a
comparable mechanics to what was in evidence in mainland southeast Asia
or in Europe after c. 1450, where the process unfolded earlier, and militates
against the drawing of unduly sharp contrasts between town and countryside.36
Urban growth and economic growth went hand-in-hand.37 The first driver
of this process was agrarian expansion, itself underwritten by the steady shift
from subsistence to market-oriented production (§5.1). It was necessary for the
size, number, and reach of urban (marketing) centres to increase, and the extent
31 Datta, ‘Rural-Urban Continuum’.

32 Bhardwaj, ‘Qasbahs in Mewat’, 321–26. See, also: Habib, Agrarian System, 62–67, where this
village manufacture of oil, gur, and cotton thread is discussed in detail, albeit without drawing
out the implications for rural-urban integration.
33 Bayly and Subrahmanyam, ‘Portfolio Capitalists’; Kothiyal, ‘Market Towns’, which paints a
similar picture, focussing on Marwar; Alam, Crisis, 102–03. On the acquisition of rural real
estate by merchants and bankers, see: Devra, ‘Mandis and Chowkis’.
34 Datta, ‘Rural-Urban Continuum’, 103, for citation. C.f. Subrahmanyam, ‘Rural Industry’,
passim, and 111–14, for explicit, critical engagement with ‘proto-industrialisation’.
35 Malekandathil, ‘Introduction’,10– 13, as well as 13–14, for comparison with the state in
Portuguese India, which is held to be more extractive.
36 On the former, see: Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 177–78.
37 Such is the thrust of Naqvi, ‘Urbanisation’, on the Mughal north, which links changes in the
locus of political and economic dynamism over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to
changes in where urban growth occurred. Borsay, Urban Renaissance, especially 10–38, 199–
224, paints in more detail such patterns and relationships in later early modern England.
Urbanism 137
and complexity of their interlinkage to intensify. In this way, output –whether

primary products or even village manufactures –could be brought to places of
greater demand, thereby supporting an economic (and political) system based
on market exchange. A similar picture can be painted for many parts of the
world, including the Ottoman Empire, where growth in population and trade
underpinned a great urban expansion in the sixteenth century, and in China
and Japan.38 This was maintained in the seventeenth century, albeit at a lower
rate.39 A second driver can be located in urban centres themselves, which were
home to pools of specialised labour capable of producing fine-quality goods.
In India, specialist textile production was fairly urbanised, so that growing
demand for cloth from the seventeenth century spurred urban growth, much
like that witnessed in European weaving centres such as Florence, Segovia,
Leiden, and Lyon at various times.40
4.1.3 Types of Urban Centre
Urban centres can be identified through references to them as, for instance,
shahrs, qasbahs, and mandis, or by bearing certain suffixes (e.g., –abad, –nagar,
–pattam, –pur). This provides an inadequate basis for any kind of taxonomy
of Indian towns and cities, however, not least because of a place’s changing
fortunes (growth, decline, abandonment) or by virtue of its original functions
being complemented by others in equal or even greater measure. So, for
instance, a town may have begun life as a royal and political centre (e.g., Delhi),
often because of the military-strategic advantages possessed by the site, but
others owed their existence to economic factors (e.g., Ahmedabad, Jaunpur,
Patna, Calicut, Cochin), and the two went hand-in-hand nicely in time in India
as in China.41 Since proximity to saintly figures and the patronage of religious
institutions sanctified kingly power, many towns grew thanks to royal initiative
around a sacred centre (i.e., one or more temples and mosques, dargahs and
shrines; e.g., Allahabad, Burhanpur, Vijayanagara).42 By the same turn, holy
men were attracted to political and intellectual centres (e.g., Delhi, Ajmer).
Ultimately, most towns and cities gradually combined secular/administrative/
commercial with sacred/ritual/royal functions.43 Map 4A shows the locations
of cities described here and in what follows.
38 G. William Skinner’s application of central place theory to the Chinese past was a pivotal
intervention, influential beyond Chinese studies, though it has been critiqued and tweaked
since, sometimes in favour of network theory; see: Swope, ‘Late Ming’. See, also: Gordon,
‘Burhanpur’; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii, 449–51; Faroqhi, Towns, 49–74.
39 Boyar, ‘Ottoman City’, 276.
41 See: Swope, ‘Late Ming’, which usefully focuses on small cities rather than the largest centres
that have dominated the scholarship.
42 Gordon, ‘Burhanpur’.
43 Evidence from northern Vietnam not only suggests this was not the case everywhere; it also
suggests sacred-cum-royal centres were less durable there than in south Asia. See: Whitmore,
‘Da Viet’.
138 Urbanism
Map 4A Urban Centres

Urbanism 139
To function can be added scale and distinguishing features: imperial capitals

and primate cities, secondary cites, large and small towns, and local marketing
centres, as well as coastal versus inland centres, or walled versus unfortified
ones, not to mention those primarily or originally revolving around pilgrimage
or religious learning.44 There are, again, reasons to be cautious about any typ-
ology based on such factors. In the first place, it would be unwise to think of
settlements as nested into a strict hierarchy, for a city might not in all respects
have been more important or influential than a small town. Qasbahs, as we
shall see, not only grew in number, but also became more important by the end
of our period.45 Their small size and origins as commercial-cum-bureaucratic
centres notwithstanding, some qasbahs attracted notable saints and other
learned men, thereby becoming important places of intellectual congregation
and debate that rivalled larger centres, as M. Raisur Rahman’s work brings to
light.46
Mughal territorial expansion gave further impetus to urbanisation, but
scale produced its own (perverse) effects.47 Much as the Tokugawa shoguns
enforced the residence of Japan’s nobles (daimyo) at Edo for a year at a time,
so the Mughal emperors insisted upon the regular presentation of nobles at
court.48 The result was a great boost to the population of the capital as lords
brought their vast household retinues, boosting the local economy and drawing
in large amounts of labour. Yet, this was also impermanent, for it was unsus-
tainable without the presence of the emperor and his court, upon which it was
entirely dependent. The peripatetic nature of the Mughal court in its classical
age meant the imperial capital shifted repeatedly for long spells, with Jahangir
repeatedly sojourning in Ajmer, Kashmir, and Lahore during his reign even as
Agra remained the capital. The new city of Shahjahanabad had been inhabited
for only four decades before Aurangzeb uprooted the court and left for the
south, making his capital at Aurangabad, while his immediate successors were
crowned in Agra.49 Thus, Delhi was without a king for the years 1679 to 1712,
although it remained a major cultural and political centre and retained the title
of Dar-ul-Khilafat (Abode of the Caliphate, or ‘seat of the empire’).50 To this
can be added the frequent campaigns and tours that left the capital city virtually
44 Gaborieau, ‘Indian Cities’, especially 187–93. A classic and very informative exposition of
the hierarchical progression of Indian marketing centres from the countryside to the city
remains: Grover, ‘Integrated Pattern’.
45 Moosvi, People, 118–34, for the enumeration of qasbahs in Akbar’s time and estimates of
urban population.
46 Rahman, Qasbah Towns, especially 28–50, for a delineation of the meaning of ‘qasbah’ in the
Indian context compared with elsewhere in the Muslim Mediterranean and middle East, and
of the nature of qasbahs in medieval and early modern India.
47 Naqvi, ‘Urbanisation’, for a survey.
48 Screech, Tokyo, 41–42.
49 On the slackening of the walled city’s population upon Aurangzeb’s departure for the
Deccan: Blake, Shahjahanabad, 67–68.
50 See: Chandra, ‘Delhi, 1675–1725’, for a summary portrait of Delhi in this time.
140 Urbanism
deserted, albeit temporarily. Only in the period of so-called Mughal ‘decline’ –

with all its downward implications for the city’s prosperity and population –did
Shahjahanabad become a permanent seat of the Mughal emperors.
A bandar (port) was a special kind of place, serving as a gateway between
India and the economies of the Indian Ocean arena. Anthony Reid termed
the mid-fifteenth to late seventeenth centuries in southeast Asia the ‘Age of
Commerce’. As greater Chinese and European demand for goods created
an economic boom, the benefits flowed through and were captured by ports,
some of which were of long-standing but most of which grew in connection
with others (e.g., Yemen, Aden, Hormuz, and Surat, to take examples from
the western Indian Ocean). A major harbour/port channelled such volumes of
goods and money that its authorities wielded considerable power in their own
right vis-à-vis regional or imperial powers like the Mughal Empire (§7.3.2).
Surat was such a port; its role as India’s maritime terminus for pilgrims
making the Hajj and its prosperity earnt it the title of Bandar-i Mubarak
(Auspicious Port), with its population swelling to 200,000 around the early
eighteenth century.51 This growth was connected to the boom in intra-Asian
and Euro-Asian trade from c. 1450 and was interlinked, therefore, with the
growth of cities both near (e.g., Yemen, Aden, Hormuz) and far. Seville, for
instance, grew in the sixteenth century as the main harbour through which
American silver reached Spain, while Amsterdam was home to merchants and
companies who likewise connected both sides of the Atlantic and from the
early seventeenth century connected Europe with Asia.52 Similarly, the largest
cities in sub-Saharan Africa were located on or near the coast, their expansion
connected to the emerging Atlantic economy (including the slave trade), not
least Elmina, Accra, and Abomey. Their populations were said to range from
around 10,000 to 25,000, making them smaller than Surat but comparable
in size and dynamics to the urban centres on the Malabar and Coromandel
coasts.53
There are other ways in which we ought to fine-tune our understanding.
A bandar like Surat could harbour large vessels plying long-distance routes,
but it could also harbour smaller boats involved in ‘looping’ or ‘country’
trade (i.e., those going from point to point along India’s coast, often taking
bulk goods such as foodstuffs but also smaller quantities of more precious
things).54 A large port and its hinterland was thus plugged into the developing
world economy, but also into local and regional circuits, complementing but
also competing with smaller ports (baras), such as Mandvi and Mundra in the
case of Surat.55 These secondary-tier ports have received a little less attention
51 Burke, ‘Patterns’, 125, for an estimate of Surat’s population.

52 Ibid, 120–22, and also 127, where the author compares various ‘colonial cities’ –most of which
were ports –including Madras, Bombay, Havana, Batavia, Manila, and Macao
53 Ibid, 126.
54 See, for example: Gokhale, Surat, especially 73–115.
55 Saxena, ‘Mandvi and Mundra’, here especially 576.
Urbanism 141
from scholars in their own right to date, although this imbalance is lately
being redressed in Indian Ocean historiography.56 Furthermore, a number
of ports –notably Calicut and Cochin –generated sufficient wealth for their
rulers to carve out hinterland city-states, which we might cautiously compare
to those of the Swahili coast (e.g., Mogadishu, Melinde, Mombassa, Zanzibar,
Kilwa), in Italy (Venice, most obviously), or the Hanseatic cities in northern
Europe (e.g. Bremen, Lübeck, Hamburg, Danzig).57 Finally, alongside indi-
genous maritime towns and cities were those established by the Europeans: the
capital of the Portuguese Estado da Índia at Goa, but also secondary centres
like Daman and Diu, Colombo and Cannanore; the English Company’s for-
tified settlements at Madras (est. after 1639), Bombay (1665), and Calcutta
(1696), which became the constitutive –and sometimes competing –centres
of the Company’s trading operations and, later, its empire; and the headquar-
ters in Pondicherry (est. 1673) of France’s Indian enterprises.58 The English
settlements were peculiar in being quasi-extraterritorial spaces in which the
Company exercised its sovereignty –as per its royal charter –and were thus
formative to the Company’s statehood long before the conquest of India that
began in the mid-eighteenth century.59
4.1.4 Comparing North and South India
So much for urban growth, but what of the spatial variegations in its rate, extent,
or character across the subcontinent? To begin with, it bears remembering
that the Mughal north was not uniformly urbanised. Laying along the arterial
highway –the ‘Grand Trunk Road’ –from Kabul to the Bay of Bengal via
Delhi, Lahore was in its heyday declared a rival of Constantinople or deemed
without comparison anywhere in Asia or Europe. It was a metropolis, there-
fore, and the section of the Grand Trunk Road across Punjab from Lahore
to Delhi was also dotted at intervals with numerous manufacturing towns
connected to regional and long-distance trade networks.60 Shireen Moosvi’s
comparison of the share of urban taxes in total revenue demand (jama) reveals,
however, that urbanisation was much higher in c. 1600 in Gujarat (18.7%) or
around Agra (15.7%) than in Punjab (3.7%).61
These statistics afford a tentative comparison with the south. They suggest
that Shahjahanabad was hardly an isolated capital, for it was not only built
at the head of a fertile tract that has steadily become one of the densest
zones of settlement in the world, but also lay along a great commercial axis
56 See, for instance: Hall, ‘Coastal Cities’, and the volume in which it is published.
57 Malekandathil, ‘Introduction’, 15, for these comparisons.
58 Biedermann, Portuguese, provides an excellent analysis of the morphology of port cities in
early Portuguese Asia.
59 Stern, Company-State.
60 Lally, Silk Roads, 50–56.
142 Urbanism
connecting maritime with continental trade routes, and becoming more and
more urbanised in consequence.62 This larger region cannot quite be described
as a conurbation, yet is appreciable for having formed an integrated network of
cities and towns of varying sizes and functions that lay like a mesh over highly
productive countryside. This was distinctive yet also recognisable elsewhere,
whether in the Low Countries or the heartland of Imperial China, which
represent this sort of formation at differing degrees of compactness/expan-
siveness. Vijayanagara was also a metropolis, its population of perhaps some
350,000 rivalling that of Cairo in 1400, but its character and relationship to the
surrounding terrain was probably rather different.63 It has been described ‘as
an example of anomalous hypercentralisation’ –and a short-lived one at that,
rising as a ‘metropolis from a constellation of small villages and forts’ and then
reverting upon the empire’s collapse.64
Vijayanagara was a monumental city built around conjoint royal and sacred
centres, perhaps best compared, therefore, to those capitals of pre-Hispanic
central and south American states where both functions were preeminent,
giving the city its identity and differentiating it from surrounding areas. The
Aztec capital at Tenochtitlán comes to mind, with its population of a few hun-
dred thousand at the time of Hernán Cortés’ arrival in 1519. Or it might be
compared to Angkor (capital of the Khmer Empire, its population around
100,000 in c. 1400) or Ava (variously the capital of the Toungoo and Konbaung
dynasties in Burma), for these cities similarly dominated the surrounding
country, with generally low-level marketing centres sufficing to channel trade
and organise relations between the capital and the countryside.65 The capitals
and courts of the Vijayanagara Empire and Deccan Sultanates were cosmo-
politan places, and these kingdoms were deeply incorporated into the webs of
the Persian and Arabic cosmopolises. This fact notwithstanding, northerners
found in the south unfamiliar and even alien landscapes and lifeways.66
Town-building accompanied the colonization of the south by the Tughluqs
and later by the Mughals (e.g., the construction of capitals at Daulatabad
and Aurangabad, respectively). They encouraged (reluctant) northerners to
migrate to the Deccan and transformed the urban fabric in a bid to make the
south more hospitable to emigrants, much as the Spanish had done upon their
colonisation of the Americas from the sixteenth century.67 This project was
perhaps only completed by the Asaf Jahi dynasty (est. 1724), who made their
capital at Hyderabad.68
62 Moosvi estimates Agra’s urban tax-to-revenue ratio at 15.7, signifying a high degree of urban-
isation in the doab region: ibid, 133.
63 Burke, ‘Patterns’, 124, for population details.
64 Heitzman, ‘South India’, 304, for citation, and 313–21.
65 Burke, ‘Patterns’, 125–26.
66 Eaton, Essays, 168.
67 Fernández-Armesto, ‘Latin America’, 368.
68 Faruqui, ‘Hyderabad’.
Urbanism 143
How might the differences be drawn and explained most appropriately?

One distinction, drawn by Ravi Palat, contrasts wheat-cultivating zones (e.g.,
north India, Europe) and riziculture zones (south India, parts of southeast and
east Asia).69 The high-productivity of land under wet-rice cultivation to some
extent freed-up labour for craft production, which was consequently ruralised
to a greater extent in south India, much as in parts of China or Japan. The
Deccan plateau, Pushkar Sohoni observes, was peculiar in another respect: the
‘displacement of the state apparatus and market networks into two separate
[urban] patterns’ in the Deccan sultanates –arguably in response to gunpowder
technologies, which had a great impact in the south (§6.4.1) –meant military-
bureaucratic centres were decanted into the string of defensive forts and thus
separated from the network of dedicated marketing centres.70 According to
James Heitzman, finally, the southern coastal and interior regions were his-
torically far more polycentric than the northern proto-conurbation dominated
by Lahore- Delhi-Agra (surrounded by countryside); comparable metrop-
olises like Vijayanagara had only an occasional and fleeting existence in the
south.71 Overall, therefore, vital differences can be discerned between the north
and south, inland and coast, zones producing such grains as wheat and those
focussed on wet rice cultivation, themes taken up in the next chapter.72
4.1.5 Urban Decline?
If the city was no longer a place to find refuge and prosperity or became ridden
with plague of the kind afflicting Hindustan in the 1610s, and if the country-
side consequently became a more favourable place to live, did citizens abandon
the city?73 In early modern India, many cities remained in near-constant use,
though populations ebbed and flowed in line with the vicissitudes of the ruling
authority’s fortunes (e.g. Delhi), others were allowed to become derelict when
their masters were defeated, only to be brought back into use by later rulers
(e.g. Thanjavur), yet even important cities fell into disuse and were abandoned
(e.g., Champaner, erstwhile capital of the Gujarat Sultanate, or the Bahmani
capital and palace city of Firuzabad, or Akbar’s later court centre at Fatehpur
Sikri).74 During its later eighteenth-century ‘twilight’, the extent of Delhi’s
built-up area diminished by around 50 per cent, and its markets by about 30
69 Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 52–67. See, also: Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 14–
31, which details matters of migration and settlement, the location of agrarian production and
craft, population size and distribution, and the nature and size of urban centres across south
India, c. 1500–1650.
70 Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, especially 96–97. C.f. Eaton and Wagoner, Contested Sites, xxi–xxii.
71 Heitzman, ‘South India’. See, also: Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 14–25.
72 Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, especially 33–43, and 216 for a useful summary of the
thesis.
73 On the plague: Sussman, ‘Black Death’, 335–39.
74 See the essay by Michell and Eaton reprinted in Eaton, Essays, 176–88, which draws the
allusion between the two doomed Bahmani and Mughal capitals.
144 Urbanism
per cent, indicating a contraction in population.75 A knock-on effect of Mughal

imperial decline was the shrinking importance of certain nearby centres like
Korah-Jahanabad, already troubled because of its poor ecology and now no
longer needed as a marketing centre nor used by the imperial army, which
had ceased to march through the region.76 A different combination of environ-
mental and political changes underpinned Lahore’s prolonged twilight, which
began around the time the city was abandoned as the Mughal capital in 1598
or else upon the receding of the Ravi’s bed away from the city in the seven-
teenth century, before intensifying in the first half of the eighteenth century
amidst the political contests for its control. A beneficiary of this process, how-
ever, was the nearby city of Multan and its satellite towns and rural hinterland
in western Punjab. Multan absorbed the available specialist labour (e.g., skilled
weavers and fabric printers), anchored itself in long-distance trade networks,
and thus served as the obvious base of Durrani imperialism in north India.77
Indeed, there seems to have been more of a redistribution of urban popu-
lation than an outright decline in the eighteenth century; city dwellers can
hardly be said to have fled to the countryside or abandoned urban lifeways.78
The causes were numerous, but the limits of agrarian expansion naturally set
the limits of urbanisation or moulded its character. The brute fact of ecology
became more apparent with the collapse of the Mughal imperium: thereafter,
local potentates could no longer draw salaries for imperial service and had to
rely, instead, on whatever income could be generated from the land. One effect,
therefore, was the enlargement of new or old dynastic capitals. In Rajasthan,
for instance, Bikaner and Jodhpur grew in size, receiving influxes of migrants
from other erstwhile imperial centres (e.g., Nagore, Jalore, and Merta). In the
Gangetic valley, the marvellous capitals at Faizabad and Murshidabad of the
Awadh and Bengal nawabis, as well as Bareilly, Farrukhabad, and Rampur,
which were under the sway of the rulers of Rohilkhand and their successors,
was part and parcel of this development.79 It was due to Mughal successor
state rulers’ patronage of their royal centres, the enlargement and expenditure
of their courts and gentries, and because of those ‘intermediate entities’ (e.g.,
jurists and other religious scholars, merchants, bureaucrats) sucked in from the
declining Mughal domains and often empowered by this ascendance.80
This process did not only occur at the expense of older (Mughal) centres.
In the parts of Rajasthan most marked by aridity, limited irrigation, and/or
poor soils, rural output was insufficient to support a more graded urban hier-
archy. These places were marked by a lower ratio of urban population than
Marwar (which was fairly fertile) or Jaisalmer, Bikaner, and Pokaran (where
75 Bayly, ‘Delhi’, 225.

76 Ibid, 226–28.
77 Lally, Silk Roads, 50–56, and passim.
78 Bayly, ‘Delhi’, 222, for a similar hypothesis.
79 Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 104–59.
80 Mukherjee, ‘Eighteenth-Century Bengal’; Bayly, Rulers, 62–88, 133–51.
Urbanism 145
tank and well irrigation was more widespread). In these more ecologically deli-
cate areas, medium-sized urban centres were sacrificed while villages grew to
be quite large (a trend also seen in Japan), matched by qasbahs of similar size.81
These qasbahs were distinguished from others elsewhere in north India, how-
ever. They were sometimes situated in very arid places because their only pur-
pose was to capture taxes from passing local and inter-regional trade, rather
than as compact administrative-cum-manufacturing centres closely entwined
with agriculturally rich countryside.82
In the south, too, redistribution characterises what happened to urban
populations far better than any notion of deurbanisation. It was a longer
and more complex process, but similarly connected to the waning of imperial
authority in the face of competitors, old and new. The defeat of Vijayanagara’s
armies in 1565 led to the dismemberment of the empire at the hands of the
Deccan sultanates and other regional kingdoms, emptying Vijayanagara’s
monumental capital of part of its population, but nowhere resulting in the
growth of any other capital to such a grand scale. The evidence is rather more
spartan than for the north, but it seems, instead, that urbanisation similarly
revolved around numerous smaller capitals and –beneath them in the urban
hierarchy –those towns that served as administrative centres and commercial
nodes.83 R. Barry Lewis brings this to light in his recent study of Mayakonda,
a pargana (district) headquarters town in the independent kingdom of
Chitradurga, located in present- day central Karnataka. The Chitradurga
nayakas (lords) claimed connection to Mayakonda in their origin legends, also
claiming to have been appointed as local lords by the Vijayanagara rulers, but
then seizing the opportunity after Vijayanagara’s defeat in 1565 to establish an
independent kingdom of their own.84 Extending to an area roughly the size of
Wales at its height, Chitradurga was a significant kingdom, no matter that it
was dwarfed by neighbouring Mysore.
The pargana formed the main territorial unit of numerous south Indian
kingdoms, and their respective headquarters towns were of importance not
only as nodes in the state’s revenue-bureaucratic apparatus, but also because
they ‘often figured as pawns in the wars of this period’ for ‘their capture by
an enemy could become a revenue gain or bargaining chip for the winner
and a permanent revenue loss for the loser.’85 This necessitated the repair and
successive enlargement of Mayakonda’s fortifications, with several batteries, a
palace, and a commemorative monument (a samadhi) soon added to the fort
complex. The 543 forts in erstwhile Chitradurga state’s eleven parganas varied
in size and significance. For its part, Mayakonda was home not only to a fort
but a small town that grew around it, being the administrative centre of the
81 Bayly, ‘Delhi’, 222, for mention of this phenomenon in pre-modern Japan.

82 Devra, ‘Mandis and Chowkis’.
83 For a discussion of the state of the field: Lewis, ‘Mayakonda’, 1.
84 Ibid, 2.
85 Ibid, 1.
146 Urbanism
pargana after all, and was also strategically important insofar as it lay along
the road channelling goods, money, and people to the capital.86 Following the
Chitradurga dynasty’s defeat, it ‘remained a headquarters town under Haidar
Ali and Tipu Sultan and was garrisoned as one of several fortified posts on
Mysore’s frontier with the Maratha country.’87 Following the British conquest,
it ‘drifted into obscurity’, as did other fortified headquarters towns that were
not transformed into taluq administrative centres.
Mayakonda was small yet subsidiary in the urban hierarchy only to royal
capitals. Its rurban character, historical development, and demographic
vicissitudes can be compared with other places surveyed in this section, par-
ticularly those parts of Rajasthan and the north of similar aridity and fertility
to the Deccan. Moving from inland to coastal areas, ecology played a lesser
role in urban redistributions, yet the combined impact of imperial decline
and the resultant heightening of political competition was similarly decisive.
Surat’s decline in the eighteenth century was not due to the growth of Bombay,
even though that East India Company port benefited from the former’s dimin-
ution. In western Java, well before Surat’s demise, Sunda Kelapa (the main port
of Pajajaran, a Hindu kingdom) was replaced by the Islamic port principality
of Banten in the sixteenth century, which was in turn supplanted by Dutch
Batavia in the seventeenth century.88 In 1511, the Portuguese seized the thriving
port of Melaka (Malacca), only to be superseded by Batavia –which served
as the Asian headquarters of the VOC –a century later. Such processes were
part of the competitive and changing environment of the Indian Ocean arena.
Batavia, notably, was a planned city –and it is to the realisation of idealised
conceptions of urban space that we now turn.
4.2 People and Politics
4.2.1 Cities and Imperialism
For the Spanish in America, tearing down pre-Hispanic cities and inaugurating
urban development along European lines signalled a break with the past and
the projection of Spanish imperialism, although even the best-laid schemes for
neat urban grids and the like could be muddied by exigencies, such as the need
to house labourers in the mining towns of Potosí and Zacatecas.89 Nevertheless,
the viceregal palaces and courts, the churches, squares, and streets were stage
sets for the performance of Spanish authority.90 Not only the layout, but also
86 Ibid, 7.
87 Ibid, 5.
88 Blussé, ‘Port Cities’, 72.
89 Fernández-Armesto, ‘Latin America’, 369–72. This is to say nothing of the resilience of indi-
genous institutions and assemblies, which remained a part of the urban social landscape and
the built environment: op. cit., 375.
90 See: Cañeque, King’s Living Image.
Urbanism 147
the very appearance of colonial buildings spoke volumes: the edifices of the
conquistadores’ mansions were intended to be ‘read’ by onlookers, and were
part of their proprietors’ self-fashioning of a new life and status in the New
World.91 By contrast, the less culturally arrogant rulers of the Old World, like
the Ottomans and Mughals, were aware of the huge symbolic windfall of
conquering a city like Constantinople or Delhi. These cities were littered not
only with important temples, mosques, and shrines, patronage of which could
help connect the new king to his people, but also fortresses, former palaces, and
other imperial monuments erected by the Ottomans’ and Mughals’ illustrious
predecessors. Unlike the tightly packed architectural clutter of Agra, however,
there were some spaces in Delhi that offered Shah Jahan a blank canvas upon
which to create his new city. But what form would it take, and why?
Gridirons might seem like the product of the orderly mind of early modern
Italian planners (or shrewd developers selling plots of real estate), but these
were neither the invention of Renaissance thinkers nor only to be found in
Europe.92 The developing preference for the gridiron pattern within the rap-
idly expanding Iberian world was imposed on the core of Damão (Daman) in
the sixteenth century, for example, but elsewhere within the Indo-Portuguese
world –such as Bassein and Cochin on India’s western coast –settlements
merely took a more broadly orthogonal or regular plan.93 The supposedly
rational and modern plan of cities in the Spanish and Dutch empires has been
contrasted with the ‘organic’ and ‘medieval’ character of urban growth in
Portuguese Asia, yet this ignores how Dutch urbanscapes literally built upon
Portuguese foundations. Putting aside the merits of these distinctions, it bears
noting that segregated streets and neighbourhoods for different communities
were a feature of Portuguese colonial cities from the sixteenth century.94 A grid-
iron layout on a more extensive scale came into being in Pondicherry in south
India during its occupation by the Dutch (from 1693), who also distinguished
what would become the ville Blanche (White Town) from the ville Noire (Black
Town) –developments that were expanded, not instigated, by the French after
their resumption of control in 1697, Jean Deloche tells us.95
In 1727, Sawai Jai Singh II inaugurated the relocation of his capital from
the hilly and congested city of Amber and the construction of a new and
entirely planned city on flat terrain –Jaipur. It was constructed according to
Indic architectonic treatises (the Vashtu shastra) in combination with inspir-
ation taken from the form of the Mughal chahar-bagh garden design, resulting
in the city’s arrangement upon an orderly grid –each corresponding to the
planetary bodies in Vedic astrology to affect particular qualities in Jaipur’s
inhabitants –as innovative as it was unusual and probably unprecedented in
91 Restall and Fernandez-Armesto, Conquistadors, 47.

92 On the gridiron as an instrument of the real estate market: Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 87.
93 Gomes, ‘Portuguese Urban Settlements’, 722–23.
94 Biedermann, Portuguese, 105, 120–31, 138–41.
95 Deloche, Origins.
148 Urbanism
the Indian context.96 What the authors of Renaissance architectural treatises

emphasised –and what was influencing these urban projects in Europe and
around the world –was the need for a regular plan, such as that afforded by a
grid, but equally a star or even concentric circles.97 Whether it is because they
facilitated the smoother passage of traffic, the free flow of the air, or because of
the cognitive benefits arising from such spatial organisation, the grid has been
a feature of urban plans around the world for millennia, not least China and
the Sinosphere (Korea, Japan).98
Geomantic principles also informed the plan of cities in the Sinosphere,
explaining the layout of the new shogunal city of Edo, a rough contemporary
of Shahjahanabad.99 Both were laid out in the early seventeenth century.
Both were transformed around the mid-nineteenth century and subsequently
swallowed up by new metropolitan developments (those constitutive of colo-
nial Delhi and Tokyo, respectively), although the shogunal capital flourished
in its final decades whereas its counterpart entered its twilight. Corporeal
metaphors guided the layout of both cities or else help us make sense of their
morphology and features (analogised as heart, mind, passageways), but their
interpretation necessarily differs because of the different intellectual and cul-
tural ecumenes in which Edo and Shahjahanabad belonged.100
Islam has been quintessentially linked to urban life since the time of the
Prophet Muhammad, even if it is difficult to elucidate such a thing as an
‘Islamic city’. For their part, Muslim philosophers considered urban centres
the ideal ‘context for actuating ethical thought and behaviour’, although some
wrote critically of the corruption and temptation to be had in such places of
congregation.101 Overall, cities have held a special place in Muslim life and
thought, and so it was in the city that Muslim conquerors proclaimed their
sovereignty over a place by having their name mentioned in the khutba, and it
was the city that became stamped with royal authority through the patronage
of new buildings.102 Guiding rulers and their urban planners were ideas found
in Islamic philosophy concerning the virtuous city, particularly in works of
akhlaq (ethical writings which also formed the backbone of princely edu-
cation; §10.1).103 The imprint of Nasir al-Din Tusi’s ideas can allegedly be
96 Asher, ‘Jaipur’, here 413.

97 Burke, ‘Culture’, 439.
98 Ibid, 439; Jinnai, ‘Edo’.
99 Screech, Tokyo, 28–31, 110.
100 Ibid, 28–30.
101 Bennison, ‘Introduction’, 1– 2; Kavuri- Bauer, ‘Fatehpur Sikri’, 43– 44. Neglia,
‘Historiographical Notes’, valuably gives a wider survey, while demonstrating how little work
has been completed on Indo-Muslim urban centres within the frame of the ‘Islamic city’
or ‘Muslim city’, as borne out by the remainder of the volume that this essay introduces,
although see Gaborieau, ‘Indian Cities’, for a survey and the beginnings of an agenda.
102 Moin, ‘Sovereign Violence’, 472–76.
103 For a discussion of architectural planning and building practice in Mughal and Rajput India,
see: Dadlani, From Stone, 119–28.
Urbanism 149
read, for example, in the phenomenology of key buildings in Fatehpur Sikri

(Fig. 4D), the entirely new city built on Akbar’s orders a few kilometres from
Agra roughly contemporaneously with Shah Abbas’ new city of Isfahan.104
According to Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad’s plan reflects the influence
of a range of Indic and Islamicate cosmologies or geomantic ideas, but he
considers certain Sufi ideas originating in Iran concerning the analogy of man
(microcosm) with the universe (macrocosm) and the great chain of being as
especially important; the emperor, his palace, the city, and the kingdom were
thus telescoped, the kingly body and the body politic found within one another
(see, also: §7.2.1).105
Across the Islamic world, various forms of charitable endowments
(waqf, madad-i ma‘ash, inam) to support mosques, madrasas (schools), and
bathhouses were granted by kings as part of their patronage of urban settings
and their performance or exercise of kingly duty.106 It meant such features not
only defined the townscapes of the Ottoman and Mughal worlds, but also
became so connected to imperial identity that new mosques and shops were
built even in cities already bearing these structures –as in Cairo after its con-
quest in 1517, for instance –so as to stamp them with the dynasty’s imprint.107
Such institutions also became major employers or else provided relief and
facilities for ordinary and indigent townsfolk; public rituals in such places and
inscriptions on the edifice of such buildings bearing the details of the king’s
largesse declared his protective embrace of his people.108
A side-effect of such benefactions was to tie more closely religious and com-
mercial life. The approach to Shahjahanabad’s Jami Masjid (Fig. 4E) was a
place where devotees and city dwellers could purchase kebabs and sherbets
from hawkers while gawping at magicians and jugglers, for instance, which
had a great deal to do with the heavy and regular footfall of the mosque’s
worshippers.109 By contrast, Edo’s Senso-ji temple received a pittance for a
stipend, such hardship prompting the transformation of its surrounding dis-
trict into something of a fairground thronged with visitors, there being shops
even within the temple precinct, for all this generated income.110 But sacred
and profane collided in either case, at once also blurring a distinction between
private and public spaces as land abutting temples and cemeteries became
marketplaces, venues for public entertainments, and even neighbourhoods.
This was a natural process, unfolding in towns and cities around the world
104 Kavuri-Bauer, ‘Fatehpur Sikri’. C.f. Blake, ‘Fathpur Sikri and Isfahan’, which reads the two
cities as part of a project of legitimising and modernising or bureaucratising the respective
empires. For a guide to Tusi’s thought, see: Alam, Languages, 46–54.
105 Blake, Shahjahanabad, xi-xiii, 32–36. For critique of Blake’s analysis here, see: Subrahmanyam,
‘Structure or Process’, 311–12.
106 Dale, ‘Empires and Emporia’. See, also: Faroqhi, Towns, 23–48.
108 See: Boyar and Fleet, Social History, 129–56, for evidence from Istanbul.
110 Screech, Tokyo, 94.
150 Urbanism
Fig. 4D Akbar’s Hall of Private Audience, Fatehpur Sikri

Urbanism 151
Fig. 4E Shahjahanabad’s Jami Masjid

152 Urbanism
long before and since, the result of which has been to create economic interests
and livelihoods.111 So much for ideals, therefore; what of the city’s mundane
and material realities?
4.2.2 Residential Neighbourhoods
Early in 1739, Nadir Shah entered Shahjahanabad and occupied the Qila
Mubarak while his men were billeted around the city. Unrest soon erupted in
the streets. The response was a crushing reprisal by Nadir Shah’s men, who
focused their activities around the city’s arterial bazaars, including Chandni
Chawk. The immediate effect was large swathes of the city being torched, the
death of perhaps 20,000 people, and the strengthening of the victor’s hand in
the post-war bargaining, resulting in the outflow of some 150 million rupees in
cash and 5 million in treasure and valuables –including the Peacock Throne
and all that it represented –from the Mughal capital.112 Another effect of the
tumult of 1739 was to accelerate a transformation in the city’s morphology
underway, in fact, from its earliest days. Outside the Qila Mubarak, mid-
seventeenth century Shahjahanabad was comprised of the enormous mansion-
compounds of princes and the great nobles as well as the smaller houses of
lower-ranking grandees and favourites, besides public and private gardens
and squares, marketplaces and shops, temples, mosques, and bathhouses,
and thoroughfares large and small.113 Ordinary people lived either within the
residences of the Mughal elites or else outside their walls, depending upon what
role they played in these households. Others, for there was a steady stream of
migrants to the city until its twilight, lived on land between such compounds
that had not yet been built upon.
Portuguese commentators of the sixteenth century evaluated Indian
buildings through Iberian and north African frames of reference, thus praising
lime and stone buildings with tiled roofs.114 Portuguese and other European
visitors in the seventeenth century praised the grandeur and scale of Indian
cities and their finest buildings, but also criticised a kind of indifference on the
part of Mughal elites toward investment in the layout, position, and proper
construction of dwellings and sanitation infrastructure for the masses.115
Escheat was held as the cause, although the nature, purposes, and extent of the
111 Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 88–89.

113 An excellent picture of the size and layout of these palazzo nobile, the largest probably far
grander than their counterparts in Europe and more like hamlets or small towns in their own
right, is painted by Blake in Shahjahanabad, 44–51, complemented by a detailed inventory of
such residences on 71–82.
114 Gomes, ‘Portuguese Urban Settlements’, 718–20, 722, where Portuguese building in this
manner is described as a bold and audacious act –for only temples and palaces in coastal
western India were so constructed –as a means of physically imprinting their authority and
presence in the Indian Ocean world.
115 Sharma, ‘The City’, 41–42.
Urbanism 153
sovereign’s confiscation of nobles’ property has been overstated and misunder-

stood. The resemblance of Indian towns to ‘a collection of many villages’ was
the result, nevertheless, at least in the eyes of Francois Bernier, seventeenth-
century French physician and traveller, whose account remains an important
source on early modern India.116 Even in Shahjahanabad, quotidian dwellings
were formed of mud walls and thatched roofing. That said, a city as large and
flourishing by the mid-seventeenth century as London was certainly no idyll,
with mostly dirty water available to rich and poor alike, sewers running full
of filth and rotting carcasses, and much of its ill-planned and high-density
dwellings of rudimentary construction going up in the almighty conflagra-
tion –the ‘Great Fire’ –of 1666, which broke out in the wake of the worst
plague since the Black Death.117
Ultimately, their manner of construction made the quotidian dwellings
of India’s towns and cities liable to fire in hot summers, when thatch dried
to tinder and readily went up in flames, or being worn away and collapsing
in the monsoon, while their density and the absence of adequate sanitation
did little to abate plagues.118 Sixty-thousand souls are said to have perished in
Shahjahanabad in 1662, when three separate fires consumed parts of the city,
while the heavy rains of 1716 and 1735 were also destructive.119 Such buildings
sprang up across the capital, nonetheless, encroaching on open land and on
spacious thoroughfares, making one early eighteenth-century resident com-
plain of them clogging up the locality in which he lived.120 As the balance of
power drifted from the centre and the empire decentralised, the importance of
maintaining a residence in the capital diminished. The result was the prolif-
eration of quotidian dwellings either within, or in place of, some of the city’s
grand mansions and gardens.121
From time to time, royal patrons in the Islamicate world ordered the con-
struction of new mosques, schools, and bathhouses. Such facilities acted like a
magnet to population, with distinct communities springing up in their environs
rather organically over time. Some were inhabited by migrants from the same
place, members of the same profession, congregants of the mosque, church, or
temple at the centre of the mahalla (residential quarter or neighbourhood), but
others were more heterogenous, with multi-ethnic neighbourhoods found not
only in large cities but also in medium-sized towns such as Ottoman Ankara.122
116 Bernier’s Travels are quoted in Moosvi, People, 102, which gives some indication of the kinds
of buildings in which ordinary folk resided. See, also: Sharma, ‘The City’, 72. For a balanced
and careful evaluation of escheat, see: Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, 63–68. See, also: Koch,
‘Agra’; Koch, Taj Mahal, 28, 97.
117 Lincoln, London, 198–215.
118 Sharma, ‘The City’, 63–66, for testimony relating to instances from across seventeenth-
century India.
119 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 45, 161–62.
120 Ibid, 44.
121 Ibid, 165–68, 175–79.
154 Urbanism
Since one could be said to belong in the mahalla centred on this mosque or
that bathhouse or marketplace, these same facilities and their respective
mahallas enabled the division of the city for the administrative purposes, such
as registering the population for taxation.
Among the first jobs of Mughal kotwals and qazis, therefore, was to ensure
the division of urban space into such quarters.123 The kotwal of late imperial
Shahjahanabad had a dozen policemen under him, as well as a few hundred
soldiers and guards at each of the city’s gates, all paid for by the government,
whereas the several-hundred strong crew of nightwatchmen were paid for by
the people themselves.124 A high-ranking figure, his task was maintaining order,
broadly conceived, encompassing such range of functions as: ensuring buying
and selling in the bazaar was all above board; supporting qazis (magistrates)
in dispute-resolution, where necessary; and dealing with crime and punish-
ment, as well as putting down disorder with military force, in collaboration
with thanadars and faujdars (neighbourhood watchmen-cum-policeman and
military officials, respectively).125 In each mahalla, kotwals were to oversee a
representative responsible for setting market prices (sometimes called the mir-
i mahalla or darogah), usually in conjunction with a dallal, who acted as an
appraiser of the goods and as a broker.126 Indeed, the cheap and plentiful avail-
ability of produce on the market was so bound up with the people’s expectations
of their king and with their belief in stable government, that Aurangzeb inten-
sified the regulation of urban markets, receiving regular dispatches from
officials tasked with reporting prices and punishing those whose corruption or
inefficacy created either gluts or scarcity and thus economic strife.127
A mahalla was usually centred on a religious structure, such as a mosque or
temple, sometimes both. A peculiar feature of north Indian cities discerned by
Catherine B. Asher concerns the position of mosques and Hindu temples, the
former typically positioned and designed to be readily visible and accessible
off the neighbourhood’s main roads, whereas the latter were usually tucked
away deep within the residential quarter itself and difficult to distinguish from
surrounding buildings by virtue of any architectural or visual features. This
was as true of temples in cities planned by Hindu rulers (e.g., Jaipur) or in
123 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 84. Bayly, in Empire and Information, 16, provides the clearest avail-
able portrait of the surveillance and reporting of crime and disorder in villages and towns,
which depended on the day and nightwatchmen (chaudkidars) reporting to the kotwal, who
passed ‘reports of affrays, murders, marvels, and violations of moral law’ to imperial officials
at court –the chief qazi, chief cleric (mufti), and the censor (muhtasib) –with a parallel system
of village watchmen, village headmen and accountants (patwaris) or registrars (qanungos),
police ‘constables’ (barkanddazis), and civil magistrates (qazis) operating in the countryside.
124 Metcalfe, ‘Reminiscences’, 15–16.
125 Singh, Town, 41–168, provides a very useful guide to the Mughal kotwals’ wide-ranging
responsibilities, his relationship to other functionaries (e.g., qazis, faujdars), and the kinds of
interactions he had with city dwellers.
126 Devra, ‘Ahmedabad’, 288–89; Blake, Shahjahanabad, 116.
127 Kaicker, The King, 168–69.
Urbanism 155
Hindu pilgrimage places (e.g., Banaras) as in those built-up by the Mughals

(e.g., Shahjahanabad, where some 96 temples were built between 1648 and
1857).128 This was also in spite of Hindu and Jain merchants being given signifi-
cant plots of prime land in Shahjahanabad as the city was under construction,
not to mention their tremendous wealth and power by the eighteenth century
when temples were constructed in other north Indian dynastic capitals and
centres of pilgrimage. Rather, this difference can be explained in terms of how
‘Islam has [traditionally] manifested itself boldly in urban settings’, whereas
Hindu patrons of temples fought a conflict between an Indo-Islamic culture
of opulence and the primacy of natural settings (hence courtyard temples) and
the dictates of austerity (hence the plainness of temple exteriors) prescribed by
their faith.129
Port cities, inland entrepots, and capital cities were especially cosmopolitan
places.130 Portuguese-controlled Diu, for instance, faced onto the Arabian Sea
and was thus home to Hindu, Jain, and Sikh merchants from Gujarat as well as
Sindh and Rajasthan –some having business within the port and its environs
(often known as Banias), while others orchestrated trade with east Africa and
the Gulf region –not to mention Parsis and Indian and non-Indian Muslims
(Persians, Arabs, etc). They competed but also had particular specialisms, each
living in separate quarters and attending their own places of worship, the most
populous and prosperous of which was the Barrio dos Baneanes (the Banias’
quarter). The largely non-Catholic and non-Portuguese make-up of Diu meant
Portuguese religious restrictions within the Estado da Índia were worn more
lightly than in Goa, for instance.131 This was in keeping with other European
settlements, which were generally segregated into ‘white’ and ‘black’ towns, the
latter housing indigenous merchants.
That said, recent research shows that ‘white’ was a flexible category, at
least in certain cases: the Dutch ‘scourge’ of Portuguese settlements com-
pelled members of their resident Indo-Portuguese community (who were not
Protestants, but Catholic ‘idolators’ and ‘pagans’, and of mixed heritage at
that) to find refuge in Madras, where they were welcomed by the English into
the ‘white town’ for pragmatic reasons, since they brought valuable commercial
links and expertise.132 In the Mughal capitals at Agra, Lahore, and Delhi, a simi-
larly diverse array of merchants mingled with the resident nobility –itself drawn
from Hindu and Muslim, Rajput, Deccani, and other Indian as well as Afghan,
Iranian, and Uzbek backgrounds –foreign emissaries and the representatives
of European companies, plus state functionaries and bureaucrats (Kayasthas
128 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 110–11, for statistics on temple construction.

129 Asher, ‘Hindu-Muslim Identities’, 139, for citation, and 121–48, for analysis.
130 C.f. Biedermann, Portuguese, especially 141–48, which interrogates what the concept (‘cosmo-
politan’) means in port cities that had very different characters even as they were each marked
by the segregation of diverse communities.
131 Dias Antunes, ‘Diu’, 781–85.
132 Guite, ‘ “Black Portuguese’ ”, especially 689 and 692.
156 Urbanism
and Kashmiri Pandits, for instance), mercenaries, slaves, shopkeepers, service

workers of various sorts, and ordinary labourers from near and far and a range
of castes and sects.133 This cosmopolitanism underpinned the city’s dynamism
but, by the same turn, also created conditions for conflict.134
4.2.3 Harmony and Conflict

How was law and order maintained on a more day-to-day basis?135 In the Ottoman
world, much conflict broke out and was thus resolved within the mahallas, drawing
on the resources of local elders and religious leaders (i.e., the imam, rabbi, or
priest).136 In the Mughal world, similarly, what disorder was not dealt with by the
kotwal and his allies was the business of caste/craft mahallas themselves. These
mahallas were ‘headed by chiefs (chaudhuris) of caste councils (panchayats)’ who
settled quarrels within the neighbourhood and adjudicated disputes over prop-
erty rights, yet also negotiated dues with city authorities and made provision for
residents’ security.137 The growth of population, the weakening of feudal bonds
of dependence and the better title to land attained by commoners, and the greater
reach and role of the market in early modern times meant there was a substan-
tial growth in litigation.138 This was because competition over property and the
entanglement of most social classes in credit/debt obligations (§3.4) meant people
took to the courts as never before.139
The question of who owned the land may be a vexed one (§5.1.2), but it
has not helped that scholarly attention has largely fixed on rights and entitle-
ments –to the revenues from the land or to particular offices, their bestowal
and renewal, their contestation and verification –rather than ownership per
se.140 As evidence of the existence and respect for private property, however,
we find that Shah Jahan’s orders for the construction of a new mosque in Agra
in 1636–37 entailed the acquisition of land outside the khalisa (Crown estate)
through purchase at prices 1.5 times its presumed value from certain proprietors
(malliks), others preferring compensation in the form of buildings elsewhere.141
133 Chenoy, ‘Shahjahanabad’, 165.

134 See, for instance: Kruijtzer, Xenophobia, especially 18–71.
135 See, also: Gokhale, Surat, 51–71, for the anatomy of local government in a seventeenth-
century Mughal city.
136 Boyar and Fleet, Social History, 121–28.
137 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 84.
138 Muldrew, Obligation,16.
139 The degree of ‘legal accessibility’ was a critical variable in this development, but was fairly
high in early modern England, so that legal means could be taken up by people from across
the social strata: ibid, especially 199–271. Evidence reviewed below suggests a similar picture
holds for India.
140 Using examples from the eighteenth-century Maratha state, Guha’s ‘Wrongs and Rights’
surveys a variety of ‘rights’, while being attentive to matters of gender and status, as well as
the use of violence in the exploitation of one’s rights or the punishment of infringements.
141 Moosvi, People, 202. Other evidence suggests malliks not only traded land amongst them-
selves, but also sold their land to the Mughal kings or entered disputes with him over the
Urbanism 157
Buying, selling, and deriving profit from property were not innovations of the
colonial period.
But property transactions were not the sole preserve of Indian nobles,
whose rights were probably the most tenuous –rather than the strongest –on
account of the practice of escheat to prevent their accumulation of power.142
Rather, there is plenty of evidence of the ownership and sale of private prop-
erty (milkiyat, in Persian) existing more widely in early modern India, the
study of which has very lately coalesced into a small but promising sub-field.143
Property was seldom a mere economic asset that stored and (hopefully)
appreciated in value, possessed by private individuals whose right of own-
ership permitted the exclusion of others from access or use.144 Property was
instead highly contingent and subjective, a feature deriving from its social –if
not always public –character in the early modern world. A good example are
ghats (riverside landings), which were used by pilgrims but also for trade, as
sites of religious rituals but also for washing and bathing, and thus constructed
by royalty and mercantile elites for motivations in excess of pecuniary gains.145
By delving into legal records surviving from the courts of local qazis in
the Mughal realm, it is possible to find wills, gift-deeds, mortgage papers, and
documents relating to the purchases of shops, houses, and land. These and
other legal documents concerning disputes over property do not only per-
tain to patricians, but also bear the names of goldsmiths and other artisans,
shopkeepers and merchants. Transactions required the consent and sureties of
at least two influential and propertied members of the respective community
or the residential mahalla before they could be signed and sealed by the qazi.
This meant acquiring, bequeathing, and disposing of property was regulated
not only by the state, but primarily by local powerholders, who played a critical
part in such processes and made property transfers intra-community or even
caste affairs.146 Thus, property was not merely an economic asset, for it was
also a ‘social space’, not merely ‘an index of wealth, but a medium through
which relations were maintained’, Farhat Hasan shows.147
matter of ownership: Habib, Agrarian System, 125. Of all groups, there is reason to believe
that only Mughal nobles’ property right was fragile, for they were forbidden from building
up heritable wealth to the extent that land returned to the Crown estate after their death,
possibly to be reallocated to another or retained by the emperor; see: Koch, ‘Agra’, for useful
discussion. That said, nobles’ property right entailed the emperor purchase their land prior to
building the Taj Mahal, hence the delay before its construction started; see: Koch, Taj Mahal,
28, 97.
142 Koch, ‘Property Rights’, 199–216, which includes discussion on the diversity of seventeenth-
century escheat practices, which varied according to what and whose property were under
consideration as well as the circumstances.
143 Chaudhry, ‘Repossessing Property’.
144 For a critique of narrowly economistic ideas of property, see: Hasan, ‘Property and Social
Relations’, here especially 853.
145 Bhattacharya, Empire and Ecology, 56–57, 128.
146 Hasan, ‘Property and Social Relations’, 859–66. See, also: Glover, Lahore, 15–16.
147 Hasan, ‘Property and Social Relations’, 853.
158 Urbanism
A parallel system operated in the countryside whereby the panch (village

leadership) was accountable in rural property transfers.148 Staying in the
town, however, we might locate one source of urban friction within the
role of local powerholders in legal transfers of property so described.
Another emerged from the ‘distinction between “ownership” (milkiyat)
and the “rights” (haqq) that one could claim from it’, evidence of which
Hasan finds in disputes presented to the qazi and thus articulated in the
language of his court –sharia. An example brings this to life. In the 1630s,
a Hindu woman’s spouse purchased four shops attached to a mosque in
Surat. In her view, under sharia, ‘a transaction of sale (bai) provided to
the purchaser an absolute and unconditional access to that which (s)he
purchased.’149 At stake was whether she could exercise her ‘right’ to collect
rents from the shops she owned, which Muslim believers disputed. In their
view, under sharia, the shops were an extension of the mosque, the mosque
was entrusted to the community of believers, and thus the rights to rents
belonged to the person in charge of the mosque. Thus, both ‘sides to the
conflict invoked sharia, and in seeking to protect their claims over the
disputed shops, both the litigants appropriated sharia by manipulating its
ambiguities and contradictions.’150
And finally, what of disorder? One cause for city authorities’ concern was
the restive potential of those who had fallen into vagabondage, although it
is yet to be ascertained whether demobilised soldiers, disaffected students,
and uprooted peasants were as much a problem for early modern Indian
authorities as their Ottoman counterparts, who grappled with population
influxes in the face of brigandage and insecurity in the countryside caused,
most notably, by the Celali revolts in Anatolia following the onset of the
Little Ice Age (§6.5).151 Because of the city’s openness and the populace’s
ease of mobility, another problem facing Indian authorities were those
aggressive Hindu and Muslim mendicants –alone or in large groups –
causing disturbances as they demanded alms.152 But collective forms of pro-
test and other expressions of discontent or dissent did not always emerge
from the margins.153

149 Hasan, ‘Property and Social Relations’, 872.
150 Ibid, 872.
151 Faroqhi, Towns, 267–87; Boyar and Fleet, Social History, 106–16, for how the Istanbul
authorities dealt with violent disorder; White, Climate of Rebellion, 163–226, for fresh ana-
lysis of the Celali Rebellion and its aftermath, and 249–75, for the associated urban explosion
and resultant challenges.
152 Sharma, ‘The City’, 63.
153 See, also: Kaicker, The King, 157–65, for discussion of other kinds of urban disorder and
conflict (e.g., those revolving around the honour of women, warring houses, or differences
between communities).
Urbanism 159
4.2.4 Vox Populi
In contrast to research revealing the role of the populi in shaping the polit-
ical order in early modern London, Paris, and Amsterdam, Istanbul, Cairo,
and Damascus, Indian historians have hitherto either denied the possession
of a political consciousness by early modern townsfolk, or else have read par-
ticular evidence and events too narrowly, reducing ordinary people to a mere
rabble or armed mob that sporadically arose to press (economic) grievances or
religious fanaticism (or both).154 In a sweeping revisionism, Abhishek Kaicker
turns attention squarely upon Shahjahanabad’s quotidian inhabitants –‘from
haughty jewellers to humble shoemakers, soldiers, obscure preachers, minor
clerics, wandering mendicants, unnamed idlers, vagrants, vagabonds, and
spectators.’155 It may be true that Indian townsfolk were not so bonded through
such corporate institutions as guilds and livery companies. Nor did they consti-
tute municipal ones, although loose community organisations did exist and did
increasingly make representation on behalf of members in the last pre-colonial
centuries, be they caste/craft assemblies or ethno-religious groups (e.g., the
Armenians), becoming ever more significant ‘public arenas’ as a result.156 In
this respect, Indian townsfolk differed, by degrees, from the varied experiences
of their counterparts in other parts of the Islamic middle East and Africa, not
to mention in Europe.157 It may also be true that the Mughal regime ‘had no
conception of their place in politics’ in its classical age.158 Change was in the
air, however, for the empire’s ordinary subjects were stirred to articulate what
can be called a ‘popular politics’ by the beginning of the eighteenth century,
framed through their engagements with Mughal sovereignty.
Shahjahanabadis were expressing themselves in a manner like their contem-
poraries in Siam, who sought to reinstate Buddhism in sacralising kingship
and to curtail foreign influence (French and Catholic influence, in particular).
A courtier named Phetracha (r. 1688– 1703) –backed by ‘the monkhood
and the mob’ –succeeded in countering French arms and a palace coup that
inaugurated a new dynasty in Ayutthaya.159 Occurring in the same year as the
Glorious Revolution in England, and described as a ‘revolution’ by Europeans,
it was hardly a revolution in the sense we would understand it, for it reinstituted
154 Ibid, 2–6, for such a critical reading of Indian historiography, and 256–90 for analysis of the
extraordinary events of 1729.
155 Ibid, 4.
156 See, for example: Gokhale, Surat, 47–49. More recently, again on western India: O’Hanlon,
‘Petitioning’, which reveals the ‘public’ dimension of panchayats as they evolved over the long
eighteenth century to supersede earlier corporate bodies.
157 The implications of these differences are scrutinised in §5.3. Boyar and Fleet, Social History,
explores the denizens of Istanbul’s relationship to the sultan and the ruling centre and may
thus be a useful beginning for comparison with Mughal India.
159 On these events, see, most recently: Strathern, ‘Thailand’s First Revolution’, including 1315,
for citation, and especially 1315–18, on the autonomous political agency of the people.
160 Urbanism
monarchical order and hence did not precipitate structural change in the pol-
itical sphere. And yet, though it might seem regressive on the grounds of its
clerical and monarchical bent, it represented a novel politicisation of Siamese
clergy and society. As we shall see, ordinary Shahjahanabadis also articulated
their newfound political voice within –rather than against –existing yet evolving
discourses and institutions of kingship. As in Siam, furthermore, a signal event
in the longer-term process of ordinary Shahjahanabadis’ awakening was their
response to foreign influence –occasioned, in this case, by Nadir Shah’s inva-
sion in 1739.
Kaicker argues that a broad spectrum of the Mughal elite had by this time
become indifferent as to who sat on the throne, some even favouring a new
dynasty. Men holding such views included Raja Jugal Kishor, a high-ranking
financial administrator and representative of the subadar (provincial governor)
of Bengal at the imperial court, and Burhan al-Mulk, the subadar of Awadh.160
They were more fearful of the scarcely incorporated peoples of the region
around Delhi who showed scant regard for Mughal authority (namely, the Jats,
Gujars, Minas, Meos, and Mewatis), than they were of Nadir Shah and his
army.161 The latter could be bargained with, after all, either by offering him a
one-off payment (as came to pass) or the throne itself (as some were willing
to do). Such bargaining could be peacefully executed according to mutually
understood norms and rituals, not least because Iranian émigrés like Burhan
al-Mulk possessed cultural, linguistic, and kinship links spanning the Mughal
world and Iran; the same could not be said of the uncontained looting and
destruction of the city that might be unleashed by the empire’s restless and
refractory groups, who were held in contempt by such elites.162
Upon securing a victory, Nadir Shah agreed with the Mughal elite that his
entry into Shahjahanabad would be conducted in a way not to provoke unrest.
The city’s common folk were neither as eager nor as willing to acquiesce to the
victors as the Mughal elites, however, for they did care who sat on the throne
and because rule by ‘a scion of the Timurid dynasty was central to the[ir]
conception of a just political order’, Kaicker argues.163 The resulting back-
lash was decades-long in the making, the culmination of the reformulation of
sovereignty and the king’s relationship to the people started in Aurangzeb’s
times. Imperial sovereignty had long been anchored in the dispensation of
justice, whether through the audience granted by the emperor to petitioners
or the proper functioning of courts throughout the realm. In Aurangzeb’s
time, personal audiences did not cease, but there was, Kaicker reminds us, a
‘bureaucratic systemisation of the delivery of justice’ via the appointment of
public censors (muhtasibs), a new office created in 1659 and recruited from

161 The Meos’ raids and recalcitrance to central authority was not new, for it had already been
recorded as a problem facing the fourteenth-century Delhi Sultans: Aquil, ‘Chishti Sufis’, 440.
163 Ibid, 21.
Urbanism 161
among the ulama (§7.3.3).164 We might think of them as akin to the corregidors
in the Spanish Empire or those Ottoman authorities tasked with managing
food supply and prices and generally regulating the market and (conspicuous)
consumption.165
Because of the centrality of justice to the discourse of imperial sovereignty,
Aurangzeb’s transformation of the former served to make the latter ‘less
dependent on his mystical nature and more on the law, broadening its sweep
and intensifying its reach across the empire.’166 In some places, this change
provided a framework of reference (the sharia) and process (interaction with
the qazi’s court) that empowered the merchants and middling sorts of the
empire’s towns and cities, thereby facilitating their incorporation within the
imperial system as never before –something seen in Farhat Hasan’s work on
urban property, too. As for the city’s ordinary folk, they felt empowered ‘to
act upon their interpretation of justice according to the law’, to the extent
that a new discourse of sovereignty/justice stimulated a newfound political
engagement –‘popular politics’ –the content and tenor of which wavered
between craving and criticising Mughal rule and between agreeing with and
departing from the opinions of Mughal theologians, bureaucrats and other
state representatives, and the nobility.167
Those subjects previously regarded as passive and with no place in pol-
itics by the Mughal regime had become politically engaged and active; eager
and willing to stand up for their padshah and the ideal of sovereignty that
had hitherto structured their lives yet was abrogated most heinously when the
Sayyid brothers orchestrated a regicide in1719 and again after Nadir Shah’s
invasion in 1739. Elsewhere beyond Europe, commoners were finding their pol-
itical voice around this time in a similar manner: in Siam, as already noted,
but also in Osaka in the 1720s and 1730s, for instance, where merchants and
artisans formed new organisational groupings to remonstrate against the state’s
exactions, its intrusion into the market, and eventually larger matters of urban
governance.168 Yet, we might pause to ask how the political views (and actions)
of Shahjahanabad’s quotidian denizens came to be shaped, and what enabled
the development of a popular politics at this time. Art was one ingredient.
Another was the use of public space. ‘The forked tongue of poetry, equally
capable of sweetness as of poison,’ Kaicker observes, ‘mirrors the dual nature
of the politics of the people who recited it in the city’, for it was ‘as capable of
launching to the king’s defence as challenging his right to rule.’169 Traces of a
164 Ibid, 107. See, also: Richards, Mughal Empire, 174–75. Singh, Town, 148–68, provides a rich
survey of market administration by the kotwal and mutasaddis, noting the latter’s overlap with
muhtasibs and mir-i mahallas.
165 Kaicker, The King, 107, for citation; Boyar and Fleet, Social History, 158–204, on their
Ottoman counterparts.
167 Ibid, 147–48.
168 Kusuo, ‘Protest’.
162 Urbanism
more critical stance are found in popular satire from the time, such as the work
of Niʿmat Khan-i ʿAli (‘The Sublime’) and the more refined Mir Jaʿfar Zatalli
(‘The Prattler’).170 There was also another duality, that of private/elite and
public/commoner –a duality increasingly traversed by some performers whose
‘mimicry of elites surely had a sharper edge when conducted in the square
before crowds of jeering commoners.’171
4.3 Urban Cultures

Travel accounts attest to Shahjahanabad’s return to normalcy following the
tumult and destruction caused in 1739. But things would never quite be the
same.172 Because defeat at the hands of Nadir Shah’s forces wrought a real and
a symbolic blow to the Mughal centre, one impact was to accelerate decentral-
isation and even the dissolution of the empire. In this context, and with the
memory of both the wealth to be had in the Mughal north and the scope for
bargaining or even collaborating with the Mughal elite, Nadir Shah’s former
general, Ahmad Shah, launched a series of campaigns from Afghanistan
into Mughal territories. In 1757, he entered Shahjahanabad and eventually
departed with carts laden with treasure, but not before driving the emperor
out of the walled city (Alamgir II was later murdered on the back of not
only the Afghan, but also a Maratha invasion and sacking of the city).173 In
1761, having defeated the Marathas at Panipat, Ahmad Shah installed one of
his Indo-Afghan collaborators as governor while the Mughal ruler lived in
the safety of self-imposed ‘exile’ in Awadh. This lasted until 1770, when an
opportunity arose for Shah Alam to return to the throne, though the empire
had withered to the environs of Delhi and the city itself was by all accounts
dilapidated and impoverished.174
4.3.1 Consumerism and Sociability
Maybe the greatest transformation of urban life in early modern times

occurred within the cultural sphere. In Europe, the period from the late fif-
teenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century ‘saw the final con-
secration of a distinctive metropolitan and genteel lifestyle’ as ‘the city turned
into the main stage of consumer change and cultural innovation.’175 Its motor
was those very same processes also at work beyond Europe, so it is no surprise
170 Here, see the analysis offered by Hasan in Paper, 67–95, of satirical and poetic literature
openly about, for instance, the practice of sodomy by political elites as a way of attacking ‘an
oppressive sovereign, a corrupt qazi, or an inefficient kotwal’ (op. cit, 81).
173 Lally, ‘Beyond “Tribal Breakout” ’, 381–84.
175 Blondé and Van Damme, ‘Early Modern Europe’, 251. Compare the portrait of the cultural
scene offered in this section with developments described by Clark in European Cities, 179–99.
Urbanism 163
that its effects were comparable to those witnessed elsewhere in the world, too.
Across early modern Afro-Eurasia, the growth of commerce not only powered
urbanisation; it also gave shape to the consumer society most readily found
in towns and cities.176 The prosperity derived from commerce animated con-
sumer society into being, but there were other contributing factors: as cul-
tural and artisanal production was to an extent unshackled from patron-client
relations through the advent of markets for such things, so their consumption
was opened to a wider range of people in a wider range of forms and in a wider
range of settings.177
Thus, by the eighteenth century, both the high-and low-born inhabitants of
Shahjahanabad had more opportunities to consume news, theological debate,
and various kinds of entertainments (poetry of numerous sorts, song and
dance, satire and performances by jesters and mimics), much of which carried
at least an undertone of political commentary. There seems to have been a
décloisonnement of urban culture, much as there was in the Ottoman world, but
perhaps a little less than in Tokugawa Japan, that helped rouse a new urban pol-
itical consciousness.178 This cultural scene encompassed a variety of performers
(from those asking for small sums in recompense, to those of great renown and
celebrity), and took place in a wider range of venues than previously (from
elite gatherings in private residences known as mehfils and majalis, to public
performances at coffeehouses, chawks and bazaars, in the precincts of mosques,
dargahs, and khanaqahs).179 Hardly confined to the private household, there-
fore, urban culture and its consumption permeated public space, where it helped
shift behavioural norms and social codes of conduct to give form to the Indo-
Islamicate ashraf, the cousin of the European burgher or bourgeois.180
With the march of commercialisation and globalisation, the early moderns
gained greater access to an increasing range and variety of (new) goods, stirring
new attitudes to consumption, luxury, sensory pleasure, and recreation.181
176 See, for instance: Borsay, Urban Renaissance, especially 117–308.

177 See, for instance: Lemire, Consumer Cultures. C.A. Bayly, in Empire and Information, 192–96,
not only described the range of venues where ‘literature’ could be ‘consumed’ in perform-
ance, but also noted, on the authorship/production side of things, the array of social types
involved, from druggists, apothecaries, tailors, dancing girls, and serving women, to Hindus
of Brahman, Kayastha, and Khatri communities, ashraf Muslims, and even Eurasians.
178 Kaicker, The King, 123–46; Francks, Japanese Consumer, 1–46.
179 Such was the importance of marketplaces to public life, and of commercial elites to urban
communities, that a critical religious debate among Delhi’s Sikh assembly at a turning point
in the history of the Sikh panth took place not in any temple precinct but in a bazaar: Syan,
‘Debating Revolution’, 1110–16.
180 Blondé and Van Damme, ‘Early Modern Europe’, 252–53. Bourgeois and ashraf were similarly
unstable terms, in that they held slightly different meanings and valence in different places
and at different times. Both terms, despite encompassing different groups and demarcating
different social relations, nevertheless shifted their meaning in tandem with the development
of consumer society.
181 See: Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 32, for the testimony of a French visitor to the Ottoman court
concerning such new attitudes, and Salzmann, ‘Age of Tulips’, for a global purview upon these
164 Urbanism
Stimulants like coffee (from the Red Sea arena) and tobacco (from the New
World) are prime examples.182 Their rapidly spreading consumption brought
about an early modern ‘psychoactive revolution’, although perhaps more so in
the West, for their use in Asia slotted into an established culture of consuming
stimulants such as alcohol, opium, and cannabis products.183 Coffee beans
from the Ethiopian highlands were being roasted and decocted into a drink
in Yemen by the fifteenth century. Coffee drinking spread from there via the
port of Mocha through the Ottoman lands during the sixteenth century and
then to the lands of the Ottomans’ trading partners in Europe and in Asia –
not least Iran, where coffee had an important place in Safavid courtly culture,
and India.184 The spread of coffeehouses in London and throughout provin-
cial cities and towns in England in the seventeenth century is well known.
These coffeehouses have long been mythologised for their contribution to
genteel sociability and to the scientific and political Enlightenment, omitting
their role in fomenting sedition. They were, furthermore, often as filthy as the
streets outside, housing vice and all manner of criminality –a fact too often
overlooked.185 Their progenitor, nevertheless, was the Ottoman coffeehouse,
which had created a new place –besides the home, hammam, mosque, public
square, or shop –for social intercourse, for trading gossip and hearing news,
and for politics, to the extent that some Ottoman gentlemen hurried to their
local establishment in their pyjamas.186
Smoking tobacco, by contrast, did not create new venues for sociability,
instead being enjoyed by men and women from across the social classes in
bathhouses and coffeehouses, in public squares and in gardens, at home and
on the move throughout the Ottoman world. Smoking did, however, engender
a rich material culture. Surprisingly, perhaps, ‘pyric technologies’ did not move
with tobacco from the New World to Europe and the rest of the world, but
instead made their way from sub-Saharan Africa via south Asia, where water
pipes and cannabis-smoking pipes already extant morphed into the nargileh or
huqqa and pipes for smoking tobacco (Fig. 4F).187 Tobacco use was challenged
by those clergy and other social commentators who deemed it immoral, on
account of its intoxicating effects and its very broad appeal, but spread to such
trends. Such were these developments that moral critiques of decadence were issued by con-
temporaries; see, for instance: Grehan, ‘Smoking’.
182 Lemire, Consumer Cultures, 190–247, on tobacco consumption around the world.
183 For analyses focussing on Iran: Kazemi, ‘Drugs’; Kazemi, ‘Tobacco’.
184 Matthee, Pleasure, 144– 74, on coffee, with other chapters examining tobacco, opium,
and wine.
185 Lincoln, London, 164–80.
186 An excellent and concise connected and comparative history of Ottoman and European
coffeehouses, their ownership and clientele, and their cultural and political role can be found
in Kirli, ‘Coffeehouses’, which also emphasises the blur –rather than the hard boundary –
between the public and private spheres in the early modern world produced by such spaces.
187 Breen, ‘Pyrrhic Technologies’, for this complication of the neatness of the ‘Columbian
Exchange’ revealing just how interconnected and complex the early modern world was.
Urbanism 165
Fig. 4F Base for a Huqqa with a Design of Irises and Other Flowers (zinc alloy and
inlaid brass; Bidar; late seventeenth century)
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1984.221
an extent that it became ‘a key factor in the breakdown of old moral strictures’
that shaped a distinctly early modern ‘public culture of fun’ –out in the open,
routine, and unrestricted.188
Shahjahanabad, too, had its fair share of coffeehouses, which served similar
purpose to those elsewhere, although we know less about them.189 Smoking a
pipe had become common in Gujarat by the end of the seventeenth century,
cheroots were liked by the ‘poorer sort’ in the Coromandel, and the habit seems
to have been spreading in north India, too.190 Besides the new accoutrements
and new venues for the consumption of particular things were the parts of the
city given over to pleasure –the ‘floating world’ (ukiyo) to be found in Edo, and
notably in its red-light district of Yoshiwara, with its counterparts in the lively
bustle around Isfahan’s royal square, Istanbul’s Galata district and the Grand
188 Greehan, ‘Smoking’, citations 1377 and 1375, respectively.

189 See: Kaicker, The King, 28–29, 108, 138.
166 Urbanism
Bazaar, and Shahjahanabad’s Chandni Chowk.191 Consumer society, as all this

indicates, was more usually urban than rural and decisively moulded urban
(popular) culture; so apparent was this to one writer in seventeenth-century
China, in fact, that he described the pleasures and corrupting effects of com-
modification and the money-driven ethos of the city in a major prose work.192
A new ‘way of seeing’ emerged in the early modern Islamicate empires; it
was moored in the engagements of learned men with knowledges particular
to Europe and the Islamic world, yet was really made manifest in towns
and cities. Amalgamating with the new disposition to leisure, the effect was
to change the use of urban space and spatial encounters –whether in new
cities like Shahjahanabad, new suburbs like Sa‘dabad (built in Istanbul’s
environs in 1722), or simply in the (re)design of mansions, gardens, squares,
and other structures –in ways comparable to developments even in quite
different cultural-intellectual ecumenes, such as Edo in Japan.193 Much like
Mughal Agra, Isfahan’s suburban development on the Zayandehrud (river)
and at Farahabad were riverside; a vista and a way of looking were integral
to their existence.194 Similarly, Isfahan’s Khaju and Allahvirdikhan bridges,
the Nurabad bridge on the road from Agra to Gwalior, the Shahi bridge in
Jaunpur, and Edo’s Nihonbashi were not merely river crossings but places of
congregation and thus of sociability. Occasionally, these bridges were used for
royal functions and spectacle. Mostly, however, they were used by the local
public for sayrgah (a place for leisure and excursion) –for taking in the riverine
views from bastions that were a conscious part of the bridges’ design, and thus
for cultivating a genteel sensibility through seeing and while being seen.195
4.3.2 Writing about the Changing City
Delhi may have been repeatedly abandoned but was never still; its history was
repeatedly stirred up, so that looking back to its past was a wellspring of its
cultural dynamism.196 The new city-within-a-city that was Shahjahanabad,
too, never became fixed in aspic in 1648, even as certain elements of its physical
makeup became ‘codified’ or served as role models for later builders (§9.3.1).
Rather, its cityscape was soon changing, and in ways echoing the transform-
ation of the empire itself. A number of new mosques were constructed within
the walled city and its environs from the beginning of the eighteenth century,
including: Zinat al-Masjid (1707), south of the Red Fort, sponsored by Princess

192 Berg, ‘Marvelling’.
193 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 26–55. Boyar and Fleet, Social History, 205–48, on leisure and
pleasure in Istanbul and Sa‘dabad.
194 Hosseini, ‘Bridges’, especially 113–15.
195 Ibid, especially 108, 111, 119, 121. The construction of beautiful bridges was not limited to the
Mughal world; see, for those of Masulipatnam: Sharma, ‘The City’, 37.
196 Frykenburg, ‘Introduction’.
Urbanism 167
Zinat al-Nisa; Sunahri Masjid (1721–22), on Chandni Chowk, sponsored

by Raushan al-Daula; Fakhr al-Masajid (1728–29), in the north of the city,
sponsored by the noblewoman Fakhr al-Nisa; and two mosques sponsored
in the mid-century by Qudsiya Begum, a wife of Muhammad Shah. Mosque
construction was no longer a solely royal affair, but increasingly sponsored
by noblemen and noblewomen. Yet, their mosques’ visual and architectural
references –and also those of madrasas constructed in this period –were
borrowed from the Jami Masjid, the imperial mosque constructed in Shah
Jahan’s time (Fig. 4E), so that ‘even as the centrality of the imperial monuments
was challenged’ by the new urban elites, Chanchal Dadlani reveals, ‘the visual
language of Mughal imperial power’ was reinforced by ‘constructing new
projects in the image of imperial icons.’197
Dargah Quli Khan visited Delhi in the late 1730s in the service of Asaf Jah
I of Hyderabad. His travel narrative, the Muraqqa-yi Dihli (‘Delhi Album’),
snapshotted in words this changing life of the city –life that formerly centred
on the palace-fortress but gradually resituated on a diffusion of public and
semi-public spaces patronised by the urban elite. His text rendered the
essential changes of the late Mughal period at large –namely, the changing
balance of power between the emperor and other powerholders, between
the centre and periphery (§7.4) –through a ‘distinctly urbanistic’ frame.198
Shahjahanabad and its imperial architecture thus played a similar role to
that of Istanbul vis-à-vis the great Ottoman cities in the Arab provinces
(Aleppo, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus), in Anatolia (Amasya, Bursa,
Diyarbakır, Kütahya, Manisa, Trabzon), and in Rumelia (Belgrade, Edirne,
Thessaloniki). Istanbul, like Shahjahanabad, was the central reference point
for these and other cities –a role that was enhanced, rather than diminished,
amidst decentralisation.
Even more striking is how this steadily changing cityscape interacted
with a new kind of spatial consciousness. Evidence of this can be found in
the Ardhakathanak, the vernacular-language autobiographical verse work of
Banarasi Das, a Jain merchant who lived around the late sixteenth to early
seventeenth centuries in the Jaunpur Sultanate and in Agra. This work suggests
the bent toward ‘urban ethnography’ discerned by Sunil Sharma was not
merely an Indo-Persianate literary affect.199 A well-known Persian-language
example of this ‘urban ethnography’ can be found in those parts of the Chahar
Chaman penned by Chandar Bhan Brahman during Shah Jahan’s reign that
richly evoke the hustle and bustle of urban life in Shahjahanabad and Lahore
through descriptions of its boulevards and bazaars, gardens and shrines, and
other public spaces.200
197 Dadlani, From Stone, 73, for citation, and 71–72, for the discussion from which these examples
are drawn.
198 Ibid, 73–80.
199 Sharma, ‘The City’, 39, 44, for details of the text.
200 Kinra, Writing, 7–8, 135–58.
168 Urbanism
Perhaps the most famous example is Dargah Quli Khan’s Muraqqa. Through
its text, the reader encounters the city’s performers and artistes –rendered in a
series of literary portraits –to relive the narrator’s experiences of religious and
secular congregation, of recreation and entertainment, not least performances
of music and poetry lasting from evening to daybreak. Yet, the Muraqqa also
‘underscores the symbiotic relationship between new ‘physical interventions in
the city’s urban fabric and new urban practices’ by the eighteenth century, for
the narrator’s encounters and experiences ‘are framed through visits to a range
of architectural monuments and public spaces’ (e.g., squares, streets, bazaars,
mosques, Sufi dargahs and lodges), which were sites of urban patronage by
nobles and other elites.201 There are also numerous references to shops and
traders and the visual and sensory pleasure associated with the riches of the
city’s consumer society.
In all this, such literature may be compared with those ‘urban guidebooks’
starting to emerge in Tokugawa Japan. These described –even celebrated –work
and leisure in the city, sometimes for the benefit of visitors and thus replete
with details of the sights and the best shops.202 Urban praise, a new commercial
sensibility, and the pursuit of pleasure amalgamated in visual terms, too, about
which Ottomanists are amply aware and historians of the late Mughal world
are beginning to make clear.203 Several factors combined to produce a new kind
of visualisation of urban space in early eighteenth-century Udaipur (Mewar),
including: seventeenth-century verse and visual reworkings of Indic aesthetic
theory (§9.3.3) and the classical literary ideals of cities (nagara-varnana) as
found in the Ramayana, for instance; urban growth as well as new cartographic
practices (§10.4), which prompted kings and painters in their employ to look
anew at their locales around the early eighteenth century; and the work of
eighteenth-century court poets, like Kavi Nandram, and travelling Jain monk
poets, like Yati Jaichandand Kavi Khetal, which celebrated urban centres. The
result was a new large-format medium in which artists ‘represented real spaces
as charismatic places’ by capturing their idealised bhavas or moods, Dipti
Khera tells us.204
That said, contemporary writing on early modern Indian towns and cities
can be distinguished from that found in other places.205 In south Germany,
where urban life revolved around numerous small cities and which was heavily
urbanised by contemporary European standards, the Bürger (the bourgeois,
or citizens) possessed a developed and proud civic identity and a literary flair.
In celebration of their cities, they churned out historical works that stand as
201 Dadlani, From Stone, 73.

202 Burke, ‘Patterns’, 114; Francks, Japanese Consumer, 43–45.
203 See: Fetvacı, Album, especially 110–29.
204 Khera, Moods, here 7, and also 27–116, 147–72.
205 The later Middle Ages saw a flourishing of urban cultural identity and associated literary pro-
duction: Clark, European Cities, 82–85. On travel literature and other writing about Beijing,
which was very long-standing by the late Ming, see: Naquin, Peking, 249–83, 451–98.
Urbanism 169
evidence of their participation in historiographical production.206 Elsewhere,

too, civic pride stimulated a rich corpus of city chronicles and urban histories
or antiquarian surveys into being from the fifteenth century. The genre emerged
in Italy: Rome was the subject of Flavio Biondo’s 1444 work, followed by
works on Ravenna, Brescia, and other places. It then spread to Spain (Valencia,
Toledo), France (Paris, Nimes, Lyons), and to England (London, Exeter). By
c. 1600, according to Peter Burke, there were thirty or so such works in print
with the number rising rapidly over the coming centuries.207 Besides its pedigree
and growing popularity, urban literature was also highly varied. Focussing on
early modern Barcelona, James S. Amelang typologises several kinds of city
writing: city chronicles, travel accounts, encomia, chorographies, guidebooks,
administrative guides, colloquies or dialogues, literary descriptions (in ballads,
poems, stories), ephemera (e.g., news sheets, festival pamphlets, protest lit-
erature), personal reflections (in diaries and memoirs). Some writers took an
ambulatory perspective, others an aerial one, perhaps climbing to the top of a
tower or spire to look down upon the cityscape.208
In the Islamic near East, however, medieval and later writers folded
descriptions of the city (such as Baghdad, Cairo, or Damascus) into larger his-
tories.209 In the Indo-Persianate world, too, writing about the city was generally
to be found nestled in monumental or universal histories, court chronicles, and
royal biographies in prose and poetry. Such excursion into the city celebrated
its buildings and its inhabitants’ achievements –in commerce, cultural diver-
sity, and the travails of daily life –to give a rich yet sweeping picture of the
urban fabric. Such works thus provided readers with an ethnographic and
a topographical tour of the city –in the sense of relating the city’s different
people and occupations, and its places and buildings, respectively.210
A literary topos with roots in classical Persian, works of shahrangiz (liter-
ally, ‘enlivening the town’) or shahrashub (‘upsetting’ or ‘disturbing the town’)
have been described as city poems.211 ‘Beginning in the sixteenth century’, Sunil
Sharma observes, such poems ‘were written about every major urban centre
in the Persianate world’ from the Ottoman lands to India, ‘either as longer
narratives in the masnavi form or as short unconnected poems organised
around a city and a patron.’212 By contrast to their counterparts, Indo-Persian
poets provided less ethnographic detail –that is, little or no detailed informa-
tion about crafts, guilds, and business jargon –instead favouring to paint more
of an urban panorama while praising a city’s diversity. Their works often had
206 Wolfart, ‘Global Yokels’.

208 Amelang, Writing Cities, 1–40.
210 Sharma, ‘Urban Ethnography’.
211 Sharma, ‘City of Beauties’, here 80.
212 Sharma, ‘Urban Ethnography’, 242, for citation; Sharma, ‘City of Beauties’, 74–75 for discus-
sion of Deccani examples.
170 Urbanism
a (homo)erotic flavour, weaving ‘commerce and love in the form of addresses

to different craftsmen and youths’ that gave glimpses into bazaar life ‘against
the backdrop of a specific location.’213 These poems have an important place
in contemporary writing about Indian cities, on account of the high degree of
intertextuality between such poems and other literary forms, and an even more
special place in the history of Shahjahanabad, in particular.214 An important
break occurred in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, when Persian
began to give way to Urdu, and a panegyric mode (shahrangiz) gave way to a
nostalgic lament of the ruined city (shahrashub).215 Poets such as Sauda and
Mir –the noms de plume of Mirza Muhammad Rafi (1730–80) and Muhammad
Taqi Mir (1722–1810) –witnessed Shahjahanabad’s desecration in 1739 and
1757, their verses mourning corruption and the city’s decline.216
At work was a mixture of pessimism and historical reflexion also to be
found in subsequent writing in new genres. Even in a cosmopolitan capital like
Delhi, the advent of what we might today call urban history and urban anti-
quarianism came only in the nineteenth century.217 Elsewhere, too, the develop-
ment was slow and the impetus came not from a sense of civic pride, per se, but
as an outgrowth of gentry culture. Qasbahs were not singularly Muslim places
yet, as C.A. Bayly noted, they frequently had an ‘Islamic flavour’ and served
as the ‘repository of aristocratic and courtly values’, especially in post-Mughal
north India.218 Qasbatis thus became important patrons of arts, culture, and
religious and intellectual debate through the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, so that ashrafs began to identify their genealogy with the history of such
places. Only in the wake of 1857, and the confrontation with Muslim cultural
loss, however, did a sense of nostalgia result in works primarily of genealogy
tied to particular towns gradually giving way to what can be called urban his-
tory proper (albeit written for or from the perspective of certain ashraf families
and communities). A qasbah’s distinctive character –fashioned by generations
of elite cultural patronage –thus began to be celebrated at the very moment it
became palpably endangered.219
4.4 Conclusion
If the generation of 1739 had cause for lament, those who survived the ravages
of 1857 experienced an even more profound grief. In the course of the Indian
213 Sharma, ‘Urban Ethnography’ 242.

214 Sharma, Mughal Arcadia, 89–124.
215 On the classical models upon which the later poets could draw their inspiration, see: Blake,
Shahjahanabad, 165–66.
216 Ibid, 165–66.
217 Dadlani, From Stone, 166– 73. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s encyclopaedic Asar as-Sanadid
(‘Monuments of Rulers’), first published in 1847, has been located within the kinds of poetic-
cum-historical works described above.
218 Bayly, Rulers, 348.
219 Rahman, Qasbah Towns, especially 52–92. See, also: Khan, ‘Local Pasts’.
Urbanism 171
Rebellion, but particularly in its aftermath, large parts of Delhi were torn
down by the British to give them clear line of fire from the Qila Mubarak –or
Red Fort, as it came to be called –in case of further uprising. Despite this per-
sistent fear of another rebellion, the British could not resist Delhi’s symbolism
as a historic royal centre. The King-Emperor was crowned at a grand durbar on
an open expanse in 1911, a year before an entirely new city –New Delhi –was
commissioned just south of Shahjahanabad (nowadays called ‘Old Delhi’).220
Several decades old now, Stephen P. Blake’s highly innovative study of
Shahjahanabad paints a rich picture of the city, its inner life, and its meanings,
at the same time pushing back against the view of Asian capitals as the ‘great
amorphous agglomerations’ described by Marx, Weber, and colonial writers.221
They ‘were no doubt different from the cities of medieval Europe’, Blake writes,
‘but they were not formless, undifferentiated globs of villagers, ready to dissolve
at a moment.’222 The scholarship of a new generation of scholars has been
attentive to such matters as the city-dwellers’ interaction with the law or their
participation in politics, consumerism, the conception and use of space, and so
forth, as testified by material in this chapter. They have not only given credence
to Blake’s arguments but rendered them in new and more sophisticated ways,
and in so doing, reversed the long neglect of urban settings and disinterest in
town life as the other side of historians’ favouring rural settings and themes.223
Yet, we might usefully dwell a moment on the distinctiveness found on the
Indian subcontinent and the divergence from the urban experience elsewhere.
Towns were founded on seigneurial initiative across the medieval and early
modern world, although aided by commercial actors in many respects and
contexts. The ‘commercialisation of royal power’ (§5.4.4) in eighteenth-century
India not only widened the role of merchants in the processes underpinning
the growth and proliferation of towns, but also granted them a more direct role
in the establishment of qasbahs. The significance of this peculiar relationship
becomes apparent against the backdrop of other transitions. Imperial expan-
sion and centralisation from the late sixteenth century furthered a much longer
process of urbanisation across swathes of India, resulting in the growth of pri-
mate cities (Lahore, Agra, Delhi) as well the growth of other secondary cities
and large and small towns in both size and number.
Imperial decentralisation and collapse did not send this process into
reverse so much as redistribute urban populations: the dynastic capitals
of old kingdoms and new successor states in many places experienced a
sustained growth thanks to the windfall from declining centres (especially
the primate cities, but also other secondary cities), yet many secondary cities
and larger towns shrank at the expense of small marketing towns (qasbahs)
220 Metcalf, ‘Architecture and Empire’.

221 Blake, Shahjahanabad, xiv.
222 Ibid, xv.
223 See: Kaicker, The King, 2, however, for a pithy statement of the limitations of even the more
recent scholarship.
172 Urbanism
and larger villages.224 India thus differed from England, say, where an
‘urban Renaissance’ arrived only in the century or so prior to the Industrial
Revolution, fairly late relative to other parts of Europe and Asia surveyed
here and thus idiosyncratic, but where growth and transformation ultim-
ately favoured provincial and newly commercially significant centres at the
expense of numerous small towns.225 Unlike England, trends on the Indian
subcontinent at the same time included deepening rurbanisation and not the
stricter separation of rural and urban places. Unwittingly, Indian merchants
supported a development that saw the compacting and turning-inward of
states and markets at a time when their counterparts elsewhere facilitated
their deepening and outward expansion.
A turning inward can also be detected in other respects. Shahjahanabad’s
cityscape may have been changing, but the city’s finest buildings were built in
a historically reflexive mode, referencing great buildings of the past, while the
dwellings of the poorer classes were of the same primitive construction by the end
of our period as they had been a century or more prior. Cities were a subject of
Indian literary and historiographical production, to be sure, but works explicitly
and unequivocally dedicated to celebrating the genius urbis only began appearing
toward the very end of our period, spurred not so much by the pride in what
was extant but nostalgia for what had been or else was endangered. Consumer
society, too, had a belated advent or else was shallower than in other parts of
the world, including swathes of the Islamic near and middle East, Europe, and
Japan. All this, moreover, derives from scholarship on the north and only from
a few locales, at that; how south India fits into this picture, if at all, has yet to be
properly fleshed out.
At the level of the neighbourhood, the lives of Indian urbanites were
structured by similar institutions to those elsewhere in Asia and Europe –
namely, resort by magistrates to community leaders in the resolution of disputes,
community-organised policing, and so forth.226 On a broader level, however,
there were important differences of Indian towns and cities from those else-
where in Eurasia. City government in early modern Asia was often the task
of officeholders appointed by a monarch or ruler, whereas in Europe an array
of institutions and collective bodies fought to check monarchical intrusion
and maintain the autonomy of towns and cities and their inhabitants, one side
effect of which is the far richer range of material for the study of European as
opposed to Asian centres.227 Citizenship and elections also distinguished the
224 For a nuanced picture of the ‘twilight’ in Delhi and Agra, see: Bayly, ‘Delhi’, 228–35.
225 Borsay, Urban Renaissance.
226 Friedrichs, ‘Eurasian City’, 48–50.
227 For an indicative but hardly exhaustive summary of the differences in source material around
the world, see: Burke, ‘Culture’, 438–39. The argument here is not to breathe fresh life into
Max Weber’s differentiation of European from Islamic cities on the grounds of corporate
self-governance in the former versus its absence in the latter. Such ideas were not rooted in
evidence, as Eldem et al argue in Ottoman City, 1–16.
Urbanism 173
political culture and role of European from Asian towns and cities.228 Evidence
of the stirrings of a popular politics means we can dispel the notion of the
Indian masses as everywhere lacking either a voice or a role in political affairs,
yet ordinary Shahjahanabadis’ limited citizenship, their conception of sov-
ereignty that revolved around the figure of the king, and thus their narrow
expectations of government strike one as archaic. The events of 1739 are not
only peculiar when set against something as singularly extraordinary as the
storming of the Bastille in Paris a half century later, but in light of the per-
sistence of Mughal government more or less unchanged in form from that of
the classical age when the Ottoman and other European states were steadily
transformed through the course of the seventeenth century.
Corporate interests nowhere in south Asia resembled those found in the City
of London (the ancient capital’s financial centre).229 Its wealthy and powerful
livery companies –such as the Mercer’s or the Merchant Taylors –not only
looked after their members’ interests into old age, not only played a part in
local governance and cultural life (feasts, annual celebrations like the Lord
Mayor’s Day), not only set the standards of particular trades throughout the
land, and not only laid the foundations for England’s growing empire of trade
and colonisation (in Virginia and Ulster). They also had the clout to variously
court and counterbalance the power and authority of the king and government
in the City of Westminster (London’s political centre), as so spectacularly came
to a head in years leading up to Charles I’s execution and the establishment of
the short-lived Commonwealth (1649–60).230
Institutions of political representation existed even in east-central Europe,
where early modern urbanisation may have been weaker in pace and character
than to the west but was certainly in motion (more so in the Polish lands, less so
in Hungary). On the European periphery, urbanisation was linked to economic
change, immigration of outsiders from as far afield as Italy and Scotland, and
the confessional conflicts of the (Counter-)Reformation, together unleashing
new pressures upon relatively ‘closed’ urban societies. On the one hand, these
created new tensions, testing and transforming medieval institutions of civic
governance. On the other hand, this was fiercely curbed by conservative cen-
tral states, which financed military expansionism via exactions from the urban
sector even as they trampled much of the political and administrative autonomy
of towns and cities granted by medieval charters.231 In India over the long-and
medium-term, by contrast, rulers could collect sufficient agrarian revenues
or tap the wealth accumulated in central and provincial treasuries to obviate
228 Friedrichs, ‘Eurasian City’, 30–31, 34–36, for these differences, and 37–43, for evidence from
China, the Ottoman world, and Mughal India that puts paid to the view of Asian city-dwellers
as passive victims of elite indifference.
229 C.f. Friedrichs, ‘Eurasian City’, 47 and nn.36–38.
230 Lincoln, London, especially 35–47, 85–86, 103–14, 131–47.
231 Miller, Urban Societies, which additionally provides a much-needed survey of east-central
European developments against the dominance of western Europe in urban historiographies.
174 Urbanism
against a reliance on bankers, corporate bodies, or urban patriciates for cash

to wage war (before c. 1700, at least).232 The cooperation of such groups was
necessary to establish and maintain imperial rule, but the state’s demand upon
such groups was within a much narrower range.233 They also intruded little into
confessional matters by necessity.
Thus, a general absence of organs of ‘political representation’ and strong
civic institutions in Indian towns and cities both before c. 1400 and in the
course of ongoing urbanisation was perhaps the other side of the coin of
multi-ethnic, agrarian empire. The state neither had to squash strong and inde-
pendent city authorities nor occasioned many calls for the inclusion of local
interests in extra-local governance.234 Nevertheless, towns have variously also
been connected to the everyday functioning yet also to the undoing of feu-
dalism, and thus to the transition to modernity.235 Naturally, therefore, it is to
capitalism that we must turn our attention.
232 For a useful discussion, see: Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 60.
233 See: Hasan, Locality.
234 Clark, ed., European Cities and Towns, 201–19, for a broader canvas of changes to city govern-
ance in early modern Europe.
235 For a sharp and concise survey: Malekandathil, ‘Introduction’, 1–3.
5 Capitalism
The Great Divergence is both a stylised fact and a new approach to an old
problem. The fact is that there was a divergence in living standards between a
cluster of economies in northwest Europe (England, most notably) and the rest
of the world, by and large persisting ever since, save for convergence among
European, the north American, and some non-Western economies.1 Scratch
beneath the surface of this ‘fact’, however, and one would not so much find any
kind of resolution among historians as multiple problems. When exactly did
divergence occur? How do we know it occurred? –that is, with what data as a
proxy for living standards? How reliable are these data?2
The Great Divergence unfolded at a time before governments began national
accounting (i.e., collecting data and compiling figures about the size of the
economy, its growth, and each person’s notional share of it). Thus, historians
have had to assess each person’s share of output –national income per person,
nowadays measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita –by using a
proxy, be it the purchasing power of wages or such anthropometric measures as
stature. Of course, many of these proxies are themselves estimates or else come
from quite scanty evidence; the degrees of separation between the evidence and
what we hope it represents has only given historians more cause for debate.
And, dovetailing with these disagreements over reliably identifying divergence,
there is much dispute over its causes, be they environmental, intellectual, or
institutional, a matter of chance or design.3 All this has reinvigorated the field;
the Great Divergence is the single most important issue in global economic
history.4
At the heart of all this puzzling is a concern for economic development,
changing living standards, and thus the related search for the origins and
1 See, for a well-organised guide to, and comprehensive synthesis of, the vast literature on the
Great Divergence: Court, ‘Reassessment’.
2 See: Goldstone, ‘Dating’, and the replies in the same special issue, especially Broadberry,
‘Historical National Accounting’, and numerous other of Broadberry’s rebuttals of the Great
Divergence revisionism.
3 Parthasarathi and Pomeranz, ‘Great Divergence Debate’.
4 See, for instance: Roy and Riello, eds. Global Economic History.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-5
176 Capitalism
sources of modern economic growth. The latter was often assumed to be inex-
tricably linked to industrialisation (sometimes even elided with ‘modernisa-
tion’); hence, the long-standing fixation on the Industrial Revolution and on
England’s historical experience. The so-called ‘rise of the Europe’, finally, was
the grandest macro-narrative into which these processes were folded, although
this is nowadays controversial, and rightly so, for it smacks of Eurocentrism
and Orientalism in its proclamation of the superiority and triumph of the
‘West’ in contrast to the languishing ‘Rest’ (i.e., Asia, Africa, Latin America).
It was against this that Kenneth Pomeranz’s reciprocal comparison of parts of
China (the Yangzi basin) with parts of northwest Europe (England, Holland)
inaugurated the Great Divergence debate.
Pomeranz suggested that Europe was neither more dynamic nor superior to
China, but lucky; that divergence opened quite late, around c. 1800; and that
its causes lay in the only major differences between the two regions, which were
otherwise remarkably similar. The chance discovery of coal close to manufac-
turing centres and water courses in England made its exploitation –and the
advent of steam-powered technology –worthwhile, while the similarly fortu-
nate discovery of the New World by Europeans provided them with ‘ghost
acres’ (i.e., land from which to produce commodities pivotal to industrialisa-
tion like sugar and cotton without sacrificing the use of Europe’s productive
arable).5 Prasannan Parthasarathi subsequently argued that India’s divergence
was also as late, of recent making, and as sudden as China’s.6 It arose because
of Britain’s need to face constraints not felt in India but resulting, in fact, from
the influx of Indian imports (cotton textiles). It also arose because the British
state was mercantilist and protected its national interests in a way that Indian
and other states did not. Britain’s conquest of India helped turn a problem into
a solution, resulting in the stymying of intellectual and technological progress
that might otherwise have precluded India’s dramatic divergence.
Criticism of both scholars’ data and analysis has been fierce, but what does
any of this matter? One consequence of the late/sudden versus earlier/slower
dispute is the significance it places on causes or developments in the modern
versus early modern (or late medieval) periods, respectively.7 Of course, early
modernity was much more than an incubating period whose significance rests
on whether or not it birthed those demographic, social, economic, political, or
intellectual features necessary to foster industrialisation and thus divergence,
as this book strives to show. Another consequence of the historiographical
rancour has been to lose sight of some areas of common ground as well as our
guiding motivations in studying the Great Divergence or seeking the origins
of modern economic growth in the first place. How, we might explicitly ask
and thereby reground ourselves, were peoples’ lives changing –at all levels of
society and across all economic classes or groups –as market relations and
5 Pomeranz, Great Divergence.

6 Parthasarathi, Asia.
7 Broadberry et al, ‘Anglo-Indian Comparison’. See, also: van Zanden, Long Road.
Capitalism 177
globalisation spread and their effects intensified? Here, then, we must bring
capitalism into the picture once again.
Capitalism was nowhere fully formed in the early modern period –not, at
least, as we might find it in Karl Marx’s lifetime and thus in his writings. One
approach taken by historians has been to look for precursors to that ‘capit-
alism proper’, such as agrarian capitalism, merchant capitalism, financial cap-
italism, and so forth.8 Or, we might look for the features of mature capitalism,
such as profit-oriented market activity, capital formation and property, com-
petitive wage labour markets, entrepreneurship, and even a spirit of economic
individualism.9 There are severe shortcomings to both approaches –that is,
to thinking of capitalism as a single spatial-temporal phenomenon, with oft-
presumed origins in western Europe, and to saddling the early moderns’ his-
torical experience with the features of modernity (§11.2).10 Instead, we might
valuably turn from these Eurocentric ideas and analyses to the work of those
world historians who, by the 1980s, had shaken-off the deeply ingrained notion
of a ‘fundamental gulf’ separating places like India from Europe, the former
supposedly static and unchanging, the latter the dynamic birthplace of cap-
italism, from whence it spread around the world following the Occidental
breakout (§1.3.2).11
Capitalism has gradually become deracinated, one way or another, from
those moorings that were formative of its historical study: out with Marxism,
as well as structuralism and dependency theory (which underwrote world-
systems theory), and a gradual shift away from Eurocentric projects and meth-
odologies, paving the way toward the kinds of reciprocal comparisons made
by Pomeranz and Parathasarathi. Tirthankar Roy and Giorgio Riello note, for
instance, the newfound ‘emphasis on market exchange on a world scale’ that has
popularised the idea ‘that capitalism was formed of a series of interconnected
market exchanges’, giving rise to ‘an altogether more flexible and easy defin-
ition of capitalism than the orthodox Marxist one based on patterns of own-
ership of assets.’12 This chapter adopts a similar understanding of capitalism,
meanwhile looking at the character of economic life in early modern India to
pinpoint where and how market-based activity steadily spread.13 This helps
us better understand the character and variety of premodern capitalism(s),
not to mention how India might have shaped the emerging global capitalist
system. The latter was becoming manifest in the eighteenth century; was
8 Neal, ‘Introduction’, here 2.

9 Such is Muldrew’s approach in ‘Capitalism’.
10 Edwards et al, ‘Capitalism in Global History’, for a critical survey of seminal works since the
1950s and the contours of a new scholarly agenda. See, also: Burnard and Riello, ‘Slavery’, for
a critique of the so-called ‘new history of capitalism’, the pivot of which has been slavery and
the slave trade.
11 Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialisation’. Subrahmanyam, ‘Rural Industry’, especially 110–14, for crit-
ical examination of the debate ushered by Perlin’s contribution.
12 Roy and Riello, ‘Introduction’, 5.
13 C.f. Roy, ‘Capitalism in India’.
178 Capitalism
largely organised by the interests, laws, and violent hegemony emanating from
Europe; and is now that form of capitalism most familiar to us thanks to the
writings of Marx and others in his stead.
One concern may be that disowning more left-wing approaches entails
abandoning inquiry concerning the entanglement of capitalism with power,
violence, exploitation, and structural inequality.14 Against this, the following
survey explores and foregrounds such entanglements wherever possible, some-
times bringing to light issues to which older Marxist –or world systems-
inspired analysis was often blind (e.g., gender, the environment). By the end of
this chapter, three things ought to be clear. First, that many of the processes
of economic change at work in India through the early modern period had
causes or outcomes interlinking the Indian subcontinent to other parts of the
world. Second, and as a corollary, that the historical development of the global
capitalist system was as intimately connected to the early modern ‘Indian
Ocean world-economy’ as it was to the Atlantic world-economy, even as it
came to subsume these, in course.15 And, third, that to be genuinely concerned
with living standards and material well-being, we cannot ignore the perils
of focusing narrowly on economic growth (and divergence). The centuries-
long processes of economic expansion and the very extraction of the earth’s
resources that has fed us and our improving ‘quality of life’ will soon reach
such an extent as to potentially make our living standards freefall. With this
in mind, the next section opens by thinking about the environment and the
origins of the Anthropocene.
5.1 Land
We live in the Anthropocene, ‘a new geological epoch’ in our planet’s history in
which humans have become ‘geological agents’, their lifeways and impacts on
Earth so large and significant that it has ‘altered Earth systems’ (e.g., climate,
environment).16 Whether it began during the Great Acceleration from the
1950s or the Industrial Revolution of the long nineteenth century, it remains
that the spread and deepening of capitalism is absolutely central to why and
how humans became geological agents. Of course, the deeper into the past
we go, the greater the difficulty of convincingly linking human phenomena to
planetary-level change. Yet, there is good reason to examine the impact upon
the natural world of early modern globalisation and empire building, for they
14 Edwards et al, ‘Capitalism in Global History’. Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, argues that
early modern south India was a commercial society without being capitalist, and thus offers a
critical counterpoint to some of the arguments made in this chapter and the understandings of
capitalism underlying them.
15 C.f. Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, especially 213–23 for a subtly but decisively different
interpretation, resting on a belief that the Indian Ocean world-economy was not capitalist and
that only a single form of capitalism truly existed (i.e., that found in Europe).
16 Bashford, ‘Anthropocene’, 341.
Capitalism 179
were deeply entwined with the development of capitalism, industrialisation,

and the Great Divergence. The European ‘discovery’ of the Americas brought
Old World diseases to the New World that resulted in the ‘Great Dying’, a
phenomenon of human death at such scale that it perhaps resulted in refor-
estation (this proposition is contentious). This possibly created a carbon sink
that helped precipitate global cooling. Thus, it is possible to link the Occidental
breakout and the Little Ice Age (§1.2.1), and the dawn of early modernity to
the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.17 But there are other
ways of making such connections.
5.1.1 An Unending Frontier?
In his magisterial synthesis of environmental history, John F. Richards iden-

tified and examined four key anthropogenic processes: (1) ‘intensified human
land use along settlement frontiers,’ (2) ‘biological invasions,’ (3) ‘intensified
commercial hunting’, and (4) ‘energy and resource scarcities in core areas’.18 It
was from c. 1500, according to Richards, that these four processes intensified.
A key factor was the steady increase in the capacity and efficiency of states and
markets (as described in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book); ever-stronger, they
‘encouraged voracious consumption of new, varied natural resources from
even the most sparsely populated, seemingly marginal areas of the globe.’19
Each of the four processes is important, yet what concerns us here –and was
perhaps the commonest and most wide-reaching –is the greater pressure
placed on the land through the expansion of settled cultivation ‘at the expense
of forests, woodlands, wetlands, and savannas’, inevitably causing habitat loss,
a reduction in both biomass and biodiversity, and myriad other changes, such
as the dropping of the water table around irrigated lands or increased flooding
where waterways were modified.20
‘Encouraged, directed, and subsidised by expansive states, surplus
populations moved steadily and easily to new areas promising employment
or fertile land’, usually on the frontiers of states, where settlement and arable
met shifting cultivators, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers roaming forests or
open grasslands, and which often resulted in ‘ethnic’ conflict, in consequence.21
Viewing these areas as ‘empty’ lands, ‘the colonising state conferred property
rights on its frontier settlers’ –namely, ‘the right to occupy, alienate, mortgage,
and bequeath lands so owned’ –requiring only that they continue to work
or even ‘improve’ (i.e., increase the yields of) their new property, all of which
was bolstered by cadastral surveys and mapping that ‘added new precision to
notions of land ownership and aided nascent land markets.’22 Occasionally,
17 Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn, 258. See, also: Richards, Unending Frontier, 58–85.
18 Richards, Unending Frontier, 4.
19 Ibid, 24.
20 Ibid, 4.
21 Ibid, 4.
22 Ibid, 5.
180 Capitalism
this process had an industrial character, such as where vast tracts of rainforest
were cleared by enslaved peoples to create sugar plantations.
Across the Indian subcontinent, there was a secular increase in cultiva-
tion through the early modern period, albeit in fits and starts. Aside from
the seventeenth-century phase of the Little Ice Age, other –occasionally
localised –phenomena sometimes set a pause on growth. The demographic toll
of famine induced by climatic fluctuation, combined with the ‘state’s chronic
inability to harmonise the agrarian economy of the dry, upland plateau with
the commercialised economy of the rich Tamil coast before the sixteenth cen-
tury’, resulted in the cessation –possibly the stagnation –of growth in later
fifteenth-century Vijayanagara, for instance.23 If India was prone to dramatic
and devastating climatic fluctuation on occasion, large parts of the subcon-
tinent were blessed with an ecology that provided great scope for the expansion
of production, especially the lands straddling the valleys and basins of its great
river systems. The northeast monsoon (December-February) brought a cool-
dry season before the hot-dry season (March-June), followed by the hot-wet
season associated with the southwest monsoon (from July). This is the general
pattern, for the timing and intensity of the monsoon varied: Punjab and the
Deccan Plateau are never inundated quite like Bengal or the western Ghats, for
instance, and are far less humid.
The crop cycle followed the seasons, with winter crops planted just as the
earlier crop had been harvested to benefit from the rains and avoid the hot
swelter.24 Europeans were stunned by the harvesting of two crops a year, even
three in a few places. Indian agriculturalists had a sound understanding of
crop rotation, usually leaving most land single cropped (yek-fasla) with either
the spring (rabi) or autumn (kharif) harvest crop, so that the land was fallow
for half the year, but sometimes sowing the land for a succession of harvests. In
addition, evidence of land being sown with a succession of rice, tobacco, and
then cotton in eighteenth-century Bengal, for instance, suggests a wider know-
ledge of crop rotation.25 Irrigation –outside the rainy season –was by means
of wells and canals.26
Climate played a key role in the phasing of agrarian expansion, and the
experience on the Indian subcontinent was most likely part of longer-term
patterns seen across the northern hemisphere: disturbance in the seventeenth
century sandwiched by more propitious periods up to c. 1560 or 1570 and after
about the second quarter of the eighteenth century. As to the particular dynamic
of agrarian expansion, this was primarily motored by the steady pushing back
of the cultivable frontier. The clearance of scrub and jungle and its conversion
23 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 85.

24 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 8–15, gives an excellent guide to India’s diverse ecology and
seasonality.
25 Habib, Agrarian System, 27, where the variations in the practice are noted, including evidence
that it was little understood in some parts of India.
26 Ibid, 28–39.
Capitalism 181
to arable had been ongoing for centuries and had advanced to such a great
extent in the Gangetic valley in the pre-Mughal period that travellers noted
the want of trees, yet the process would continue through the auspices of the
Mughals and their successors, such as the Afghan rulers of eighteenth-century
Rohilkhand and Farrukabad.27 According to Irfan Habib, the greatest increases
in the period from the advent of Mughal rule to c. 1900 were experienced in
the Gangetic valley and Bengal, resulting from the clearance of sub-montane
forests (§3.1.1), and in Berar, due to the denudation of the central Indian
forests.28 Because of negligible technological change and thus the continued
reliance on manuring as the sole means of maintaining fertility and yields, the
thin soils of the erstwhile forests and wastes degraded, so that output per acre
dropped in the long term.29 Some might rail at Mughal-era clearance and col-
onisation (by the plough) of Bengal’s forests being posited as the beginnings of
a process that has now reached its frontier, on the Sundarbans, a delicate and
globally significant environment that is currently under destruction.30 Yet, we
cannot situate early modern south Asia in a world of expanding commercial-
isation and ignore the planetary-level effects of such processes.
Globalisation also played its part, for it was not only how much but also
what was produced that changed. Whether primarily for subsistence or for
market exchange, Indian peasants grew a range of legumes and food grains
(jins-i ghalla) –rice, wheat, barley, millet, and sorghum. With the steady
commercialisation of the economy, production for the market of a range
of higher-grade or cash crops (jins-i kamil or jins-i a‘la) increased: oilseed,
cotton, sugarcane, indigo and other dye-yielding plants, hemp and other fibre-
yielding plants, spices, saffron (in Kashmir), and fruit (which was for market
exchange if not quite a cash-crop per se).31 The process of commercialisation
did not begin with the arrival of Europeans in the Indian Ocean world in
1498 or with the establishment of the Mughal state in 1526.32 In north India,
peasants seem to have been paying the revenue demands of the state in cash
from the thirteenth century.33 In the south, too, there is evidence of the steady
monetisation of the economy from c. 1500 linked to tighter relation of the
‘state, producing economy, and external commerce’, especially as the latter
steadily expanded.34
27 Moosvi, People, 91–100; Eaton, Persianate Age, 52; Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 104–43.
29 Ibid, 22–23. Habib also suggests that the average size of the field and number of cattle per
household fell between c. 1595 and c. 1900, so that the availability of manure probably
declined: op. cit., 62.
30 Richards, Unending Frontier, 32–38.
31 Habib, Agrarian System, 43–59, which provides this largely north Indian picture. For a survey of
south Indian crops and agrarian specialisation, see: Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 25–31.
32 Asher and Talbot, India, 57, 93–96, for evidence of commercialisation in the later medieval era.
34 Subrahmanyam, Political Economy. See, also: Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 124–27;
Sohoni, ‘Coinage’.
182 Capitalism
Yet, the spread of the cash nexus becomes much more visible –in the source
material, at least –from the late sixteenth century.35 The causes were inter-
active and both local and global. They include the spread of the Mughal
imperium and its fiscal and monetary systems, part and parcel of which were
efforts to standardise weights and coins, collect revenue demands in cash, and
encourage greater cultivation; the influx of bullion and/or coined metal and the
increasing monetisation of the economy; and the growth of trade at various
scales (local, regional, overland, overseas), especially Indian Ocean and Euro-
Asian trade.36 Precious metal flows from Europe (via the Levant), Japan, and
east Africa pre-dated the discovery of the New World, yet American silver
imports were transformative.37 Shipments from Europe via the Cape of Good
Hope increased almost twenty-fold over the sixteenth century due to the avail-
ability of American silver.38 But this was actually the least important route
until the eighteenth century, for the route from Europe via the Levant as well
as direct shipment from America via Manilla were the main channels by which
Europeans brought precious metals to Asia, particularly India and China.39
Besides this, the spread of the cash nexus was global in another respect.
The use of copper coin for everyday transactions was growing in Europe at
roughly the same time as India, Burma, southeast Asia, and Japan, signalling
that economic change in India was part of a broader development.40 Indian
agriculturalists carted their produce to local markets for sale in return for
goods and cash, using the latter to buy other goods or to pay taxes, which was
expressed in terms of copper coins called dams. Or they might part with a pro-
portion in lieu of taxes to the local jagirdar and his agents (who were probably
able to realise a better price than the peasant themselves) and in lieu of loans to
their creditors (to whom they sold on contracted, and probably unfavourable,
35 Muldrew, Obligations, 100–01 reminds us that monetisation and money usage were nowhere
sufficient in early modern England to ‘alienate economic exchanges from social exchanges in
the Marxist sense of a “cash nexus” ’ and money was really ‘only the grease which oiled the
much larger machinery of credit.’ In India, too, rapid monetisation propelled the economy
toward the destination implied by the concept of the ‘cash nexus’, without actually quite
reaching it.
36 Richards, ed., Imperial Monetary System, remains a most valuable collection of essays on mon-
etary history and much of what is described, above. That said, besides metallic money, cowries
and other ‘humble currency’ remained in use into the colonial period, especially in Bengal;
Perlin’s essay in op. cit. and his ‘Proto-Industrialisation, 63–64. Habib, Agrarian System, 293–
97, describes the state’s means of incentivising or inducing cultivation. And, for the existence
of a cash-nexus in the Maratha domains: Wink, Land and Sovereignty, 331–39.
37 Irigoin, ‘Global Silver Economy’ is an excellent essay, explaining how the exploitation of
American silver impacted Europe and Asia.
38 Japanese silver remained critical, not far off the volume of American metal imports, which
gives some sense of the impact the injection of the latter made to Asian trade: Subrahmanyam,
Portuguese Empire, 159. Access to Japanese silver, moreover, underwrote the Portuguese
expansion and –following their expulsion from Japan in favour of the Dutch –the VOC’s
domination of other European players to about 1680: op. cit., 186–87, 293.
39 Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 186–87.
40 Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialisation’, 62–63, 68–69.
Capitalism 183
terms). Some merchants also visited villages to buy certain higher-value crops,
then selling them through their networks.41
Another important cause of the growth of commercialised agriculture was
the agility and adaptability of Indian peasants, without whose knowledge and
willingness to introduce or switch between crops all of this would have been
impossible. One peasant in late eighteenth-century eastern Rajasthan was
said to raise an extraordinary nine crops, but many others in the same locality
impressively raised between three and six each, for example.42 Some of these
crops were possibly higher-yield varieties, the products of long-term special-
isation, or else more abundant due to the use of fertilisers (e.g., green manure,
animal manure), as was the case elsewhere in Asia.43 Some were entirely new,
quite literally the fruits of what Alfred W. Crosby termed the Columbian
Exchange –that is, the criss-cross of Old and New World species.44 They made
their appearance from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, either
via the Ottoman lands or via Portuguese settlements, and were eventually
embraced by Indians, much as east and southeast Asians did, too.45 Maize
was cultivated in western and south India from the 1620s or so and had spread
to eastern Rajasthan by the 1660s. Tobacco probably spread first to southern
courts like Bijapur and then to the north. The now-ubiquitous chilli peppers
that spice Indian cuisine were another New World novelty, as were guavas,
pineapples, papayas, and cashew nuts, while coffee –although cultivated only
to a limited extent, entirely in south India –originated from the other side of
the Arabian Sea.46
The consequences of this have not been drawn out beyond trite celebration
of Indians’ gustatory cosmopolitanism.47 The clearance of forest, furthermore,
did not merely continue in a piecemeal way, but accelerated under Shah Jahan
and even became fairly systematised, almost a dictate of Mughal rule.48 Similar
processes unfolded across the world, from the expanding Russian Empire in
the northern hemisphere to the Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope
and its environs in the south, but the evidence from China is powerfully sug-
gestive of the combined impact of cash crop production and the extension
of cultivation to increasingly marginal land.49 There, not only tobacco but
also maize and sweet potatoes were incorporated into the consumption and
41 Ibid, 73–79; Habib, Agrarian System, 85, 276–81.

43 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii, 427, 449, on Japan.
44 Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn, 256, for a summary.
45 On the latter, see, for example: Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 436–37.
46 Habib, Agrarian System, 42–43, 50–51, 54–55. See, for the longer history of transplantation of
flora, prior to the Europeans’ arrival: Pearson, Indian Ocean, 168.
47 Except cursorily in: Richards, Unending Frontier, 32–38.
48 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 29–30.
49 Richards, Unending Frontier, 242–306. The relation of agrarian expansion to soil erosion or
desiccation in the long term in southeast Asia have also been detailed by Lieberman in Strange
Parallels, vol. i, e.g., 239, as part of the explanation of political cycles (§7.5).
184 Capitalism
cultivation patterns of a hungry yet growing population, for these crops were
high in calories and well suited to relatively poor soils on slopes and hillsides. In
the medium-term, the cultivation of marginal land more suited to the shifting
swidden agriculture of indigenes led to the rapid degradation and washing
away of the soil, the silting of waterways, and thus the devastating flooding
and famines of the late Qing era, although such dangers and the general loss
of biodiversity were apparent to the Qing elites long before then.50
Adding to the impacts of cash crop farming were those associated with
shipbuilding. Indian shipwrights were celebrated by contemporaries for their
craftsmanship, even supplying Europeans with vessels, but their flourishing
business is an index for the more archivally silent and invisible process of defor-
estation.51 In order to begin to place this into context, we might remember that
the largest European ships were constructed from the timber not of hundreds,
but of thousands of felled mature trees. The rapid escalation of shipbuilding
so depleted English woodlands of species like oak by the seventeenth century,
that a lucrative market for timber from private lands sprang up to supply the
Royal Navy, who also found it necessary to import timber from the Baltic and
the American colonies.52 Indian shipbuilding probably produced similar effects.
As the demand for certain goods grew, so ‘commodity frontiers’ pushed out-
ward, sucking in more labour and turning more land over to settled agriculture,
transforming the ‘global countryside’ and drawing the livelihoods of more and
more Indians –like their counterparts elsewhere in the world –within the ambit
of the market, so that (parts of) India became steadily more entangled into
the global capitalist system that was emerging from c. 1450.53 A few caveats,
however. First, there were places where trade was just as important, yet was
of a distinct character from what has presently been described. Malabar, for
example, had never been a part of the Mughal Empire or other inland states
and its rulers did not collect land revenues until the end of our period. Calicut
was its most important port, although Cochin enjoyed efflorescences in the
sixteenth century (associated with the Portuguese) and in the early eighteenth
century (the Dutch). The main exports were pepper, and latterly timber, san-
dalwood, and coconut products, with the export trade dominated by various
Indian and Arab merchants, European private traders, the remaining (small)
proportion handled by the European companies.54
50 Janku, ‘Drought’; Schlesinger, World Trimmed With Fur. For comparison with the combin-
ation of demographic growth, imperial expansion, and ecological damage in the Ottoman clas-
sical age: White, Climate of Rebellion, 15–122. Among the outcomes of the resultant crisis was
further commercialisation based on cash crops for European markets; op. cit., 276–97.
51 Pearson, Indian Ocean, 185.
52 Richards, Unending Frontier, 224– 27. For other, devastating details: Paquette, Seaborne
Empires, 129–30.
53 For an explication of this thesis and a novel research agenda linking capitalism and commod-
ities: Beckert et al, ‘Commodity Frontiers’.
54 Das Gupta, Collected Essays, 158–60.
Capitalism 185
Secondly, despite the march of settled agriculture, Indian peasants (and

artisans) were able to take flight in the face of adverse conditions, often seeking
refuge with distant relatives or –as uparis (landless labourers) –maybe even
welcomed into villages in need of extra hands.55 The commonest cause was the
search for sustenance. In the Mughal classical age alone, there seem to have
been scarcities or famines of varying degrees of severity in 1554–56 (afflicting
Delhi, Agra, and other large tracts of the Gangetic valley), the 1560s (Gujarat),
1572–73 (Sirhind), 1574–75 (Gujarat), 1578–79 (parts of north India), 1587–
88 and 1589–90 (Sindh), 1596 (across Hindustan), 1597 (Kashmir), the great
famine of 1630–32 (Gujarat and the Deccan), 1636–37 (Punjab), recurrently in
the 1640s and in 1650 (across north India), 1651 (Punjab), 1655 (parts of the
Deccan), 1662–63 (Bengal), during the war of succession fought after Shah
Jahan’s death, in 1670 (Bihar and Bijapur), 1678 (around Lahore and Ajmer),
1685 and 1691 (Gujarat), 1686 (the Deccan), 1694–95 (Gujarat and Delhi),
1695 (Odisha), 1696–97 (parts of Gujarat and Malwa), a great famine in 1702–
04 (the Deccan), two at the start of Farrukhsiyar’s reign (1713–19) and another
in Delhi in 1719. The causes were droughts or unseasonable rains, occasionally
plagues of locusts or bouts of plague, and sometimes the effect of warfare.56
There were, finally, a range of groups who maintained semi-nomadic or pas-
toral lifestyles. The Banjaras combined the search for fresh pasturage with the
carriage of bulky goods, like grain, on the back of their herds of thousands of
pack bullocks. They had been operating in the Deccan since at least the fifteenth
century, with south Indian weavers relying on them to bring cotton from the
‘black soil’ tracts, but they also moved other goods through their very extensive
networks across the peninsula.57 The cost of transportation was low, but profits
were only to be made when price differentials were sufficiently large, perhaps
due to scarcity caused by poor harvests or the disruption brought by localised
fighting or war.58 Other pastoral groups include the Powindas, who circulated
between the Afghan highlands and the north Indian plains, and sometimes as
far south as Gujarat and the Deccan, exchanging their animal products (hides,
milk, fats like ghi) and the productions of their homeland (especially fresh and
dried fruits and nuts) for Indian wares.59 Outside settled agriculture and pas-
toralism were groups residing in forests and uplands (§1.1.1).
5.1.2 Ownership and Rights
If some mobile groups grazed thousands of animals on (presumably) common

pasturage while other seemingly settled cultivators did not hesitate to take
55 Gordon, Marathas, 36.

56 Habib, Agrarian System, 113–22, for details of the pre-1707 famines, and 291–92, for famine
relief measures; Alam, Crisis, 31–32.
186 Capitalism
flight when necessary, we might ask: Who owned the land? Was it the king?
While much contemporary and colonial-era writing by Europeans contains
the hardy Orientalist trope of the absolutist potentate, Indian –especially
Mughal –sources paint a different picture. There was neither sanction in
Hindu or Muslim law for the king’s allodial title to land, nor any proclam-
ation of such pretence in Mughal documents. The revenue demanded by the
Ottoman or Mughal rulers from their subjects was conceived as a kind of social
contract, for Hanafi jurisprudential thought had it that the land belonged to
god, with the king merely its guardian.60 That said, transfers of urban real
estate (§4.2.3) signify ownership and property right residing beyond the frame
of mere royal dispensation (i.e., the grant of waqf, madad-i ma‘ash, inam), no
matter that such property rights were more fragile in India and many other
parts of the early modern world than today.61 In south India, too, property
rights were extant by the Vijayanagara period, held primarily by temples but
also by individuals, as attested by the sales of land to pay property taxes.62
In mainland southeast Asia, by way of a comparison, glebe lands (the equiva-
lent of madad-i ma‘ash) were ‘openly sold and mortgaged like private prop-
erty’ from the early fifteenth century. Royal bans on such alienation and sale
from time to time notwithstanding, the real estate market steadily developed,
supported by the legal system and driven by the demand for foodstuffs that
pushed up the value of land around marketing centres around the late seven-
teenth or early eighteenth century.63 Here we find all the same ingredients in
the mix in south Asia, too: the pressure of commercialisation on land values,
the appetite for speculation in real estate, a developing legal infrastructure,
and the unwillingness (or inability) of the early modern state to thwart the
sale of property.64 Increasingly, and certainly by the last century or so of our
period, therefore, the market for land existed as never before. The evidence
from Ottoman Anatolia is similar.65
If, before that time, the king did not own the land, then how about the Indian
equivalent of a baron? The words zamindari and zamindar are of entirely
Indo-Persian derivation and had come into use by the early fourteenth cen-
tury. Zamindari indicates proprietary rights that provided the possessor with
an income, usually a customary share of village produce. Zamindars possessed
such rights and ‘belonged to a rural class other than, and standing above, the
peasantry.’66 Theirs, moreover, was a superior right: zamindars owned land and
so, in many cases, did peasants, yet the zamindar in some places possessed the

61 Khoury, ‘Administrative Practice’, 309–10.
63 Lieberman in Strange Parallels, vol. i, 160, 179, 298.
64 In addition to evidence –mostly from north India –cited in this chapter, see: Palat, Indian
Ocean World-Economy, 106, for indications that the Tamil country was part of these processes.
65 Faroqhi, Towns, 242–66; Khoury, ‘Administrative Practices’.
66 Habib, Agrarian System, 174, for citation, and 169–91.
Capitalism 187
right to evict landowning peasants or to redistribute land beyond that of his

(or her) ownership.67 The wellspring of such rights was ‘when a village was
settled by a person who had its virgin land brought under a client peasantry’
or when peasants were bought out of their rights by one of a superior non-
peasant status.68 Such actions were predicated, however, on a king’s recognition
of such a class of actors, often by virtue of a king seeing a particular caste
prevail over the peasantry in the localities of a particular area. South Indian
records pertaining to property transfers in the Vijayanagara period refer, it is
worth noting, to a similar understanding of a landlord’s right to a ‘superior
share’ (melvaram) against the cultivators’ ‘lower share’ (kilvaram).69 These
were imbricated, in turn, within the (stacked) revenue claims of high officials
(nayakars), then the regional grandees, and finally the imperial centre, much as
in the Mughal north.70
Sale of zamindaris to outsiders was one route to entry into that class,
exploited by warlords, low-ranking officeholders and servicemen, and rural
moneylenders, who made their purchases either in cash, with mortgages, or
through loans to other zamindars that could be repaid through the transfer of
the zamindari upon debt default. Of this last, there are relatively few examples,
perhaps because success as a zamindar required coercive force to bolster one’s
superior rights.71 Other claims to zamindari came from tributary chiefs who
not only held superior rights vis-à-vis peasants, commanded a customary share
of produce, and possessed the necessary military force, but had achieved this
independently of any overarching kingly authority, putting them almost on a
par with India’s rajas.
Indeed, some rajas sold their rights to a village ‘much like any other
zamindar’, while some village officials (chaudhuris, or deshmukhs in south
India –often zamindars themselves) could grow into a chief, or vice versa.72
Interestingly, the power of deshmukh families grew in tandem with the Deccan
sultanates and their successor, the Maratha state. By settling local disputes,
collecting revenues and submitting a portion to the central treasury, and pro-
viding military manpower, these lineages had their landed rights confirmed by
a sanad or writ from the king, giving them greater clout if their subordinates
rebelled, in turn. It was in this context that many of the leading Maratha
clans rose to prominence (e.g., the Shindes, Manes, Ghatges, Nimbalkars, and
Mohites).73 Returning to the Mughal north, the differences in status of rajas
from ordinary zamindars enabled them to enjoy a greater degree of autonomy
67 Ibid, 177–78. See, also: Koch, ‘Property Rights’, 200.

69 Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 51.
70 Ibid, 57. See, for a comprehensive survey of revenue relations in the various states and zones
(coastal, inland) of south India: Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 31–44.
72 Ibid, 222–24.
73 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 187–88; Gordon, Marathas, 23–35. For a detailed discussion of
rights and revenue relations in the Maratha state, see: Wink, Land and Sovereignty, 251–92.
188 Capitalism
from the centre in return for their military service and payment of tribute.
Some of the leading Rajput chiefs, for example, chose to enter imperial service
and receive ranks (mansabs) and prebendal rights (jagirs) in addition to their
watan –their homeland, which was reconstituted as a non-transferable and
hereditary jagir –in return for military service, tributary payments (peshkash),
and some other revenue payments.74 Some even replicated a jagirdari system
within their ancestral or watan domains, as the rulers of Mewar and Marwar
did (§7.1.2).75
Overall, it was the zamindars’ superior rights (and coercive power, in some
cases) that meant they were called upon by higher authorities for the collection
of land revenues. In this respect, ‘zamindar’ designated a tax gatherer (rather
than a taxpayer), frequently turning them into intermediaries between the
state and the revenue payees (peasants, for the most part), so that their rights
gradually came to be described in Mughal documents as a form of service
(khidmat).76 Such lexical manoeuvring was part of the Mughal centre’s con-
solidation of power, involving the pacification and incorporation of these
powerholders into the imperial framework as mere tax gatherers –whereupon
they could be rewarded for excellent service and punished for disloyalty with
dispossession of their zamindari –rather than leaving them as autonomous
agents possessed with the means of opposing the emperor’s authority.77 Some
of the more truculent zamindars who possessed sufficient coercive force, in
fact, resisted Mughal authority (§6.1.3). A similar reorganisation of local
landed power into the administrative structure –where such lordship was not
displaced altogether –began a little earlier in the Vijayanagara Empire and was
strengthening around the mid-fifteenth century as the imperial centre firmed
its demand of revenues in cash, itself supported by steady monetisation.78
What about the peasants (raiyats) themselves?79 While the zamindars held
a superior right –that is, one extending beyond their own landholding and
entailing something larger than mere ownership to include, for instance, cus-
tomary dues –this did not preclude peasants’ possessing proprietary rights
or else holding mere usufructuary rights. Mughal documents discern peasant
land (raiyati) without any superior right, although this was shrinking due to
encroachment by zamindars; distinguish peasant holdings (raiyat kastha or
zamin-i riaya); and note peasants’ ability to turn their rights to land into a sale-
able proprietary right. More often, however, it is the right to settlement and

75 Ibid, 226; Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, 79–80.
76 A ta‘alluqdar who was also a zamindar might, therefore, be remitting the revenue of an area of
land much larger than his or her own zamindari; see: Habib, Agrarian System, 209–14.
77 Ibid, 220–22. See, also: Alam, ‘Eastern India’, on how khidmat was transforming by the later
seventeenth century and how the new arrangements fuelled the contests between the centre and
the zamindars in the eighteenth century.
78 Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 144.
79 In addition to what is described here, a useful complement can be found in: Raychaudhuri,
‘Agrarian System’, 262–66.
Capitalism 189
tenancy that is recognised. Mughal documents also recognise the zamindars’

rights to redistribute land and the emperor’s right to redistribute land on the
occasion of peasant cultivators’ flight, the ultimate aim of which was to ensure
land remained under the plough.80 The preference being for peasants to remain
on the land, orders were periodically issued to the jagirdars urging them to
return anyone who had migrated to their place of origin. This recognition of
peasant’s right of occupancy or ownership and the anxiety about peasant flight
was, Irfan Habib surmises, ‘natural in an age when land was relatively abun-
dant and peasants scarce’ and had the effect of making most peasants into
semi-serfs rather than totally free agents.81
Over the eighteenth century, there was a steady subinfeudation of these
landed rights, with significant consequences for the fate of the Mughal
Empire (§7.4). But what of the significance of this system for economic
growth and the development of capitalism? In a widely influential essay
published in 1969, Irfan Habib argues that there was no potential for cap-
italist development.82 This was despite the spread of market relations and
the use of money, the evidence of ‘Smithian growth’ (i.e., growth achieved
by using more labour or bringing more land into productive use), and the
growth of zamindari –and, with it, of khud-kasht farming based on hired
labour –all of which might have been the preconditions for primary accu-
mulation and the emergence of capitalist farming. Holding that the vast
bulk of agrarian surplus went to the emperor, nobility, and higher-ranking
servicemen, whose major expenditure was either on war or conspicuous con-
sumption, Habib contends that there was no basis for the development of
capitalism, even if we see the growth of urban-centred manufacturing and
(foreign) trade in this period.
Being an orthodox Marxist, one consequent chink in Habib’s argument
is to identify ‘capitalism’ with the kind described in Marxist theory, denying
the possibility of a distinctly early modern and/ or south Asian variant
while flying dangerously close to Marx’s ideas about ‘Oriental despotism’
(described below).83 As for his pessimism about the state’s parasitism, this
has been challenged by scholars who have shown that the imperial state was
less smooth-functioning and hegemonic than previously supposed (§7.3),
on one side of the coin, as well as work suggesting a little more scope for
rural consumption in early modern India than Habib and his followers have
granted (§4.1.2), on the other. As we shall see in this chapter, furthermore,
merchants played a significant and steadily growing role in the economy of
early modern India, while the relationship of trade and taxes to warfare was
hardly as inconsequential –in terms of capitalist development –as Habib’s
work suggests, even as mercantile activity, state power, and the production of

81 Ibid, 133, for citation, and 130–34, for analysis of documentary evidence.
82 Habib, ‘Capitalistic Development’.
83 On this last point, see: Athar Ali, ‘Critique’, 701–03.
190 Capitalism
violence were entangled in different configurations and with different effects

in eighteenth-century India compared to, say, Britain.
5.2 Labour
Marx himself wrote extensively about India, which held a special place in the
development of his theory of capital. Marx viewed the means and relations
of production in pre-colonial India to be sufficiently distinct to those in other
times and places to merit a separate category: the Asiatic mode of production.
Its key feature was Oriental despotism: the state was viewed as a behemoth
that exercised its absolute power over a largely undifferentiated rural mass by
appropriating all surplus.84 There was no commodified or market-oriented pro-
duction, no private property, no civil society, and no political consciousness
in consequence. As the Ottoman historian, Huri İslamoğlu-İnan notes, the
Asiatic mode of production was not only more grist to the mill of nineteenth-
century Orientalist thinking, shaping how Western and colonial histories about
the Islamicate world were written. It also cast a very long shadow over non-
European societies and economies well into the twentieth century by rendering
them ahistorical, static, and incapable of change –and thus unworthy of
study.85 Indian historians like Irfan Habib may not utilise the theory, and they
may highlight those respects in which the theory is empirically wrong and
where dynamism was to be found (e.g., in the spread of market relations), but
Marx’s belief in Oriental despotism is indelibly imprinted upon such analyses
nonetheless. Putting such ideas and assumptions to one side, we may now pro-
ceed to bring into view an alternative and better picture of the economy of
pre-colonial India to write a different history of capitalism.
5.2.1 ‘Free’ Labour and its Markets
The history of labour in precolonial India, Shireen Moosvi notes, is under-

developed compared to other parts of Asia, let alone Europe. That said, some
of the broad features of rural and urban labour can be sketched, even if com-
parison with the experience and values of labour elsewhere is impeded by
the state of the historiography.86 The peasantry was in no way a monolithic
or undifferentiated mass, despite very limited social mobility and the social
and proprietary relations sketched above. One set of distinctions can be made
between the poorest peasants, above whom were the mass of peasants (reza
riaya in the Mughal world), over whom the big men or headmen (muqaddams)
exercised their sway.87 A second set of distinctions can be made between
84 See, for instance, Habib, ‘Marx’s Perception’, especially xx-xxv, and the rest of the volume in
which this survey appears.
85 İslamoğlu-İnan, ed., Ottoman Empire, 1–6.
86 Moosvi, ‘Labour’, where the state of the evidentiary record is attributed as the cause.
Capitalism 191
landless, ordinary, and ‘rich peasants’, the last cultivating large areas with their
own ploughs and sometimes making use of hired labour. These labourers were
paid in cash wages or in kind on a daily or seasonal basis; there is no documen-
tation of sharecropping arrangements.88 A third distinction revolves around
peasants’ relationship to the market: at one end were subsistence producers, at
the other were those whose output was entirely commodified, with most some-
where in between, for the trend was certainly toward production for the market
over the early modern period.
The mobility of labour did not only take the form of flight in the face of
hardship; ‘a region’s circulatory tradition could,’ Dirk H.A. Kolff remarks,
‘produce little diasporas.’89 Take, for example, barahmasas (songs of twelve
months) as a genre of Indian folk song. These expressed a woman’s loneli-
ness as her husband laboured far from home, thus testifying to a world where
mobility was culturally understood and accepted.90 A word also about women’s
labour, which some materials suggest was indistinguishable from male labour
in terms of pay and responsibilities, others indicating that women partook in
particular, gender-defined tasks: not ploughing, but weeding, transplanting,
and harvesting, not brick laying, but brick carrying, not weaving, but thread
production. Additionally, women performed many non- marketised labour
tasks: processing the harvest as part of the rural manufacturing economy (e.g.,
cleaning and winding cotton, working the sugarcane and oilseed presses, etc),
animal husbandry, and innumerable invisible jobs, such as the preparation and
carrying of food to the fields.91 Besides rural labour, men also participated in
the market for military labour that opened in the slack season (§6.1), while
others serviced the demand for military and naval power –as well as skilled
carpenters and ship builders –created by European operations in Asia, which
was impossible to meet using either free Europeans, convicts, or enslaved non-
Europeans and was probably based on wage labour.92 In such respects and
probably more broadly, too, labour was as mobile in the search for employ-
ment in south Asia as it was in the Ottoman realm, of which we have a fabu-
lously rich picture.93
Turning to the craft or manufacturing sector proper, one can again distin-
guish fully commodified from partially or non-commodified production, as well
as high-skilled versus low-skilled tasks (e.g., weaving versus thread production).
That said, nowhere in India do artisans seem to have been divided into guilds as
they were in Europe, in west Asia, where the Arabic term sinf indicates a form
88 Moosvi, ‘Labour’, 247.

89 Kolff, ‘Market’, 23.
90 Alam, ‘Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’, 144–47. Note: Nanak composed in this genre, which
found its way into Sikh scripture; Singh, First Sikh, 10–11.
92 See, indicatively: van Rossum, ‘Running’.
93 See: Faroqhi, Travel.
192 Capitalism
of such organisation, or in east Asia.94 Some artisans ‘maintained control over

their product until it was sold in the market’, ranging from those ‘relatively
well-to-do artisans who owned their equipment and produced luxury goods for
a limited market as well as poorer artisans who produced ordinary goods for
the larger market.’95 Others worked in workshops (karkhanas) using materials
and tools provided by their ‘employers’ –who might be the emperor, princes
and nobles, rich merchants, or even master artisans –either in return for wages
or receiving advances for the purchase of material from a merchant/buyer to
whom the finished goods were sold at pre-agreed prices.96 Dutch East India
Company sources pertaining to Gujarat reveal that wage labour had spread
to other trades in the urban economy, including the work of carpenters and
bricklayers. Urbanisation in early modern Japan led to a construction boom
that created tremendous demand for bricklayers and other craftsmen, in turn
fuelling a consumer boom, so we might postulate similar effects in Mughal
India.97 All this puts paid to Habib’s seminal objections to the notion that
merchants/capital had subordinated artisans/production by the eve of coloni-
alism. At the very least, we ought to recognise that market relations had made
many inroads within Indian society.98
Just as peasants could take flight, so might artisans, either pushed by
hardship or pulled by higher wages.99 Yet, none were more mobile than
seafarers, and India’s central place in the maritime economy of the Indian
Ocean world meant its ports functioned as lively markets for seaborne labour.
Asian seafarers were known as ‘lascars’ and were vital to shipping, whether on
small boats or larger ocean-going vessels, including those plying trans-oceanic
routes. Although some were procured as slaves and trained in the job, the bulk
came from one of two pools. First, there were those possessing specialist skills,
often because they hailed from families long connected to the sea; this was
most true of serangs or chiefs of sailors, as well as their assistants. Second,
was the larger category of those forced into wage labour aboard ship by pov-
erty or indebtedness, often recruited from the countryside by specialist labour
contractors.
In respect of both their origins and recruitment, as well as their work in
far-flung locales, Indian maritime labour shared much in common with that
in the contemporary north Atlantic world and was probably just as global.
The Dutch, for instance, recruited sailors in Surat and in Bengal to work at
94 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 113. To compare with Ottoman and Chinese guilds, see: Hanna,
‘Guilds’; Grafe and Prak, ‘Families, Firms, and Politics’, 88–89. Palat, Indian Ocean World-
Economy, 136–40, however, describes guild-like institutions in south India, though these did
not control and gatekeep production a la guilds proper.
96 Verma, Karkhanas.
97 Francks, Japanese Consumer, 11–15.
98 Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 3–4, summarises the rancour surrounding this debate.
99 For example, the French tried to lure weavers to Pondicherry with the promise of cash
advances: Arvind, ‘Pondicherry, 666–67. For a wider purview: Parthasarathi, Transition, 29–30.
Capitalism 193
their ports (e.g., Batavia, Cape Town) or aboard ships on voyages (both within
the Indian Ocean world and between Asia and Europe), thus competing with
the English, other European organisations, and, of course, Asian shipowners.
European demand was constant but waxed when war and conscription at
home dried up the pools of European sailors, although it is difficult to say
whether this approached a competitive labour market per se of the kind we
might expect under mature capitalism.100 Ultimately, European imperialisms
spread and developed in tandem with global capitalism –but this was not
entirely peaceful, and thus frequently met with the resistance of the proletarian
labour upon which they depended.101
5.2.2 ‘Unfree’ Labour and the Slave Trade
Slavery and enslavement have as long a history in India and the wider Indian
Ocean world as anywhere. Akbar may have freed the imperial slaves, but that only
proves how widespread slave labour was within the empire; his actions certainly
never strived to wipe out enslavement, which would have been impossible.102
A boom in the export of slaves from the east African coast via mari-
time networks across the Indian Ocean began in the ninth century. This was
connected to a prolonged period of sustained demand from Muslim soci-
eties, especially those in the Arab Peninsula, Persian Gulf, and India.103 Indo-
Muslim states, such as the Bengal and Deccan sultanates, continued to make
use of Habshis (Ethiopians) into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.104 Indian
demand is thought to have increased sharply in the late Middle Ages, probably
in connection with the military slave (ghulam) system of the expansionist Delhi
Sultanate, which was supplied not via Indian Ocean channels but through ter-
restrial networks reaching into the Eurasian interior.105
Of the 63,000 enslaved persons imported into the Cape Colony, 1652–1808,
26.4 per cent were of African origin, 25.9 per cent Indian, and 22.7 per cent
Indonesian, but this is only one example, and the makeup differed from place to
place. Other destinations in the early modern period –when the Indian Ocean
slave trade remained robust, probably growing –include the Mascarenes, Dutch
Batavia, and the Americas. European demand contributed to this growth
from the sixteenth century yet did not crowd out indigenous demand, which
changed according to its own dynamics.106 Especially remarkable is evidence
100 Nadri, ‘Maritime Labour Market’. See, also: van Rossum, ‘Running’. For the bigger picture
of European imperial labour regimes: Paquette, Seaborne Empires, 145–59.
101 van Rossum, ‘Running’.
102 Moosvi, ‘Labour’, 251, where Shah Jahan’s edicts abolishing forced labour (begar) are also
described.
103 Save where additional references are provided, the present discussion draws from the excellent,
concise survey by Gwynn Campbell in ‘Question’.
104 Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 63; and further notes, below.
105 See: Kumar, ‘Service’, for military slavery in medieval India.
106 Allen, ‘European Slave Trading’.
194 Capitalism
of the interlinkage of systems of enslavement in the Indian Ocean and the

Atlantic worlds from the late sixteenth century, and thus of the entangle-
ment of capitalism’s development in the early modern Atlantic world with
Asian societies and economic systems.107 For, as we now know, slavery was the
opposite of wage labour –a defining feature of capitalism –and yet played an
absolutely critical role in the emergence of global capitalism.
Such interactions do not mean the Indian Ocean slave trade was anything
like the Atlantic system.108 The pre-1750 European slave trade in Asia was nei-
ther of insignificant scale –for, perhaps half a million souls were enslaved,
c. 1500–1800 –nor should we overlook that it was truly multidirectional in a
way that knitted together the Indian Ocean world.109 Yet, the plantation system
of the Atlantic world, which was predicated on the steady supply of enslaved
Africans, did not spread very readily in the Indian Ocean world before c. 1750,
let alone further inland in the Eurasian interior.110 Across the Islamic world,
captives worked on farms and in the fields, but also served in military and
administrative roles, or performed labour in commercial or domestic settings.111
In India, there was probably a proportionally lesser demand for slaves to do
farm work compared to other Indian Ocean economies with greater labour
constraints, but forced labour (begari) was widespread.112 Where the enslaved
did perform agricultural work, therefore, ‘a striking feature of subsistence and
small-scale commercial production in agriculture is that peasant slave-owners
generally worked alongside their slaves’, setting them apart from their enslaved
African counterparts in the Atlantic world.113
Second, there was no counterpart to the systemic racism that justified –to
Europeans –the enslavement and subjugation of people of colour within the
Atlantic system, where the primary conception of enslavement was as ‘chattel’
or ‘person-as-property’. In the Indian Ocean world, by contrast, ‘there existed a
variety of forms of bondage’: client slavery, pawnship, rural servitude (e.g., begari
provided to zamindars), and debt bondage.114 Understanding why the juxtapos-
ition of the binary categories of free with unfree/slave labour is problematic in
the Indian Ocean world also becomes clearer if one accepts that ‘the concept of
107 Hooper and Eltis, ‘Indian Ocean’.

108 The contrast drawn in this paragraph between Indian Ocean and Atlantic systems is the result
of the influence of the vast body of scholarship regarding the latter. A global canvas is not
possible here, but an extensive world historical survey of early modern slavery can be found
in: Eltis and Engerman, Slavery.
109 Allen, ‘European Slave Trading’.
110 European demand for slave labour from their arrival in the sixteenth century to the colonisa-
tion of the Mascarenes by the French was largely confined to their trading-cum-administrative
enclaves and plantations; see: Chakraborty and Van Rossum, ‘New Perspectives’, espe-
cially 3–4.
111 Prange, ‘Trust in God’, 221; Levi, ‘Hindus Beyond the Hindu Kush’, 278.
113 Campbell, ‘Question’, 131. See, also: Levi, ‘Hindus Beyond the Hindu Kush’, 278–80; Dale,
Indian Merchants, 75–76; Prange, ‘Trust in God’, 221; Habib, Agrarian System, 142–44.
114 Campbell, ‘Question’, 135.
Capitalism 195
individual liberty was weak’, Gwyn Campbell tells us.115 This meant there was a
fairly wide spectrum from freedom to the unfree. Those we might hastily describe
as unfree might be able to marry freely, own property, or demand a change of
ownership when their conditions were deemed unsatisfactory –which the enslaved
of the Atlantic world could not.116 This all being said, newer research is beginning
to emphasise that these indigenous or local systems of enslavement (sometimes
casually described as ‘benign’) interacted with the trans-regional, trans-oceanic,
and global circuits of commodity enslavement (the ‘brutal’ form) –a transition
premised on early modern globalisation and imperial expansion.117
Third, is the fact of some slaves’ high status, attained before or during their
enslavement or upon manumission.118 Warfare may have been the vehicle for
Malik Ambar’s ascent (§6.1), but the lives of many military slaves was bru-
tish and short. War also served as a means of Rajput leaders enslaving the
elite women of their vanquished foes’ households, forcing them into marriages
to settle old enmities, for example.119 Women might also become enslaved on
account of tax arrears or other dues, as evidence from eighteenth-century
western India attests.120 Enslavement was not free from violence or brutality in
the Indian Ocean arena, therefore, even if it differed widely from the Atlantic
system. Only in the present century has the study of Indian Ocean enslavement
and the slave trade been coalescing into a small field; the scholarship is steadily
becoming ever more granular and sophisticated, helping us tease out points of
difference or similarity with the Atlantic system.121
5.3 Merchants and Trade

Impersonal exchange is the transaction between agents who do not know
one another. In their transactions, one party cannot rely on their personal
115 Ibid, 136. The careful study of manumission also muddies the notion of a transition from
being ‘unfree’ to ‘freedom’, as some form of bondage or distinct status endured. See: Kumar,
‘Service’; Eaton, ‘Military Slavery’; and Ekama, ‘Manumission’, this last examining
eighteenth-century Colombo under the VOC.
116 Chatterjee, ‘Slavery’, especially 19–20, and passim, for a useful overview of the historiography
on slavery/enslavement in India in comparative context.
117 Geelen et al, ‘Runaway Slaves’, most explicitly on 66–68, and passim.
118 A good case is the Ottoman world, where non-Muslims were enslaved in the lands within
and beyond the empire’s fringe in a system known as devshirme. At its height, between the
mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, Karen Barkey notes, ‘only five grand viziers out
of forty-seven were of Turkish origin; the others were of Albanian, Greek, or Slavic origin
and had risen from the devshirme’ – Empire of Difference, 124. They entered a range of
occupations, however, with those taken into military-administrative service (kuls) educated
and enabled to climb to positions of considerable power, but others were consigned to agricul-
tural or domestic work in rural or urban settings. See: Toledano, ‘Enslavement’.
119 Sreenivasan, ‘Female Slaves’.
120 Guja, ‘Slavery’, 165, and passim, for an exploration that is attentive to gender, to women’s
roles on both sides of the ‘master’ and ‘slave’ divide, and to their resistance to coercion.
121 See, for example: Chakraborty and Van Rossum, ‘New Perspectives’.
196 Capitalism
reputation as being trustworthy or creditworthy to acquire business, and by

the same turn, a business deal that goes sour does little to hurt their reputa-
tion and thus their prospects. A key feature of modern markets are institutions
which take the place of reputation to make impersonal exchange easy. As these
institutions became more elaborate, so impersonal exchange at greater fre-
quency and scale became possible, resulting in unbridled market exchange and
thus modern economic growth. But what do such institutions look like and
where did they originate?
In a provocative body of work on the Mediterranean economy in the
Middle Ages, Avner Greif distinguishes the Genoese (Christians) from the
(Jewish/Muslim) Maghribis. The former, he claims, held more ‘individu-
alist’ beliefs and formed corporate bodies – including guilds, city governance
authorities, courts and thus the law and legal enforcement of contracts –
which were utilised to support exchange. By contrast, the latter were sup-
posedly more ‘collectivist’ or kin-based and relied on reputation mechanisms
and community-based institutions to deter opportunism. According to Greif,
these very different dispositions and initial institutions shaped how each
group did business across their long-distance networks yet also had longer-
term effects –what is called path development. There was legal and organisa-
tional change in support of impersonal exchange and efficiency only in late
medieval Europe –not north Africa and the middle East –even without the
support of ‘strong’ states (and perhaps because of this fact and the power
of citizen assemblies and urban self-government).122 Other scholars, in turn,
take this as paving the way to the birth in Europe of the early modern joint-
stock company, replacing sole traders, family firms, and ethnic or kin-based
partnerships, ushering in an ‘organisational revolution’, and thus helping to
explain why the ‘West’ ultimately grew rich while ‘the Rest’ did not.123
5.3.1 Indians and Indian Ocean Trade
What does this matter to a survey of early modern Indian merchants and
trade? A sharp contrast has long been drawn between the sophistication of
European trade organisations in Asia and indigenous merchants, the latter
characterised as poorly capitalised and little more than pedlars. The latter
falsehood has been shaken off thanks to the weight of so much evidence
presented by Indian Ocean historians since the late 1960s or so.124 The ‘prince’
122 Greif’s arguments are more sophisticated than can be allowed here and have been finessed
in response to criticism. See, most recently: Greif, ‘Reappraisal’. For more detail: Greif,
Institutions. For the larger reappraisal of guilds, now seen as broadly positive to the early
modern economy, see: Epstein and Prak, eds., Guilds.
123 Harris, Going the Distance.
124 This became crystallised in the so-called ‘pedlar thesis’ of J.C. van Leur, who otherwise did a
great deal to reconstruct the history of pre-modern trade in the Indian Ocean. For a recent,
careful, and concise survey of the thesis and its various reiterations by other scholars, as well
as the accumulated evidence in rebuttal: Chaudhury, ‘ “Pedlar” Thesis’.
Capitalism 197
of seventeenth-century Gujarati merchants, Mulla Abdul Ghafur, left assets

worth 8.5 million rupees upon his death in 1718, comprising a mansion, lands
in and around Surat, and his shipping enterprise. According to a Dutch list
of 1701, he owned 17 of the 112 ships belonging to the port of Surat, which
was a remarkable investment given that even the richest and most risk-loving
businessman might only own one or two ships.125 Others, such as Achyutappa
Chetti and his heirs likewise owned ships to ply Coromandel trade in the seven-
teenth century and partook in activities requiring a high degree of capitalisa-
tion.126 One might place them, legendary bankers like the Jagat Seth, or their
Armenian counterparts in Asian waters on a par with the patriarchs of the
Fugger and Medici dynasties in Europe.127
Other contributions, we shall see, have knocked the wind out of the sails
of European triumphalism by emphasising the difficulties Europeans faced in
Asian waters, their struggle to achieve any kind of dominance, and the necessity
of forging partnerships with local agents. In other words, many of those techno-
logical and financial innovations that helped the Europeans reach Indian Ocean
ports –from new ship designs and firearms to the formation of joint-stock
companies, stock markets, and insurance markets –did not aid their actual
day-to-day business in Asian (and African) markets. Asian business organisa-
tion continues to be distinguished, nevertheless, for its reliance on kinship and
community, the ramifications of which are profound in light of Greif’s conten-
tious arguments. Were Asian merchants like their Maghribi counterparts? Was
there a reliance on community-based mechanisms to govern reputation, resolve
disputes, and create trust to the extent of inhibiting the emergence of alternate
institutions? What implications, ultimately, might this have had for the nature
of market exchange and trade and their historical development? There can be
no tidy resolution of these matters here, yet they do provide a new way to review
the world of merchants and companies in India and the Indian Ocean world.
To begin, let us start in the locality and from there look outward.
‘Bania’ (vaniya) is found littered throughout the contemporary European
source material (sometimes rendered as Banyan or Bunyan), a caste-cum-
occupational category referring to Hindu and Jain commercial actors. In
north India, Bania could be used to accommodate ‘eighty-four Jain and
Vaishnavite Vaishya clans –Oswals, Agarwals, Shirmali, etc., but also
incorporating certain other high caste Hindu groups traditionally associated
with trade and commerce.’ In the south, it designated Chettis and Komatis,
who were ‘among the leading Hindu merchant castes’, although fierce intra-
caste rivalry crackled at Madras, which had to be divided into different
zones for the respective groupings.128 Of the Indian Muslim merchants, those
125 Das Gupta, Collected Essays, 98–101.

126 Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 300–14.
127 Harris, Going the Distance, 173–97.
128 Prakash, ‘Indian Maritime Merchant’, 436, for citations; Erikson, Between Monopoly and
Free Trade, 133–34.
198 Capitalism
belonging to the Bohra community were particularly important, at least in

western India, while those known as Marakkayars and Chulias dominated
the Coromandel trade.129 Arab, Persian, and Turkish Muslim merchants
as well as Parsis, Jews, and Armenians were also to be found in the major
entrepots and ports.
Banias were the most numerically dominant and perhaps the most powerful,
yet the term is something of a catch-all, obscuring a range of specialist functions.
Indian moneylenders (sahukars) operated throughout the countryside, lending
small sums to peasants to finance production, but also dealt in credit to soldiers
and local traders; hence, they financed economic production and petty trade. In
contrast, bankers (sarrafs or shrofs) took deposits and made more substantial
loans than the sahukars, while also issuing bills of exchange (hundis) and changing
currency. In such respects, they can be said to have greased the cogs and wheels
of exchange, but their specialism resided in banking and they mostly do not seem
to have become involved in trade itself (some exceptions are broached, below).
Trade was the preserve of merchants, the larger among them borrowing from
and making deposits with the sarrafs where necessary. Trade ranged from local
or petty trade, often carried out by someone dealing in a wide range of goods,
to long-distance trade, usually in the hands of specialist brokers and merchants
confident in dealing in particular goods (e.g., indigo or fine textiles). Additionally,
there were Banias –and other communities of merchants, including Muslims, like
Abdul Ghafur –who owned ships and those who freighted their cargoes on ships
owned by others.130
Long-distance trade operated at different scales (Map 5A). First, there was
trade between India’s regional economies. Bengal, for example, produced sur-
plus rice, sugar, and butter that could either be sent up the Ganges or the adja-
cent Grand-Trunk Road to other north Indian marts, or via coastal shipping
from ports like Hughli on the Ganges delta to ports on the Coromandel coast,
around the Indian cape to the Malabar coast, or even to Gujarat. This port-
to-port trade around the peninsula has been called ‘looping trade’, carried on
largely by ‘country boats’ or dhows, and was a vital means of transporting bulky
and inexpensive but important goods. Gujarat imported many foodstuffs: wheat
and other grains by road from Malwa and Ajmer, rice from the Deccan or
even from Malabar via the coastal looping trade. Its exports were high-grade
cotton and indigo, sent both to Indian and overseas markets.131 A second
level of trade was conducted between the Indian subcontinent and overseas
and overland markets. It was flourishing in the early modern period and was
vitally important to those empires whose capitals –such as Vijayanagar and
Delhi –were deep inland. Or, to put it differently, such interior location was no
129 Prakash, ‘Indian Maritime Merchant’, 441.

130 Ibid, 442, 342–50.
131 Habib, Agrarian System, 78–81. C.f. Prakash, ‘Indian Maritime Merchant’, 436–37.
newgenrtpdf
Capitalism 199
Map 5A India and the Indian Ocean World
200 Capitalism
Fig. 5A Painted Chintz (Palampore) for the Sri Lankan Market (Coromandel, eight-
eenth century)
Capitalism 201
hindrance to linking the state’s economic core to the distant or external world
of trade.132
In the age of sail, environmental factors set limits on ships’ voyages: captains
had to catch the monsoon winds just right or risk being blown off course, and
could only go in a single season where the winds would take them.133 Given its
importance, the monsoon was named across the Indian Ocean world: mawsim
in Arabic, mosum in Hindi, msimu in Swahili. The southwest monsoon blew
craft northward from April to August, while the northeast monsoon propelled
southward voyages.134 This defined smaller commercial circuits or segments
constitutive of the larger Indian Ocean trading system. Movement between
these segments was necessary because certain areas specialised in the produc-
tion of certain commodities, the production of spices being a good example.
India’s Malabar coast produced most of the world’s pepper, followed by parts
of southeast Asia, while cinnamon came from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), nutmeg
and mace from the Banda islands, and cloves from the Moluccas (Maluku
islands).135
Having said all this, there was no absolute constraint to larger voyages and
the system was by no means locked into place by climate and environment in
the pre-modern period. Rather, it was in flux, with the routes, principal ports,
and major merchant communities continuously evolving through the early
modern period. One example may be sufficient at this juncture, drawn from
Gujarat, which was India’s overseas trading region and its merchants dom-
inant in the western Indian Ocean.136 Cambay (Khambhat) was Gujarat’s pre-
mier maritime city until it was usurped by Surat, probably sometime before
the Mughal conquest of 1579.137 Surat flourished in the seventeenth century
but entered a downward spiral in the eighteenth century resulting from the
combined effect of political change in the region, in the Mughal Empire, and
abroad.138 Gujarati merchants weathered the storm, however, by pivoting into
new ventures –namely, trade with Mozambique and the south-east African
coast, including the slave trade.139
132 See, for richly detailed surveys of the period c. 1500–1650: Palat, Indian Ocean World-
Economy, 162–76; Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 46–90; Flatt, Living Well, 120–64.
133 Pearson, Indian Ocean, 13–26, for more on the ‘deep structure’ of the Indian Ocean world.
134 Sivasundaram, ‘Indian Ocean’, 46–47.
135 Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, offers a recent treatment highly salient to the themes of the present
chapter (viz. capitalism, globalisation, violence, and the Anthropocene).
136 Prakash, ‘Indian Maritime Merchant’, 444.
137 Singh, ‘Cambay’. There was a reorganisation of prosperity and merchant activity, with sites
and collaborators linked to the Portuguese struggling when the latter struggled around the
turn of the century: Das Gupta, Collected Essays, 300–14.
138 Ibid, 98–101, 351–68. See, also: Subramanian, ‘Western India’.
139 Gujarati maritime merchants owned slaves, who worked aboard their boats, and became
steadily more involved in the trade in enslaved Mozambiquans to western India over the eight-
eenth century: see: Machado, ‘Forgotten Corner’.
202 Capitalism
Indian textiles were an important medium of exchange for spices within

intra-Asian trade networks, to the extent that India’s textile trade helps map
key routes, ports, and their productive hinterlands. Cloth was woven all over
the subcontinent but production specifically for overland and overseas markets
tended to cluster in four areas: (1) Punjabi textiles were mainly destined for
markets linked by India’s caravan trade with Afghanistan, central Asia and
Iran, and even Russia; (2) Gujarat, its textiles sent via ports like Surat and
Cambay, principally to overseas markets across the Arabian Sea (i.e., to east
Africa, the Arab Peninsula, and Iran); and the cloth centres of (3) Bengal and
(4) Coromandel that found outlet via ports like Hughli and Masulipatnam
and were oriented to markets around the Bay of Bengal and southeast Asia
(Fig. 5A).140 The early modern Indian Ocean world was thus highly complex,
constituted of well-defined yet interpenetrating routes or circuits, of shifting
webs of exchanges centred on quite specific commodities, and of a huge and
varied cast of actors with well-honed specialisms and a fierce competitive
streak.141 It was into these transactional networks that European merchants
and trading organisations had to insert themselves to acquire the spices they
so craved, yet a market for Indian textiles soon developed within the Atlantic
world itself, to the extent that India truly clothed the early modern world.142
5.3.2 Europeans and Indian Ocean Trade
The Portuguese enterprise was formulated as a viceroyalty of the Crown –

the Estado da Índia (est. 1505), with its capital at Goa from 1510 until 1961.
Trade between Lisbon and India was known as the ‘India run’ (Carreira
da Índia). Under the king’s control, it was part and parcel with Portugal’s
imperial ambitions to possess and govern territory, motivated by ‘mercan-
tilism and messianism’.143 Early on, however, private trade was carried on
side-by-side with that of the Estado, and the monarch’s monopoly over the
Euro-Asian spice trade faltered precisely at the time when private traders
began flourishing in the latter part of the sixteenth century.144 Euro-Asian
trade was linked with intra-Asian trade, and Crown trade with this private
trade, therefore: the India run was ‘fed’ with commodities secured by inte-
grating into the Asian system of exchange pursued (and organised) by the
140 See, additionally: Lally, Silk Roads, especially 21–46.

141 A sense of the rivalries and feuds between competing communities can be gained from: Das
Gupta, Collected Essays, 315–41.
142 Rich guides to what has been cursorily described here can be found in: Riello and Parthasarathi,
Spinning World; Riello and Roy, eds., South Asian Textiles.
143 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire, 48–55.
144 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade, reassesses the Portuguese enterprise along these lines, while also
attending to the role of the New Christians in knitting together intra-Asian and Euro-Asian
trade, engendering truly global networks. See, also: Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire,
which is an excellent guide to developments in Asia from their beginnings to the eighteenth
century, 87–152, 191–222 being especially pertinent to the present discussion.
Capitalism 203
Crown in conjunction with Portuguese settlers (casados) and the world-

circling networks of the New Christians.
Portugal’s imperial ambitions proved immensely difficult to realise,
amounting to little more than a string of forts that yielded revenues used for
funding purchases of Asian goods destined for Europe and also for funding
the Estado’s very existence in Asia.145 A strategy of monopolising the spice
trade by conquering the spice-producing lands likewise gave way to merely
regulating trade itself through the issuance of passes (cartazes) to ships. Again,
the gains proved difficult to realise. Thus, some historians have contrasted the
more classic empire in the Atlantic world with the ‘thassalocracy’ or ‘sea-born
empire’ in Asia, itself described by one historian as little more than a ‘protec-
tion racket’ –especially when viewed from indigenous actors’ perspective –
effected by controlling choke points such as Colombo (1505), Melaka (1511),
Hormuz (1515), and Diu (1535) and patrolling the surrounding seas.146 Others
are confounded by the Estado, which was an ‘intricate hub of connections’
somehow ‘both tiny (being based in seaports) and vast (establishing navi-
gational links between India and Europe)’, and ‘both insignificant when
compared to the great landbound empires of the time, and yet highly influen-
tial, when connected with its surroundings’ (§6.4.3).147 As for the Estado’s and
other Portuguese traders’ (modest) financial successes, these were maintained
well into the seventeenth century –that is, despite the entry of the Dutch and
English.148
Unlike the Estado, the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie (VOC; est. 1602, on the back of voyages since 1597) and English
East India Company (EIC; est. 1600) were private enterprises –chartered joint-
stock companies, to be precise.149 The EIC’s charter, for instance, distinguished
it from both the Estado and from the business of Asian merchants, for it gave
the Company –a body of private merchants –a monopoly over trade between
England and the ‘East Indies’ and, by additional privileges granted in 1623,
the right to exercise the rule of law over English persons in the East.150 Philip
J. Stern argues that the EIC was neither just a company nor merely acted like
a state, therefore, but actually exercised executive, legislative, and judicial
powers, exhorting even its critics to see it as a ‘body politic’ (the term contained
145 Münch Miranda, ‘Fiscal System’, which reveals how haphazard and precarious the entire
system was, particularly following the advent of (military) competition with the Dutch and
English.
146 Pearson, Indian Ocean, 120–22. See: Benton and Clulow, ‘Interpolity Law’, especially 78–85,
for a sophisticated reading of the Portuguese and other pass systems in the Indian Ocean from
the perspective of early modern imperial regimes.
147 Biedermann, (Dis)Connected Empires, 16, for this rich historiographical precis.
148 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade; Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire, 191–26.
149 That said, we should not understate the companies’ relationship to their respective states;
see: §6.4.3.
150 By far the most in- depth and empirically rich study of the EIC remains: Chaudhuri,
Trading World.
204 Capitalism
within its charter). It was a Company-state from the outset, a century and a
half before its first conquests on Indian soil.151 The VOC ought to be seen in
the same way, Arthur Weststeijn argues, pace Stern.152
Equally remarkably, the EIC was just one –and a relative latecomer at that –
of a plethora of joint-stock companies, corporations, or bodies of merchants
constituted in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England for the purposes
of overseas trade, including the Merchant Adventurers (chartered in 1407),
Spanish Company (1530), Muscovy Company (1555), Eastland Company
(1579), Venice Company (1583) and Turkey Company (1581), which merged
into the Levant Company (1592), and the Royal African Company (1660).153
Eventually, largely in the wake of the VOC and the EIC, a number of other
European companies were founded for trade with Asia, although they were
more marginal actors in various respects and a number were not private
enterprises: the Ostend Company (1715–31), the Swedish East India Company
(est. 1731), Prussia’s Emden Company (est. 1751), a sequence of Danish com-
panies (the first was founded in 1616), and a series of French enterprises dating
to 1600.154
The EIC and VOC were trade organisations but they were also a carapace for
other actors. The most significant of these actors were employees of the com-
panies acting in their secondary capacity as ‘private traders’; such freedom –up
to a certain point –to pursue one’s own commercial interests and make one’s
own fortune was among the perquisites that drew entrepreneurial men and a
fair few rogues into Company service. Their existence also created something
of a paradox. ‘In spirit and conception,’ Emily Erikson argues, the EIC ‘was
meant to be a monopoly firm that accumulated profits by controlling market
opportunities and restricting competition.’155 In practice, private traders were
critical to the Company’s success, even as their activities diminished the extent
and strength of the corporation’s exclusionary monopoly. This is because pri-
vate traders were pioneers, seeking out opportunities that the Company would
otherwise have overlooked.
To succeed in the face of a weak English state that offered little protection
or advantage so far from home, and strong Asian elites, who had the capacity
to erect significant obstacles, Company servants had to ingratiate themselves or
else forge sexual and familial relations with local actors to pursue their private
151 Stern, Company-State.

152 Weststeijn, ‘VOC’.
153 Many of these are discussed in detail in: Smith, Merchants, passim, and 7, for discussion of the
long roots of early modern corporations in Italian societas of the thirteenth and fourteenth
century or else in the English guilds.
154 Gottmann, ‘French-Asian Connections’; Idem, ‘Prussia’. All of these companies were more
cosmopolitan and less ‘national’ than may at first appear: the EIC was peopled by English but
also Scots, Irish, and Welsh, and even a significant number of Frenchmen at a time of Anglo-
French hostilities, while many of the north European companies included Dutch and English
merchants.
155 Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade, 2–3.
Capitalism 205
interests.156 They also had to fabricate informal information networks within

the framework of the Company, whose own information networks were hier-
archical and designed to communicate between agents, their superiors in Asia,
and the Company directorate in London. They did so by using social networks
and port-to-port communications to share knowledge between employees.
As ‘more and new ports [were brought] into the larger network of Company
trade’, so ‘new opportunities, new markets, and new types of commodities’
were brought within the corporation’s orbit, resulting in its most rapid phase
of growth between 1660 and 1700.157 Consequently, the sum of EIC business –
both official and private, intra-Asian and Euro-Asian –eclipsed that of the
Dutch.158 It was this ‘decentralisation’ within the framework of the EIC that
permitted all that activity that cumulatively powered the Company’s trading
success and its ever-growing importance to England’s national economy.159
In these vital respects, therefore, the EIC in toto was not solely the product
of English institutional and financial innovation –the so-called ‘organisational
revolution’ –but one whose structure evolved in its Asian operating context and
was moulded through the local agency of its employees. In other respects, too,
the Europeans owed a debt to local factors, not least the cooperation and col-
laboration of indigenous actors: sovereigns, who granted them permission to
trade; dallals and gomustahs (agents) and their counterparts outside India, who
helped procure the goods needed for exchange; brokers who acted on behalf of
traders in their supplications for trading rights at Indian courts; shipowners,
captains, and crews, who freighted goods for private traders participating in
intra-Asian trade (or ‘country trade’, in EIC sources); shroffs, whose loans
financed trade and who changed currencies and issued bills of exchange; and
others who helped the Europeans overcome their vast knowledge deficits and
information asymmetries.160
From the Europeans’ perspective, the scale, scope, and complexity of Indian
Ocean world exchange systems –from the myriad transactions on the bazaar
to financing and insuring long-distance voyages –were massive opportun-
ities yet riddled with risk, so that the involvement and knowledge of skilled
156 Veevers, British Empire, powerfully elaborates this thesis.

157 Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade, 3.
158 Ibid, 4–5, 77–106, for analysis. For the Dutch side of things, nuancing the post-1660 eclipse
thesis, see: Emmer and Gommans, Dutch Overseas Empire, 17–124, 245–399; Gaastra, ‘Textile
Trade’.
159 On this, compare Erikson and Veevers’ contributions with that of Mishra in Business of
State, who argues that the Company was always and very consciously embedded within the
ascendant early modern English state.
160 Münch Miranda, ‘Fiscal System’, 219–20, for Indian merchants’ financing of Portuguese
trade. Prange, Monsoon Islam, 223–25, notes the cooperation of Mappilas with Portuguese
despite the latter’s avowed animosity towards Muslims in the long wake of the Iberian
Reconquista (see: §3.1.1). See: Van Meersbergen, ‘Diplomatic Repertoires’, especially 889–
93, for innovative research on the role of brokers –some female –in the pursuit of trading
privileges. Such collaboration was not always voluntary, as examples found in: Scammell,
‘Indigenous Assistance’, reminds us.
206 Capitalism
local operators was key.161 Such reliance created the need to identify the trust-
worthy and to build and maintain trust through various means, although
many Europeans remained distrustful of their Asian partners.162 As scholars
uncovered such relationships, so they began to speak of an ‘age of partnership’
(Holden Furber), ‘age of commerce’ (Anthony Reid and Kenneth McPherson)
or of ‘reciprocity’ (Michael Pearson). Attention to the Asian side of things
revealed a less rosy picture, however, because the reasons for assisting Europeans
varied from coercion at gunpoint or foreboding that this was the best or only
way to earn a living, to the desire for the ‘protection’ or the lure of profit by
working with the European organisations.163 Thus, darker characterisations of
the relationship of Europeans with political and commercial elites have come
into being: an ‘age of contained conflict’ (Sanjay Subrahmanyam), ‘balance of
blackmail’ (Ashin Das Gupta), ‘perceived mutual advantage’ (Om Prakash),
‘conflict-ridden symbiosis’ (Chris Bayly), and ‘two-way dependency’ (David
Ludden).164
What of the economic impacts made by European trade? Indian Ocean
historians have split hairs over the system-wide effects of European commerce,
specifically whether it brought greater integration or eroded past relationships,
not least the so-called ‘Muslim lake’ created by Muslim maritime merchants,
which possibly reached its high point in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.165
More specifically for India, Om Prakash postulates that the silver influx and
the ‘sellers’ market’ –created by growing European demand for certain goods
outstripping any increase in supply –contributed positively to output, employ-
ment, and incomes, while also improving the money supply and spurring
further monetisation, marketisation, and the spread of banking and credit
relations.166 Maybe so, but another way of looking at China and India’s silver
influx involves recognising that they were silver-hungry, their demand for the
metal pushing up its price and thus advantaging the Europeans who brought
it, while American supplies helped cheapen silver in certain parts of Europe,
privileging merchants and perhaps resulting in relatively higher growth rates
and other positive effects in Europe compared to Asia.167
161 Pearson, Indian Ocean, 159–60, for a sense of the risks

162 van Meersbergen, ‘Problem of Trust’.
163 Nadri, ‘Mancherji Khurshedji’, offers a forensic portrait of the hows and whys of collab-
oration. See, also: Veevers, British Empire, for examples of collaboration ranging from the
peaceful to the violent; Nadri, ‘Maritime Labour Market’, 358–63, for disaffection, disputes,
and desertion by lascars employed in European service.
164 This synopsis is entirely derived from the excellent historiographical panorama provided
by: Vink, ‘New Thalassology’, 55–56.
165 Ibid, 55. Pearson, Indian Ocean, 62–112, surveys the Indian Ocean in the era when Islam was
spreading overseas.
166 Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise. See, also: Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 91–
251, for careful evaluation of the Portuguese, Dutch, English and Danish enterprises’ impacts
on the character, scope, and scale of trade.
167 Irigoin, ‘Global Silver Economy’, especially 272–73, 278–80.
Capitalism 207
Moreover, the big picture offered by Prakash and others becomes convo-
luted when examined from the perspective of a port or productive region, trade
route or commodity exchange or merchant group, as a few examples stand to
show. Bengal, for example, would become the ‘bridgehead’ of British colonial
rule in the mid-eighteenth century. But in the decades immediately prior to
the conquest of 1757, the EIC and the VOC’s share of trade paled in com-
parison to that of their Asian rivals even in key commodities such as silk, so
perhaps their economic impact was equally modest.168 There may have been
merchants, furthermore, who were squeezed-out by European pass controls
and the creation of monopolies, yet scholars have actually emphasised indi-
genous merchants’ agility and tenacity.169 There were some definite losers, how-
ever. There is no doubt about the tragic destruction wrought on the Banda
Islands, whose inhabitants were slaughtered by the Dutch in an exceptional
but nonetheless brutal act of violence, with the island then repopulated with
Dutch settlers but also enslaved persons forced to work on plantations, itself a
violence upon the landscape and people.170
5.3.3 Trade as a Family Enterprise?
How did Indian merchants and firms organise their long- distance trade
networks?171 Let us consider, as an example, Punjabi family firms involved
in caravan trade with central Asia. The patriarch of the firm (the ‘principal’)
would send his kinsmen (acting as ‘agents’) into the Punjabi countryside to
extend credit to peasants, receiving repayments in raw cotton at below market
prices in lieu of interest on the loan. This material would then be advanced to
urban weavers to produce the kind of cloth in demand in overland markets;
again, the loan would be repaid in kind representing the firm’s acquisition of
textiles at below market prices. This profit would be reinvested further, for
agents would depart with the annual caravan and journey to a designated cen-
tral or west Asian mart, selling the goods upon arrival, and then reinvesting
their profits in other ventures. The latter might include loans to central Asian
peasants producing the kinds of commodities in demand in north India.
Typically, these agents would remain in central Asia for a number of years,
returning once they had realised returns on their investments. As new agents
joined each trading season, this meant there were typically several members of
a family firm in central Asia at any given time, each bringing fresh instructions
and information about market conditions for their brethren. As there were sev-
eral such firms, the result were Indian neighbourhoods –complete with Hindu
168 Chaudhury, ‘International Trade’. See, also: Pearson, Indian Ocean, 129–39, for the spatially
variegated economic and political impacts of the Portuguese.
169 Prakash, Dutch, 222–33.
170 Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse; Pearson, Indian Ocean, 146–48.
171 Chaudhuri, Trading World, 131– 52, offers some instructive characterisations of Asian
merchants.
208 Capitalism
and Jain temples –in central Asia and Iran. These, however, were largely all-
male spaces due to the fact that female family members did not participate in
this circulation or, perhaps more appropriately, this elliptical movement (i.e.,
short periods of movement marked by long sojourns in particular locales).172
This can be contrasted with Indian family firms spread across the subcontinent
(e.g., the Marwaris) and those marked by a higher degree of settlement –closer
to diaspora –where migration of male and female family members allowed
social reproduction in host societies (e.g., the Chettis).173
Compared to their Asian partners and rivals, were European merchants less
reliant on family and ethnicity? Corporations –not nations –have lately been
spotlighted as the drivers of early modern globalisation, empire-building, and
more besides (e.g., from their role in spurring ‘scientific’ inquiry to stimulating
new patterns of migration).174 Yet, many authors of this new scholarship have
consciously disaggregated such corporations, bringing employees –and their
balance of official business versus private commercial interest that shaped
their activity –squarely into view. They have also shifted away from top-down
models of corporate governance toward bottom-up understandings of how
individuals –from ordinary investors to company merchants –pursued their
objectives, emphasising the critical importance of social networks.175 English
merchants are now shown to be far from the ‘impersonal’ actors meeting in the
abstract space of the marketplace of so much economic theory. Their careers
usually began with an apprenticeship or training, whereupon they began for-
ging their social networks. These were cultivated at home and abroad by living
as neighbours, attending the same congregations, and brokering marriage
alliances that joined families together.176 The wives and female relations of
English merchants also played their part: by visiting, corresponding, gifting,
and by nurturing the emotional ties –love and friendship –between women
and their families, they supported the advance of merchant capitalism.177
Through a mix of reproduction and family patronage, furthermore, entry into
the East India Company became ‘hereditary’, to a degree.178 A broadly similar
story can be told of the VOC and the ‘social world’ of commerce in the Dutch
Indies.179
172 This account draws heavily on Levi, Indian Diaspora, itself building upon Dale’s Indian
Merchants, but for a wider purview, see: Lally, India and the Silk Roads, 99–124. Scholars have
disagreed over the appropriate terminology to characterise such operations because of the
varying degree of locomotion versus settlement they exhibited. See, for example: Levi, Indian
Diaspora, especially 95–120.
173 Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchant Networks.
174 Pettigrew and Veevers, eds., Corporation.
175 Most recently, for example: Hodacs, ‘Keeping It in the Family’; Smith, ‘Social Networks’; and
references, below.
176 Smith, Merchants.
177 Finn, ‘Love and Empire’.
178 Veevers, ‘Kinship Networks’.
179 Taylor, Batavia, especially 33–51.
Capitalism 209
As to the uses of family and wider social networks, these were several. Credit
was as much a social institution as an economic instrument; social networks helped
vouch for trustworthiness and levied added costs to reneging on commitments,
smoothing everyday yet nonetheless risky business; and dynasties could perpetuate
those values that made them trustworthy and thus creditworthy.180 Collecting and
sharing information was another use, as we have already seen. Family provided
social capital, a site for capital accumulation, and a pool of joint resources –
material and affective. Frequently, the creation of family also meant the crossing
of boundaries: European merchants started families with indigenous or local
women, for instance, something to an extent encouraged by the Portuguese and
Dutch until the mid-eighteenth century.181 Without reading Euro-Asian unions
as purely functional, born of a desire for contacts with local elites, social capital,
trading privileges, and heirs who could be incorporated as intermediaries between
the European organisations and local economies, such advantages might have
accrued to European men who took local wives in Asia.182 Corporations were not
merely economic organisations but communities, and by turning a cultural and
social lens onto their study, we can see how the networks of kith and kin forged
and solidified by employees furthered their own business activities and gave shape
to their employers’ commercial and ‘imperial’ enterprises.
A corollary of this looking under the carapace of European trading
organisations to uncover the carefully constructed social networks of European
merchants and their families is that Asian family firms no longer seem like a
peculiarity in need of so much explanation.183 We might more fruitfully inter-
pret the creation of vast social networks with multiple nodes stretching across
the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds as a continuation of time-honoured
practices as well as a more or less tacit ‘emulation’ of those techniques par-
ticular to Asian societies.184 At the same time, corporate organisation alone no
longer appears sufficient for any explanation of either individual or firm-wide
success, so there is no longer a need to thanklessly puzzle over why corporations
did not emerge within the Indian Ocean world.185 We might shed the view of
Asian family firms as anachronisms in the early modern ‘age of corporations’,
therefore, and instead appreciate family firms’ role in accumulating financial
and social capital, in creating trust, and in developing dispersed yet depend-
able networks of agents working in the family firm’s interest.186 We have little
180 Muldrew, Obligations, 58.

181 Taylor, Batavia; Blussé, Strange Company, 1–15, 156–259.
182 See, for instance: Veevers, ‘Kinship Networks’, 106–07.
183 Note, however, that family firms were not necessarily the norm, and some Indian ‘mer-
chant princes’ were unable to pass on their wealth and reproduce their enterprises down the
generations, as explored by: Nadri, ‘Merchants’.
184 Veevers, ‘Kinship Networks’, here especially 107–09, and passim.
185 See, for instance: Harris, Going the Distance, 331–64, for a largely counterfactual and thus
unconvincing analysis.
186 Aslanian, Armenian Merchants, here especially 100, and 166–201. See, for a statement of the
advantages of kin-based networks: Pearson, Indian Ocean, 100.
210 Capitalism
evidence from ‘inside’ these Asian firms of the kind that has animated recent
studies of European private traders and their social networks, making it dif-
ficult to robustly test the hypothesis that there were meaningful similarities
between Asian and European family operations. Yet, one especially valuable
cache of documents reveals how and why the networks formed by families of
Asian-origin created and utilised information flows.
When a British man-of-war halted and seized the Santa Caterina in 1748,
the British came into possession of a weighty postbag of ‘about a hundred
personal, business and official letters, notarised documents, accounts, petitions,
contracts, receipts and formal certificates of appointment’ composed between
1745 and 1748 and later deposited in the India Office archives in London.187
The correspondents made use of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Armenian,
Persian, and Portuguese.188 Studied by Sebouh Aslanian and Gagan Sood,
these letters reveal the centrality of family and the importance of oral and
written communications, whether in reaffirming affective ties and intimacy,
particularly between mothers and fathers and their children or between
husbands and wives; in securing the obedience of wayward brothers, sons, and
nephews acting as agents; in cementing trust in relationships with strangers,
including other families who may have been kith, kin, or no more than part-
ners; or as a means of sending instructions and relaying information about
market conditions (current prices, profits, supply, demand, competition) or
political factors that might impact business.189
There were some key differences between Asian and European mercantile
networks, nevertheless. In the first place, Asian merchant families only occa-
sionally pursued marriage into different lineages, usually where it provided
access to European shipowners or other partners well beyond the bounds
of community.190 In contrast, the apprenticeship and training system meant
English merchants’ social networks were drawn more widely from their very
beginnings. Second, and more importantly, were differences in the situatedness
of Indian family firms in the politics of their ‘home’ states relative to their
European counterparts. Banias did not form guilds or other ‘economic’
interest groups, although they did belong to powerful community- based
groups that, ‘when in control of a particular occupation, could and did regu-
late the manner and method of trade’, namely the mahajanis and nagarseths.191
They did seek recourse in local law courts over matters concerning rights or to
settle disputes (§7.3.3), but commoners’ voices were otherwise virtually inaud-
ible to imperial government (§4.2.4). True, the most prominent merchants and
187 Sood, Islamic Heartlands, 24.

188 Ibid, 24, and 122–48, on oral versus written languages and the range of lingua francas used in
this arena.
189 Ibid, especially 79–121, 248–69; Aslanian, Armenian Merchants, 44–201.
190 Sood, Islamic Heartlands, 252–56.
191 Prakash, ‘Indian Maritime Merchant’, 440. See, also: Sood, Islamic Heartlands, 249 and nn.
5–6; O’Hanlon, ‘Petitioning’.
Capitalism 211
bankers presented themselves at court, possibly giving them direct access to the
king’s ear. Yet, there neither seem to have been any systematic ways by which
Indian merchant associations could press upon political decision- making,
nor were they able to secure the highest posts in the administrative system
as their Muslim counterparts in fourteenth to sixteenth-century Damascus
and Aleppo succeeded in doing.192 The ennobling of the merchant, Nusrullah
Khan, during Aurangzeb’s reign is a rare exception that proves the rule that
Indian merchants seldom became members of the aristocracy, setting them
apart from the creamy layer of the English middle class who rose to become
part of the ruling oligarchy.193
European merchants and corporations were, indeed, more closely enmeshed
with politics and government. Apprenticeships created a political commu-
nity, since apprentices became citizens holding voting rights within the city.194
A merchant might use his wealth to launch a political career, or an English
grandee might buy shares in a chartered company like the EIC, but, either way,
Company interests were well-represented among parliamentarians. Thomas
Pitt, for example, was an interloper –a private trader evading the Company’s
trade monopoly –who amassed a fortune, was thus appointed to negotiate on
behalf of the Company with the Mughals before being appointed Governor of
the Company’s settlement at Madras, and was great-grandfather and grand-
father to two British prime ministers.195 In this respect, individuals may have
been busy creating family-based networks in pursuit of their private object-
ives underneath the shell of the EIC, but another result was to make John
Company an incredibly important part of the English (later, British) economy
that gave it political clout, which repaid employees in turn.
Where does this leave us? On the one hand, recent research softens the
kinds of distinctions made by Avner Greif. On the other hand, he might well
counterargue that European merchants relied primarily on legal institutions
backed by the state, only bolstering these with the mechanisms derived from
networks of kith and kin, whereas Asian merchants relied primarily on commu-
nity and secondarily, if at all, on law or other larger frameworks transcending
group identities. This is indefensible, given what we have seen concerning
Indians’ recourse to the courthouse.196 As for the development of markets and
capitalism, it would be unwise to separate developments in Europe and the
Atlantic world from those in the Indian Ocean arena –for they were vitally
linked in numerous respects, as we have seen so far in this chapter –let alone
describe the former as modern or superior.197 Well into the twentieth century,

193 Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, 154.
194 Smith, Merchants, 18.
195 Wilson, India Conquered, 28–29.
196 Such was his vigorous (and venomous) response in ‘Reappraisal’ to evidence presented by
Jeremy Edwards and Sheilagh Ogilvie that the Maghribis also used legal institutions.
197 Vink, ‘New Thalassology’, 48–51.
212 Capitalism
after all, the colonial economy had not only failed to wash away or even sub-
sume Indian capitalism, but vitally depended on the ‘bazaar economy’ of indi-
genous merchants and financiers to sustain everyday economic activity and
intermediate between local and world markets.198 Whether this interdependent
dualism was a new development or evolved from prior relationships remains
murky, but is suggestive of co-existing varieties of capitalism shaped by local
circumstances, rather than one ‘superior’ system capable of entirely flattening
others.199
5.4 The State and Economic Life

Commerce (tijarat) is many times better than statecraft (imarat). Statecraft
makes one subordinate while in trade, one leads the life of a ruler. The
wealth accumulated by a noble is a misfortune, whereas the money earned
in trade is lawfully enjoyable (wajh-i halal). – Anand Ram Mukhlis200
5.4.1 Piety and Profit
Commerce brought great riches, which some early moderns had to reconcile
with personal beliefs emphasising piety and material simplicity, as Max Weber
postulated while thinking of Europeans. Consider, for instance, European
burghers’ spending on church altarpieces and the like, which was perhaps not
a world apart from Hindu and Jain merchants’ lavish sponsorship of rituals,
donations to temples, and construction of ghats and dharmshalas as part of
a similar purification of profit.201 Remembering the embedded or social char-
acter of economic activity also helps to bring powerful and wealthy women
back into view. Royal and noble women participated in trade, particularly to
Mecca, sponsored the construction of key urban buildings (§4.2.1), and also
invested in other kinds of infrastructure (e.g., step wells, caravanserais, ghats,
ports), both in reflection of their piety or charity and as the wellsprings of
further income (i.e., from rents, tolls, taxes, shares of harvests or the output of
198 See: Ray, ‘Asian Capital’.

199 True, something that can be called a ‘capitalist world-economy’ has subsumed prior and alter-
nate economic systems around the globe, but we might more usefully see this as an incomplete
and thus ongoing process forged out of the tessellation of localised capitalisms.
200 Cited in: Subrahmanyam, Tagus to the Ganges, 97.
201 The observation concerning Weberian theory owes to Bayly, who also pioneered our appre-
ciation of north Indian merchants’ and financiers’ expenditures: Bayly, ‘Epilogue’, 177. That
said, India’s mercantile classes perhaps eschewed ostentation and conspicuous consumption
in favour of outward simplicity and overt piety to such a degree that India’s greatest capitalists
seem not to have nurtured artistic talent in the manner of their European counterparts (e.g.,
the Medici) and their collective bodies or civic institutions, nor did they play the role –as a
class –like that of Europe’s burghers, who took over from princely (and ecclesiastical) courts
in steering artistic developments. See: Chipps Smith, Northern Renaissance, especially 67–146.
Capitalism 213
quarries, etc).202 It would be incorrect, however, to entirely divorce ‘economics’

from ‘religion’ and thus imagine commercial gains as anathema to dharma and
requiring reconciliation through charitable expenditure.203 Indian religions
were not entirely ‘renunciationist’, as we have seen in the case of Sikhism (§3.4).
The ownership of property, furthermore, was deemed ‘praiseworthy’ insofar as
it furthered duties and obligations to the household; to this extent, the acquisi-
tion of moveable and immoveable property was vital to corporations of monks
and nuns, for example.204
Some orders of monks were highly mobile, their members combining
movement between a network of monasteries interlaced over the subcon-
tinent with trade and high-interest moneylending. Women made investments
in the architecture that supported such mobility, trade, and banking in the
Gangetic valley and Bengal, including monasteries and shrines, but also resi-
dential complexes, wells, ponds, and tanks in temple precincts. They were the
wives of Hindu Mughal governors and zamindars, or else zamindars in their
own right. Together with their Muslim counterparts, they supported a parallel
Sufi monastic geography, too.205 They also loaned and borrowed money from
monks, plugging themselves into monastic lineages in support of their inde-
pendent economic ventures: property transactions, moneylending, the silk and
salt trades, for instance.206
These links became especially valuable upon entering widowhood, par-
ticularly in a context where polygyny was commonplace among the elite. The
division of a husband’s or father’s estates between an often-large number of
female dependents necessitated careful, long-term wealth management if a
woman was to sustain herself. Through expenditure on the rituals and other
needs of holy men, a female zamindar nurtured the bonds of trust under-
pinning her economic relations with such non-kin while ‘ensur[ing] that they
returned regularly to her estates, settled them, and expanded both their mili-
tary and agrarian potential.’207 Taken with the role of elite Mughal women, the
ramifications of such findings are significant. Though women did not voyage
abroad as merchants or earn fame as the scions of great banking firms, they
nevertheless played the role of investor in pursuit of private wealth (and merit)
in India as elsewhere in the early modern world, sometimes even determining
the course of empire and globalisation.208
202 Chatterjee, ‘Women’, 177–79 and nn. 6–9 for important references.
203 Bayly, Rulers, 168–73.
204 Chatterjee, ‘Women’, 181.
205 Ibid, 189–95. See, for examples of women who inherited zamindaris in accordance with Hindu
or Muslim law and then sold or disposed of their milkiyat rights: Habib, Agrarian System, 191
and n.95.
206 Chatterjee, ‘Women’, 198–200.
207 Ibid, 205–06.
208 See, for instance: Ewen, ‘Women Investors’.
214 Capitalism
5.4.2 Elites and Commerce
There is absolutely no reason to disregard elite involvement in commerce

as little more than a lifeline for the provincial gentry-woman facing desti-
tution, therefore. Shopkeeping (dukandari or baqqaliat) was not above even
Shahjahanabad’s elite, whatever their scorn for the unseemliness of business
and manufacture. Anand Ram Mukhlis (d. 1750), who penned the quip that
opens this section, is a good example. Born in Shahjahanabad, Mukhlis
combined life as a courtier and litterateur with trade, serving as vakil (agent)
for the emperor’s wazir from 1720 to 1748, and lived among Khatri traders
and administrators in one of the city’s suburbs.209 When pressed for cash by
Nadir Shah’s men in 1739, Mukhlis was able to collect fine textiles of cash-
mere and brocade worth 10,000 rupees from within his house as payment, per-
haps having ‘received it as a share of profit from an investment contract, or
purchased it to sell for a shop of his own’, since shops were built into the kind
of mansion he inhabited.210
Mughal umara (nobles, pl. of amir) were not tied to the land, and they, too,
combined residences and shops. Raja Jugal Kishor alleged he lost some 200,000
rupees worth of goods and 50,000 rupees in cash when Nadir Shah’s men
plundered his vast mansion and his shop on Chandni Chawk.211 Mansurpur
was the name of an entire complex built by the subadar of Awadh, Burhan
al-Mulk, next to Kabul Gate and alongside the canal that brought water into
Shahjahanabad from the northwest, with shops on either side. In the Ottoman
Empire, likewise, those in possession of start-up capital did not demur about
setting up shop. The eclipse of devşirme and the janissaries’ search for new
livelihoods motivated many to establish coffeeshops, for instance, which served
additionally as venues for political intrigue and mafia-style racketeering.212
Others took to tax farming (iltizam), as in the Mughal world, which Ariel
Salzmann views as a deliberate ‘privatisation’ of the state’s resources.213 It was
through the creation of the large commercial estates (çiftliks) that cash crops
were produced in the Ottoman lands for the European market.214 It was those
older elites left out of these dynamic avenues for enrichment and cast aside by
new political realities who took pen in hand to satirise those nouveaux riches
who sullied themselves with dukandari.215
Commercialisation made an even greater and quicker advance in the eight-
eenth century, therefore, and consumer culture permeated ever more deeply

211 Ibid, 86–87.
212 Çaksu, ‘Janissary Coffee Houses’. The broader context and ambit of Janissary activity is
described in: Yaycioglu, ‘Guarding Traditions’, especially 1545–555.
213 Sajdi, ‘Ottoman Cultural History’, 18.
214 Ibid, 13.
215 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 12.
Capitalism 215
into Indian society. But the involvement of elite actors in commerce was not
sudden and new to this phase; it was of much longer standing. Aside from
the investments of royal women or the relationships forged between princely
households and merchants through the Mughal classical age (§7.3.1), are
numerous examples from different parts of India and different sections of the
elite.216 At the start of our period, we find the elite in the Bahamani Sultanate
closely involved in overseas trade, for instance, while the later Bijapur sultans
themselves owned ships at Dabhol, which was an important port for the over-
seas horse trade.217 Members of the Mughal royal family owned ships at Surat,
which plied the pilgrimage route to the Hejaz. Meritorious but also lucra-
tive, because transporting Hajjis could be combined with Red Sea trade, such
investment was more broadly emblematic of the twin pillars of Mughal sov-
ereignty: accumulation and redistribution. Two ships are best known to us
because of the furore caused by their capture: the Rahimi, captured by the
Portuguese in 1613 and owned by a Rajput princess from Amber who was
married to Akbar –thereupon renamed Maryam-uz-Zamani –and the Ganj-i
Sawai, owned by Aurangzeb and captured in 1695 alongside its escort, the
Fateh Muhammad.218
If the Mughal elite’s involvement in Gujarat revolved around the pilgrimage
economy, nobles partook in a wider range of commercial ventures in Bengal,
and more heavily, too.219 Provincial notables –subadars, faujdars, the larger
zamindars – were well-positioned to parlay the spoils of their office into pri-
vate commercial investments, especially if they were proximate to a thriving
commercial hub. By partnering with a professional merchant house, they could
diversify their assets and income, for who knew when they might fall out of
favour. Other servicemen were more hands-on still. Mir Muhammad Sayyid
Ardestani was a Persian adventurer who had made a fortune in the diamond
trade before ascending through service to the Golkonda sultans to the office
nawab in 1643.220 He not only combined political office with an active par-
ticipation in maritime trade from Coromandel ports but used it to extract
concessions from the VOC ‘and successfully defy its requirement to obtain
passes for sending ships to specific ports in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago’
then under its control. His defection to Mughal service in the next decade and
216 Women acquired –and were courted for –their material fortunes and social capital before the
high Mughal period; see, for an example: Kolff, Naukar, 47–48.
217 Flatt, Living Well, 127–64, where it is argued that this involvement was not viewed as
‘exchange’, but in terms of ‘courtliness’ which ‘possessed a strong ethical character in which
skills and objects played a complex role in the formation of the self.’ (164)
218 Findley, ‘Mughal Women’.
219 Prakash, ‘Indian Maritime Merchant’, 450–52. Aside from Surat, ports further north on the
Indus delta –like Thatta and Lahori Bandar –were used in Aurangzeb’s and Murad Bakhsh’s
ventures, as Subrahmanyam has shown; see: Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 27, for
discussion and references. As for the Bengali elites’ continued involvement in local trade in the
eighteenth century, see: op. cit., 54–55.
220 Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 322–27.
216 Capitalism
his appointment as subadar of Bengal in the early 1660s caused only a pivot,
not a cessation, of his activities. And where Ardestani (later known as Mir
Jumla) invested in long-distance trade, Shaista Khan (d. 1694) is famous for
his investment in the local and regional trade of Bengal, particularly in salt and
betel nuts, but also pearls and precious stones.221
Such men, being well-documented, were merely the tip of the iceberg –part
of a large social type whom Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C.A. Bayly have called
‘portfolio capitalists’.222 Often military men or administrators, rather than
merchants, many began to acquire landed rights by the early eighteenth cen-
tury to make the best long-term investment of their position, knowing that
their interpenetration of the political and commercial worlds was fragile and
probably temporary, as it indeed turned out.223 The career trajectory and riches
amassed by Cardinal Wolsey (1475–1530) bear this out spectacularly, showing
this was hardly a uniquely Indian phenomenon. The story of his protégé,
Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540), was a little different, moving from a mer-
cantile and/or mercenary career to that of statesman, though he continued to
blend money, violence, and clerical service, much as doing so was necessary for
the descendants of Jayanti Das to pursue success (see: §7.3.3), albeit at a more
local level.224
Such investments could be huge: the withdrawal of the Mughal nobility
from Bengal’s trade in the late seventeenth century has been associated with
a decline in the region’s maritime trade, for instance. Such a diverse range
of involvement on the part of Indian elites –all the way up to the Mughal
emperor –puts paid to any notion of their condescension toward ‘merchant
princes’ (malik al-tujjar) or the political elites’ alienation from business and
finance.225 What about more direct intervention into the economy by the state
proper, however? The official Portuguese and French enterprises in Asia were
royal monopolies, yet it was more common for European monarchs to grant
charters giving private companies monopoly privileges, or for exclusivity to be
exercised by guilds. Even the minting of coins or the creation of military units,
which we might presume to be under the state’s tight control, if not its mon-
opoly, were in many places in Afro-Eurasia the preserve of state-appointed
221 Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, 155–59, which includes discussion of exactions (e.g., tolls, market
taxes, etc) abolished by Aurangzeb that imperial servicemen were forbidden to collect.
222 Bayly and Subrahmanyam, ‘Portfolio Capitalists’, especially 410–13 and 416–18, wherein
Ardestani’s investments are also described.
223 See: Parthasarathi, ‘Merchants’, 200, for this discussion. But see also Bayly’s own retrospect
on his contributions: ‘Epilogue’, 181.
224 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 46–47.
225 The original ‘merchant princes’ were the rich nakhudas or merchant-shipowners; the European
merchants and trading organisations came later; Prange, Monsoon Islam, 78–91. The notion
of condescension toward them –and thus the Mughals’ blindness to the European threat –in
part derives, perhaps, from the reluctance of Indian rulers to actively protect Indian merchants
from the predations of the Portuguese, traceable as far back as pre-Mughal Gujarat; see: Palat,
Indian Ocean World-Economy, 12. See, also: Pearson, Indian Ocean, 115–17.
Capitalism 217
contractors and fairly decentralised (§6.4.1).226 Exceptions of note include the

long-standing imperial monopoly on salt held by the Qing Great State and its
predecessors, or the creation of a Safavid monopoly over turquoise by bringing
the mines in Nishapur into the Crown estate (khassa, equivalent to khalisa),
both of these commodities being vital sources of revenue to the respective
states.227
5.4.3 State Monopolies
The Safavids’ fiscal base was, however, much narrower and shallower than
their Chinese or Indian counterparts. Avoiding fiscal-political precarity and
crisis thus underlay Shah Abbas’ (r. 1588–1629) infamous decision to turn the
silk-producing areas of Gilan and Mazandaran into khassa, to subject the silk
trade to state control, and to forcibly relocate Armenian merchants involved
in the silk trade to the suburb of New Julfa and insist that they act as the prin-
cipal brokers and merchants.228 Other industries were created by the state, with
variable degrees of success and varying significance to the domestic and export
economies: Chinese-style porcelain manufacture, Indian-style rice and indigo
cultivation, and a tobacco business, for instance.229
A little later, in 1633, Shah Jahan established a short-lived indigo monopoly
in the Mughal realm. All indigo became state property and could only be sold
to Manohardas, a Hindu merchant who won the contract to act as sole buyer
of indigo in exchange for a payment of 1.1 million rupees at the end of his
three-year term, of which 500,000 was repayment of a loan advanced by the
treasury to finance the enterprise. Some merchants believed it was motivated
by greed, others noticed its inauguration in the wake of the Gujarat famine
of 1630–32 that had devasted Gujarati indigo production and consequently
ramped up competition and prices in the indigo markets near Agra, where
EIC and VOC merchants fought for the dyestuff. Some discerned the influ-
ence of nobles with a vested interest in the indigo trade or inspiration drawn
from the Safavid example. Of course, the bigger picture –bearing in mind that
Shah Jahan was striving to bring more land under khalisa at this time –was an
effort to increase Crown revenues in the face of expensive wars and building
projects.230 Ultimately, the monopoly met with fierce resistance from producers,
226 See, for example: Perlin, ‘Proto- Industrialisation’, 77–

78. Singh, Town, 169– 91, offers a
forensic account of the Mughal mint and its operation, demonstrating the blurring of a state-
run establishment with the appointment of merchants and moneychangers (as contractors?)
who also carried on their own private business, as well as the state’s limited grip over the mint
from time to time. On the plethora of private mints in Britain, for example: Satia, Empire
of Guns, 202, 208. On the inverse relationship between the extent of central control and the
number of regional mints in Safavid Iran: Matthee, ‘Mint Consolidation’.
227 Lally, ‘Salt and Sovereignty’, especially 651–52; Khazeni, Sky Bue Stone.
228 State control had lapsed by the reign of Shah Safi (r. 1629–42). See: Matthee, Silk for Silver,
91–146.
229 Kazemi, ‘Tobacco’.
218 Capitalism
indigenous merchants, and the European companies, the latter acting to under-
mine the monopoly, leading to it being rescinded in 1634.231
A final example may underscore the creation of monopoly as a response to
the fiscal constraints facing centralising states. Until the 1760s, when Malabar
came under the sway of the Mysore state, its sovereigns did not gather land
revenues. Under the rule of Marthanda Varma (r. 1729–58) and Rama Varma
(r. 1758– 98), however, Travancore grew from a compact principality into
an important kingdom laying along the Malabar coast. One cause was the
boom in Malabar pepper from around the 1720s associated with the decline
of Surat and its re-export trade in Indonesian pepper to Red Sea and Persian
Gulf markets. Once flushed with these revenues, combined with a standing
army and a bureaucracy, Marthanda Varma could expand his power. In turn,
he established a monopoly to not only secure the revenues deriving from the
lucrative pepper trade, but to maximise profits (or rents) to the state. In effect,
merchants became agents who bought pepper from producers at fixed prices,
supplied the pepper to state depots at fixed prices, and thus obtained a fixed
commission in return.232
Monopolies like those in Travancore and Mysore were a distinctly
eighteenth-century phenomenon. They represent a late flowering of a larger
phenomenon –what scholars have called ‘south Asian mercantilism’. This was
not mercantilism in the conventional, Smithian meaning of ‘bullionism’, but
in the sense of the state behaving like a merchant by using ‘the means at its dis-
posal, including coercive means, to control and influence both producers and
trading partners’, acting ‘as a merchant, but also as an oligopolist, or in the
extreme case, as a monopolist.’233 More broadly, this resulted in the control of
revenue flows through deeper commercialisation; through taxation of trade;
and through revenue farming. By the eighteenth century, these manoeuvres
often required merchant capital, resulting in the drawing together of the state
and mercantile actors, as we shall see.234
Private actors may have been responsible for much decision-making before the
beginning of the eighteenth century, therefore, but Indian states were not totally
hands-off. If we have this impression, its perhaps because the centre devolved
many of its obligations to local governors, as was the case in the Mughal clas-
sical age. These sub-imperial actors spent money repairing or constructing
caravanserais, wells, roads, and other facilities for merchants; made efforts
to control piracy and banditry; controlled the price and supply of grain and
other foodstuffs; and encouraged not only rural commercialisation, but also
the development of certain urban industries and crafts.235 There was a fine line
231 Nadri, Indigo, 157–64, for details of the monopoly, as well as sub-imperial level efforts to con-
trol the prices and profits derived from the indigo trade in subsequent years.
232 Das Gupta, Collected Essays, 158–60, 201, 421–56.
233 Subrahmanyam, Tagus to the Ganges, 49, for citation, and 45–79, for analysis along these lines.
234 Parthasarathi, ‘Merchants’, 202–04.
235 On the latter, see: Verma, Kharkhanas.
Capitalism 219
between expecting local authorities to make whatever undertakings were neces-

sary to keep things running, versus chastening them for any failures or excesses
in this regard, the latter including the levying of –sometimes vital, sometimes
arbitrary –taxes or cesses.236 Mughal expansion necessitated more than effective
caretaking, however, and so were ushered in measures that not only consolidated
the centre’s grip on its domains but reduced ‘transaction costs’ for mercantile
actors. Monetary reform was key in this regard, bringing India’s economies
closer to a ‘national market’ than at any time before the mid-nineteenth century.
One way of putting this fact into perspective is by remembering India’s vastness.
Or, more parochially, if the union in 1707 of England with its poorer relation
north of the border stimulated economic change and brought prosperity to
Scots, imagine the impact of imperial integration by the time of Aurangzeb’s
death in the same year, when the Mughal Empire had reached its largest extent,
being considerably more fertile, and its manufactures exported around the
globe, making it a sink for the world’s precious metals.237
5.4.4 Merchants and the State
The Scottish example is especially pertinent in one respect: it reminds us of

the hunger for ‘free trade’ with England and its empire and the crucial role
played, therefore, by ‘bourgeois’ Scotch interests in pushing for integration.238
Similarly, there is much evidence of Indian magnates’ collusion with pretenders
to various Indian thrones, including ‘outsiders’, for Indian merchants
supported the Portuguese in the seizure of Goa, Ahmad Shah Abdali in his
campaigns into north India (§1.3.3; §7.4), and the Company in its conquest
up the Gangetic valley, to take but a few examples.239 Their motivation seems
to have been the short-term profits from such activities as selling grain and
materiel in times of war and invasion, and the long-term benefits of polit-
ical stability and having a relationship to the ruling centre, although the last
did not translate into the offer of political office. There has been some debate
about when bankers became more deeply involved in Mughal state finance,
and we ought to be cautious about backwards extrapolation from eighteenth
century or even later material (as found in Karen Leonard’s work) to argue for
236 Compare, for instance, the outsourcing of security over Gujarat’s maritime trade on the open
seas to the Sidis versus the system of river fleets (nawara) supplied and captained by ‘wardens
of the frontier’ in return for jagirs in the marshy Bengal delta, which Gommans explains
with reference to differences in ecology: Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 164–65. Surat’s decline
in the eighteenth century meant a dwindling income to the port from which to pay its naval
guardians, while their position on the wrong side of a conflict with the Marathas did little to
improve their lot. See: Das Gupta, Collected Essays, 154–56. Hasan, ‘Fiscal System’, provides
an anatomy of how the port operated within the Mughal revenue- bureaucratic system,
including fiscal demands levied by the centre versus the sub-imperial states.
237 See: Hoppit, Dreadful Monster, 35–85.
238 Whatley, ‘Union of 1707’.
239 On the former, see: Chakravarti, Apostles, 44–45.
220 Capitalism
this process beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century (as J.F.
Richards cautioned us against).240
Yet, merchants and financiers did eventually become ever more closely
entangled with the state, probably after the turn of the century, as they became
among the beneficiaries of what C.A. Bayly termed the ‘commercialisation of
royal power’. This involved the devolution of the perquisites of sovereignty –
namely, tax collection –to revenue farmers, many of whom were portfolio
capitalists who often relied on Indian financiers as under-managers (where the
latter did not take on revenue farms on their own account).241 Of the many
factors underlying this development, a key one was Indian rulers’ need for
enhanced revenues and for the capital to wage war, whether by rehabilitating
long fallow, bringing waste into cultivation, or stimulating improvements in
the yield or the value of the standing crop. In return for the right to farm land
taxes or tolls, entrepreneurs pioneered these developments and thereby spared
the centre much of the associated risk, meanwhile increasing the reliability of
revenue streams.242 This was not an innovation of the period –being centuries
old, though viewed by the state as an evil in the Mughal classical age that
encouraged the squeezing of the most vulnerable in the pursuit of the farmers’
maximum return –nor was its spread in the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries a uniquely north Indian development.243 The Balija Chetty brothers,
Malaya and Chinanna, for instance, competed together in auctions to gain
control of ‘extensive tax farms along the coast up to Nagapattinam, including
important ports such as Devanapatnam and Tranquebar’ while also farming
taxes for the Dutch as their tenants in Pulicat, just to the north of Madras.244 If
anything, it had become widespread much earlier in the south compared to the
north.245 In the western Deccan, too, Brahmans elites were transforming their
financial power into political power, which proved valuable to the eighteenth-
century Maratha state’s evolution and expansion.246
Being common in sixteenth-century Iberia, the Estado farmed out taxes,
too, as did the Dutch in their wake in places like Malacca.247 In all, this
240 Leonard, ‘ “Great Firm” Theory’; Richards, ‘Mughal State Finance’; Leonard, ‘A Reply’. For
a useful evaluation, navigating between the differences and extremes at the heart of the dis-
agreement, see: Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 26. See, also: Alam, Crisis, 8–9.
241 Bayly, Rulers, 164–70.
242 Sheth, ‘Revenue Farming Reconsidered’, for the varieties of revenue farming estates, the range
of uses they served, and the varying mechanics by which they came into being.
243 Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, xxiii-xxiv, for examples from the seventeenth century of offers to
buy farms and praise for those who avoided such temptation.
244 Prakash, ‘Indian Maritime Merchant’, 450, for citation; Subrahmanyam, Political Economy,
303–14, for a biography of Chinanna Chetty.
245 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 35–37, where both the prevalence and persistence
of revenue farming in the south is described; Subrahmanyam, ‘Rural Industry’, 80, for a fair
view of the impact of revenue farming in Golkonda.
246 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 191–92; Wink, Land and Sovereignty, 339–73, for more detailed
analysis.
247 Münch Miranda, ‘Fiscal System’, 214–15.
Capitalism 221
development unfolded a little later in India than in the Ottoman Empire, as we

have seen, or in Vietnam, where the sale of offices was picked up from 1658,
fuelling conflict between the older, patrimonial-bureaucratic order and a newer
and more mobile, market-based social sector. It took a further few decades
still before it was witnessed in Burma (from the mid-1700s).248 By contrast, this
process began to go into reverse elsewhere. Tax farming persisted in parts of
Europe, and many areas of the British economy remained decentralised and
in private control (e.g., the minting of coins), yet the British state moved away
from revenue farming and toward public tax collection in the eighteenth cen-
tury as part of its steady fiscal centralisation, setting off down the path toward
what Wenkai He calls the ‘modern fiscal state’.249
India’s wealthiest financiers may have possessed great capacity to extend
credit, yet tax farming is a feature of economies where ‘credit was less
developed, bureaucratic and communication networks poor, and means of
seeking additional finance limited.’250 The degree of centralisation exhibited
by the Mughal state has long been overstated, but its collapse unleashed a
centripetalism that intensified the problems of state financing for its many
successors. This fact as much explains the growth of revenue farming estates
in eighteenth-century India as its belated abolition in the Ottoman world
during the nineteenth-century era of reform and recentralisation.251 Thus, we
may celebrate the ‘warrior entrepreneurship’ of arriviste rulers (as C.A. Bayly
brought to attention), or the role played by tax farming in smoothing cash
transfers, ensuring liquidity, and improving local collaboration in the Mughal
state and other long-standing kingdoms (as Muzaffar Alam argues).252 Yet, in
comparative perspective, it was hardly a novel innovation and might even be
viewed as a retrogressive development when put in global perspective.253
5.5 Conclusion
How were the changes described in this chapter affecting the material lives
of Indians by the end of our period? Was labour becoming better or worse

249 He, Paths, especially 51–77. The unevenness of this process –not least the persistence of tax
farming and contracting out in Scotland, which was poorer, less economically integrated, and
less politically centralised –proves the point being made here; Hoppit, Dreadful Monster, 38.
250 Sheth, ‘Revenue Farming Reconsidered’, 905.
251 That said, tax farming persisted alongside the reorganisation of the Ottoman postal system,
a process that involved private contractors and thus supported provincial actors, yet helped
strengthen the centre by improving the flow of information and coordination of activity, so
that neither decentralisation nor centralisation can be said to accurately describe what was
happening to the Ottoman state: Koh, ‘Ottoman Postmaster’.
252 See: Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, xxiii, for critical discussion and references.
253 On this point, I am inclined to agree with Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, xxiii. A similar argu-
ment has been made in: Ágoston, ‘Military Transformation’, which compares the trajectories
of state (de)centralisation, fiscal capture, and military capabilities and the degree of their
control.
222 Capitalism
off, for example? The evidence on artisans is rather mixed and too limited,
though the trend was probably toward a deterioration of their living standards
long before the onset of ‘deindustrialisation’ in the nineteenth century.254 How
about merchants? The generalisation that mercantile actors benefitted from
their closer relationship to Indian states in the early eighteenth century has
been textured in certain quarters by the observation that some were squeezed
out by the mercantilism of eighteenth-century Indian states (i.e., the formation
of certain monopolies), while many others did not partake in the commer-
cialisation of royalty. Others still were welcomed by the Company in its need
for credit, money changing, and other commercial services, then summarily
cast aside by the colonial state once it had finished with them. Indeed, the
ease with which financiers and traders were side-lined by the Company in the
later eighteenth century, and the retreat of Indian commercial actors into rural
property investments until the late nineteenth century distinguishes them from
their English counterparts, who had a deeper, often interpenetrating, and more
enduring relationship with the state.255 Thus, having not even ventured into the
even less documented world of the countryside, it should be evident that our
understanding of how particular groups in particular places fared over the
early modern period is woefully limited. In fact, even the macro-level picture of
economic growth or decline in certain provinces or regions is sketchy, at best,
and hotly contested, at that.256
What does emerge through the broad strokes, nonetheless, is how much
of economic life had been engulfed by the market by the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury. India’s experience was in common with that in other parts of the world.
Before the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, according to Victor Lieberman’s
grand global survey, the vicissitudes of the market’s spread were linked
to climatic change. But from then on, the growth of trade at various scales
was a key driver of deeper rural commodification and increased specialisa-
tion across large parts of Eurasia, something the evidence from south Asia
broadly supports.257 In turn, this supported the development of successively
more centralised and integrated states (§7.5).258 Yet, lest we celebrate such phe-
nomena, we might remember that the early modern period witnessed such a
dramatic and increasingly systematic change in land use –from the clearance
of forest to sowing wholly new crops in the soil –that one cannot help link it
to the beginning of the Anthropocene. And, to make explicit a theme running
254 Parthasarathi, ‘Historical Issues’; Parthasarathi, ‘Merchants’, 206– 09. Parthasarathi,

Transition, not only fleshes out this thesis, but also offers (on 9–42, especially) a rich portrait
of how weavers worked, their training, living standards, and relations with merchants in the
decades to 1750.
255 Subramnian, Indigenous Capital, for this process in western India.
256 See, for instance: Marshall, ed., Eighteenth-Century, 10–14.
257 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 48– 53, 112, 211. Note: Lieberman variously gives
the turning point as 1400 and as 1500.
258 A valuable explanation of the link between trade and premodern centralisation is offered by
Lieberman in Strange Parallels, vol. i, 179–81.
Capitalism 223
through this chapter, these developments were tied to the channelling and sys-
temisation of coercive power in connection with landed right.
Capitalism ought, theoretically, to sweep away pre-modern institutions
(such as slavery or caste) and replace them with wage labour and ‘modern’
market-based exchange and productive systems. It could co-opt these very
same institutions, and often did so: enslavement was and remains part and
parcel of the derivation of profit and the process of accumulation.259 In the
early modern Atlantic world, enslavement was pivotal to capitalism’s his-
torical development –namely, the transition to industrial capitalism –for it
created the wealth, opened new markets for manufactures, and was used in
the production of cheap calories for workers, without which industrialisa-
tion might not have taken off.260 Relatively new evidence suggests that the
enslaving of Asians by Europeans and their collaborators was also linked
to this development. As for enslavement and unfree labour within India and
the Indian Ocean world, this was probably growing, yet was seldom linked
to the spread of novel economic systems such as the plantation complex.
All this suggests globalisation distinguished and shaped the development of
early modern capitalism, marking what at first may have appeared as a subtle
break with the past.
What also emerges through the broad strokes is the dawn of ‘commercial
society’ in early modern India. Economic historians have debated its advent
in Europe, but it was probably in the sixteenth century, and thus long before
the eighteenth-century ‘commercial revolution’ (and the ‘consumer revolu-
tion’).261 They have also debated the underlying mechanics. One idea is that
there were a series of worldwide ‘industrious revolutions’, from western
Europe to Tokugawa Japan. Operating in a context of limited technological
change, seventeenth- and eighteenth- century households simply increased
their production by working harder, thereby generating the surplus –put out
on the market –that permitted their increased consumption.262 Of course,
commercial society did not develop in one fell swoop, but through a series
of changes, often beginning with simple adjustments to housing and diet in
pursuit of greater comfort and nourishment, and then escalating to more and
finer things.263 The origins of a household’s possessions showed a concomitant
outward spreading, from local manufactures to global goods. This improve-
ment in material standards of living was becoming more all-encompassing, yet
was also geographically and socially uneven, occurring earlier in cities or ports
259 For what ‘theory’ says about capitalism and institutions like caste, and the latter’s co-option,
see: Mosse, ‘Caste’.
260 Edwards et al, ‘Capitalism in Global History’; Burnard and Riello, ‘Slavery’.
261 Muldrew, Obligation, 20–21; Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 47–59.
262 de Vries, Industrious Revolution, for now canonical work on Europe. See: Bayly, Birth of the
Modern World, 49–59, for wider application of the idea.
263 Trentmann, Things, 108, for subtle variations in this manner between Japan and northwest
Europe.
224 Capitalism
and places close to them, while developing much faster among certain occu-
pational groups or those of certain status and wealth in ways that deepened
‘class’ divisions.264
Globalisation played an important role in the formation and evolution of
commercial and consumer societies. The steady introduction of a range of
new goods to global marketplaces, combined with the deepening integration
of production sites with centres of demand, stimulated new and increasingly
cosmopolitan material cultures and a new hunger for ‘things’ –a ‘consumer
society’ –into being, touching all levels of society, rich and plebeian, free and
even the enslaved alike.265 Attention to this has led to the development of a
sub-field known as global material cultural studies, which has helped reshape –
and decentre –early modern history by shifting our gaze from the study of
companies and trade between Asia and Europe, to the study of people and
the material goods they gave pride of place, these goods often moving through
ever-more globalised networks of exchange.266 Of course, capitalism is not
necessary for consumer society, which has taken root even in as hostile a clime
as the Soviet Union, a fact Frank Trentmann’s world historical survey of the
subject reveals.267 The genesis of consumer societies, however, went hand-
in-glove with the development of capitalism(s) and its imbrication in early
modern globalisation.
Thus, consumer societies also looked different around the world and over
time, reflecting the uneven development of capitalism and its frequently quite
vernacular character. In seventeenth-century Britain and the Netherlands, for
instance, consumer societies were propelled by innovation, novelty, and variety
to a greater extent, according to Trentmann, than those appearing earlier in
Renaissance Italy or in Ming-Qing China, where antiquity was more revered
even as new goods and forms of sociability sprang up. Trentmann’s search
for the causes of these differences drags him into the debates about the Great
Divergence and ‘industrious revolutions’, none of which he deems satisfactory,
although his own solution actually comes close to Parthasarathi’s arguments
about the role of the state in northwest Europe in spurring import-competing
innovation.268 Trentmann also observes that the emergence of consumer soci-
eties were uneven in another respect, appearing earlier (in port cities, for
instance) or penetrating more deeply in some contexts than others (namely,
among merchant communities and the bourgeois).269 In these spatialised and
temporal differences we find a close correspondence to the lumpy or uneven
264 Muldrew, Obligations, especially 21–36, 51–59, 69–90.

265 See: Lemire, Consumer Cultures.
266 For an excellent survey of the entangled historiographical advent of global history,
material culture studies, and the shift from the study of companies/corporations to things,
see: Gerritsen, ‘Global Lives of Things’.
267 Trentmann, Things.
268 Ibid, 71–79.
269 Ibid, 93–94 and passim.
Capitalism 225
geography of capitalism, its agents, and the dynamics of its development. It

permits us to place early modern India within a larger historical symphony
without flattening-out its crucial variations on the theme.
We have precious little insight into the mentalités of early modern Indians
(§3.4), making it impossible to convincingly speak of a commercial sensibility,
but there can be no doubt about a commercial society –if not also a con-
sumer society –in the making. There were also markets for violence (§6.1)
and steadily developing markets for artistic patronage (§9.3), both with patrons
and clients and buyers and sellers. Ordinary people, too, participated to an
increasing extent with marketised exchange, especially in cities. By the mid-
eighteenth century, Shahjahanabadis could purchase a couplet or chronogram
in the bazaar, perhaps from the very same poets and wits who entertained
the nobility in the refined environment of the mehfil.270 Other dimensions of
an early modern Indian consumer society are evinced by, for instance, chan-
ging notions of property (from communal to private or ‘enclosed’, to use the
English historian’s parlance), or in production of entirely new cash crops (e.g.,
tobacco) and the novel forms of sociability these engendered (§4.3.1). All these
deserve greater examination in the context of early modern India, as they have
in Tokugawa Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and much of Europe.271
We ought not lose sight of the darker aspects of commercial society and
consumerism, however. Corporations, not the state, drove England’s overseas
expansion, for merchants relished the ‘possibilities for investment in land,
property and empire –even the development of new industries and crafts’ that
came with international trade.272 Corporations also provided a model for the
organisation of colonial government, as in Ulster and Virginia, which were
spearheaded by London’s merchant community.273 In the course of their over-
seas expansion, they came into conflict with competitors and with indigenous
powerholders; this was the context to their militarisation.274 To view the English
and other European trading organisations in Asia only as commercial actors –
whether by narrowly studying trade or by opening our eyes a little wider to the
world of goods and cultures of consumption they engendered –blindsides us
to their role in the manufacture and trade of arms and the making of violence.
In Britain, the state relied on contractors and sub-contractors for the manu-
facture and delivery of ordnance well into the late eighteenth century, even into
the next century. In a context of a limited number of specialist manufacturers
and resultant constraints on overall supply, the British state also competed
270 Kaicker, The King, here 108.

271 Quataert, ed., Consumption Studies; Francks, Japanese Consumer, especially 1–73, which
looks at urban and rural consumer society.
272 Smith, Merchants, 13. See, by contrast, critique of the attention given to Indian ‘portfolio
capitalists’ –revolving around their fleetingness and, hence, inability to penetrate Indian
states in the manner of ‘the liaisons dangereuses between governing and mercantile elites in
Europe’ –highlighted by Palat in Indian Ocean World-Economy, 21.
273 Smith, Merchants, 214–15.
274 C.f. Ibid, 33.
226 Capitalism
with such institutions as the East India Company, whose healthy trade in
arms, combined with the need to equip its steadily expanding military from
the 1740s, served to dramatically ramp up demand for firearms. Indeed, as
Priya Satia argues, there was an incredibly deep and complex, sometimes com-
petitive yet other-times symbiotic entanglement of the East India Company,
the Royal Africa Company, and other chartered companies with the British
firearms industry. The latter was itself related to British financial institutions,
as both were largely in the hands of Quakers. These financial, manufacturing,
and trading businesses were also enmeshed in British economic institutions –
namely, the Bank of England and the Royal Mint –and the British state. Thus,
financial networks, technological innovation, and the imperatives of virtually
relentless warfare were all tightly interwoven in industrialising Britain and its
expanding empire.275
On the one hand, there was perhaps something highly distinctive in the
way public versus private, state versus market, government ownership versus
commercial investment in the state were blurred and sometimes inextricable
in Britain. This helps us explain the strange fact of British economic and pol-
itical hegemony, which slowly began to develop around the tail-end of the
period studied in this book. On the other hand, the British in Asia were rela-
tive latecomers to the conjunction of commerce and hard power; for much
of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they were comparably less
militarised than their Dutch and Portuguese counterparts, as the next chapter
describes. All this points us back to the imbrication of capitalism, globalisa-
tion, and violence –something of which we have largely lost sight in the wake
of the global and cultural turns in early modern history. Against this, the next
chapter puts violence centre-stage, using it as a lens to reconceive the social,
political, and military history of early modern India.
275 Satia, Empire of Guns, especially 25–180. See, also: Irigoin, ‘Global Silver Economy’, 280–
81. Smith, Merchants, 144, 175–206, offers a different image of the bargaining power of the
English state vis-à-vis merchants, and vice versa. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade,
40–42, describes the relationship of state capacity to the corporation.
6 Violence
In 1401, Ibn Khaldun came face to face with Timur.1 Born in north Africa
in 1332, Ibn Khaldun rose rapidly into high office and acquired his reputa-
tion as an intellectual luminary of the Arab world, not least on account of
his published works. His life was peripatetic, with periods spent in southern
Spain, across north Africa, and the Arab peninsula, and it was toward the end
of his life –while serving as the qazi of Cairo in the service of the Mamluk
sultan, Faraj (r. 1399–1405, 1405–12) –that he reluctantly accompanied his
master on a military campaign to Damascus to fight Timur. Such was his fame
that he was invited to attend on the world-conqueror, engaging in a series of
discussions that spared him and his defeated colleagues on the ill-advised cam-
paign. Ibn Khaldun thereafter returned to the office of the qazi and died in
1406 (a year after Timur), but his writings garnered considerable influence
across and beyond the Arabic- speaking or Muslim worlds, this influence
enduring down the centuries.
One thesis, pertinent to the subject of this and the following chapter, derives
from his Muqaddima. Of central importance to his thinking, which was shaped
by analysis of the Maghreb, Arabia, and central Asia, was the relationship
of two worlds: that of rural civilisation, which is characterised by the simple,
pared-back life of peasants and pastoralists, and urban civilisation, which
took hold around areas of surplus production, permitting not only material
luxury, but also complex political and social organisation. These worlds were
at once opposite yet complementary. In a spatial or geographic sense, they were
interdependent because peasants and nomads needed or enjoyed the riches of
urban centres while sultans and their subjects depended on the resources –
such as mobile military power –from the realm of pastoralism.
In a temporal or historical sense, too, Ibn Khaldun conceived the two
worlds as intertwined. The rusticity of rural civilisation was the ever-present
past. It reflected a prior, even embryonic, stage of historical development. Yet,
it also contained the vital ingredients –such as the resources of coercion –
required by societies at the more advanced stages of historical development,
1 The discussion that follows draws on: Cheddadi, ‘Ibn Khaldūn’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-6
228 Violence
persisting long after they had disintegrated. The extravagance of urban civil-
isation, by contrast, was both a culmination and an end point. This is because
mulk (power, sovereignty) can be obtained only through ʿasabiyya (solidarity
born of blood ties, real or fictive), and is its logical conclusion according
to Ibn Khaldun. Through a capable and charismatic leader, men from the
rural world might be bonded together to defend their territory, before being
lured by the rich pickings of urban centres to raid or conquer. The leader
of the ʿasabiyya might establish himself as a dynast of a dawla (state), but
from there things start to unravel. The bonds formerly based on blood or
genealogy give way to those based on marriage alliances, leading to divisions
into families, parties, and factions, which are an inherently unstable basis for
mulk and dawla.2 The result of these divisions and the increasing remote-
ness from rural civilisation is the inability to mobilise and channel resources
to sustain power and authority, with the state eventually disintegrating and
becoming easy pickings for a new conqueror and his kinsmen. According to
Ibn Khaldun, therefore, ‘cycles’ characterise the history of states or empires.
Although his empirical base never extended so far, Ibn Khaldun’s thesis
nonetheless has purchase among historians of India, China, and other parts
of Asia, as we shall see.3
The rise and fall of various Indian dynasties after Timur’s invasion of
1398 can be partly explained by the reworking of these ideas, which serve
as our point of departure for an analysis of political power in the present
and following chapter. The focus in this chapter is on what can be called
‘hard power’ and political violence. The possession of hard power and its
underlying resources (soldiers, weapons, tactics), and the ability to success-
fully wage political violence (wars of conquest, pacification campaigns, the
suppression of rebellions), was of fundamental importance in carving out
a kingdom, consolidating authority, and keeping rebels at bay. The more
peaceful routes to maintaining or even enlarging the kingdom’s borders, such
as the brokering of (marriage) alliances or the incorporation of collaborators
and erstwhile opponents, was only possible where a ruler had already
demonstrated their strength. With this in view, the following sections of this
chapter consider each of the following matters, in turn: Upon whose ser-
vices did Indian (would-be) rulers depend when making war and political
violence? How can we understand their participation? How did Indian rulers
justify violent conflict and reward victorious participants? And how did mili-
tary technologies and their evolution effect Indian warfare and, ultimately,
the power of Indian states?
2 For a careful discussion of dawlat (or daulat) in discourses of sovereignty as they evolved in the
Indian context from the time of Timur’s conquests to the reign of Shah Jahan, see: Kaicker, The
King, 58–65.
3 Wink, ‘Post-Nomadic Empires’, for discussion of how the early modern Ottoman, Mughal,
and Qing dynasts and their writers –wary of their ‘decline’ being seen as inevitable, pace Ibn
Khaldun –modulated the latter’s ideas.
Violence 229
6.1 The Economy of Violence

Shahjahanabad has been romanticised as a dazzling city of cosmopolitans.4
But it was a city founded on contrasts –of mansions surrounded by mud huts,
of men of the pen rubbing shoulders with men of the sword (§7.2.3).5 And it,
too, had a dark underbelly peopled by an underclass, by the unscrupulous,
and by the politically restive and the criminal. In this, Shahjahanabad was
much like other early modern capitals, such as Istanbul, albeit without the
brawling sailors and the near-constant threat posed by restless janissaries, or
London, although not nearly as dangerous, dirty, and rude as that city and its
inhabitants.6 A Mughal nobleman or amir had always been expected to main-
tain a certain number of troops in return for his salary, but he was also free to
run his household as an autonomous sarkar (administration), usually choosing
to complement his harem, household staff, and team of clerks with a mili-
tary contingent.7 This last was not only put to the task of protection, but also
to exert its brute power in policing and extracting revenue from payees. Such
contingents were formed of permanent retainers, loyal to their master, but also
freebooting troops and toughs for hire (sih-bandis), much held in contempt and
many of them of Afghan, Abysinnian, and Turani extraction.8 Before its twi-
light years, therefore, men of arms and skilled fighters from far and wide were
already prowling the dark and narrow lanes outside the palace walls. Some
might be policing the city (§4.2.2), others forming gangs to burglarise Delhi’s
grand mansions and shops.
Several of the men patrolling the city streets in the 1780s were in the employ
of a shadowy figure, ‘Himmat Bahadur’. He fought on the Mughals’ side
against the Afghans and Marathas at Panipat in 1761 and with the combined
Mughal-Awadhi forces against the British at Buxar in 1764. He brought down
a Persian adventurer in the 1770s and had been instrumental in the ascendance
of several Maratha leaders in the 1780s. But in 1787, he colluded with an
Afghan warlord hungry for treasure, who proceeded unimpeded to the imperial
palace, where he held the imperial family captive and even blinded the Mughal
emperor. Himmat Bahadur’s part in all this was motivated not by a hatred

5 Prosperity was the cause of social changes –including the growth of the nouveaux riches as well
as a new underclass –that made the imperial capital at once more wealthy and turbulent by the
early eighteenth century: The King, 78–96.
6 Take, for example, one Khannan, a beef-butcher by profession but also a professional and fabu-
lously wealthy thief; ibid, 82. A rich portrait of the violent disorder in Ottoman Istanbul can be
found in: Boyar and Fleet, Social History, 89–121; Yaycioglu, ‘Guarding Traditions’, 1549–550,
on the Janissaries’ role in making the urban (dis)order. Thomas’ Pursuit of Civility describes the
barbarousness or rudeness of the English in their own eyes and in those of European contem-
poraries, and the roughness of Londoners, more particularly. See, also: Lincoln, London.
7 Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, 161–63.
8 Kaicker, The King, 257–90 for references to such figures amid the study of urban riot and
disorder.
230 Violence
for the Mughal ruler, but by his desire to avenge being wronged by one of the
Maratha elites –an endeavour in which he succeeded. Himmat Bahadur’s final
act would be to help the British defeat the Marathas in 1803, which transformed
the East India Company into the paramount power in south Asia. He was a
man who was motivated not only by material rewards, but also by honour
and loyalty; whose tentacles of power reached widely across the subcontinent
and whose allegiances were shifting; and whose command of violent resources
could as easily be put to the task of protecting ordinary city folk as defending
great or growing empires.9 His life is a useful prism, therefore, through which
to understand political violence in south Asia.
6.1.1 Marketised Violence
This vignette of Shahjahanbad in the 1780s not only offers a window onto the
political landscape of the later imperial period; it also helps sketch the kinds
of men who were ready to make violence, the resources at their disposal, and
something of their modus operandi. Before proceeding, it is worth observing
that this portrayal of an all-male world may be deceptive, for the role of
women in politics –and the making of violence for the purposes of conquest
or as piracy –has been given little explicit attention in Indian and wider world
history (§7.2.2).10 But this is not to suggest that that the study of violence in
early modern India has produced an especially rich historiography; far from
it.11 Indian historians have largely focused to date on warfare and some have
analysed the market for military labour, yet the latter was only one part of a
much broader economy of violence.
On the demand-side, this economy could be made up of rulers, warlords,
and military entrepreneurs representing those patrons and clients demanding
the services of violent men, whether to create state regiments and the private
armies of regional grandees and royal pretenders, or rural and urban militias,
police forces, and gangs of armed men supporting fiscal agents responsible for
the maintenance of law and order. Among those who supplied their ‘labour’,
whether as (un)armed brawn or as skilled combatants, were fighters belonging
to guilds, not to mention highway-men, outlaws, bandits, and buccaneers, and
various kinds of footloose strongmen, wrestlers, martial arts experts, or other
skilled combatants in possession of anything from simple weapons such as
pikes or sticks, maces and spears (Fig. 6A), to archers and to those toting the
9 For other examples of men skilled in fighting or use of weapons switching between different
types of protection services and soldiery as the market and demand dictated: Kolff, ‘Peasants’,
249–50.
10 See, however: Paranque et al, eds., Powerful Women.
11 Indicatively, see: Anthony et al, eds., Cambridge World History of Violence, which contains only
one chapter on south Asia (by William Pinch, summarising his Warrior Ascetics), but several
each on the Ottoman world and east Asia, with the lion’s share on Europe and its colonies. The
work on non-European locales has developed more gradually and more recently: Robinson,
Bandits; Tong, Disorder Under Heaven; Barkey, Bandits.
Violence 231
Fig. 6A Spear (steel; south Indian; possibly seventeenth century)

more sophisticated firearms developed in this period (arquebuses, muskets,

matchlocks, flintlocks).12 In early modern India, the broader landscape of the
economy of violence encompassed rural sports such as pata hilana (fighting
with wooden swords), rustam khani (stick fighting), and tir andazi (archery), as
well as martial arts training centres or akharas in both towns and countryside,
some organised by monks.13 More broadly, the Indian peasantry appears to
have been well-armed and able to effect its resistance to unwanted overlordship
where its services were not used by the same.14
There was more than a mere rough undercurrent to the early modern world,
for it was peopled with men ready to make violence.15 The state’s monopoly
over violence, as Janice E. Thomson argues, is ‘neither timeless nor natural’
but of relatively recent genesis; until the modern period, most states found
themselves trying to regulate the propensity for violence and its patronage
as a necessity, if not actually transacting in a competitive marketplace them-
selves.16 There was no single market, of course, but a series of imbricated
markets segmented by geography, by identities (real or imagined), and by the
12 See, also: Lally, Silk Roads, 75–79.

13 Kolff, Naukar, 28.
14 Ibid, 1–31.
15 The inspiration, here, comes from J. R. Hale: Renaissance Europe.
16 Thomson, Mercenaries, 1 for citation, and passim. Even nowadays, the state cannot claim
to possess a total monopoly in the face of pirates and private armies: Colás and Mabee,
Mercenaries.
232 Violence
skills of participants, although the agility and mobility of some actors meant
they could switch from one locale or function to another.17 Rulers and their
nobles naturally had to reach into these local pools of violence and transact
on the market for the services of armed men in order to wage political vio-
lence. One early eighteenth-century text outlined which ‘martial clans’ could
be recruited into a mansabdar’s service and in what proportion of their total
contingent: Afghan nobles could recruit up to two-thirds of their men from
among their own, for example, whereas Uzbek nobles’ forces were more eth-
nically homogeneous.18 The growing market for military labour in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries strengthened the hand of landed elites in
control of men (e.g., zamindars, deshmukhs), military contractors, and new
groups espousing a martial ethic, meanwhile deepening the militarisation of
local society and making labour more mobile, especially in the south.19 The
focus here and in much of what follows rests upon labour deployed in combat,
but non-combat labour –encompassing blacksmiths, carpenters, stonemasons,
miners, boatmen, and builders, not to mention all those provisioning the front
lines –was probably also marketised to a degree.20
6.1.2 Military Slavery
At the outset, however, it is worth stating that the nature and degree of market-
isation probably varied, especially since some participants were not transacting
as free agents on the open market as economic theory might have it. A mix-
ture of coercion, especially over clan or lineage members by their leader or
superior, and even corvée labour were necessary to amass fighting power in
the premodern world, as in Japan on the eve of Tokugawa rule (est. 1603).21
Across the Islamic world, particularly on the ‘frontier’ –described as ‘polit-
ically unstable and socially fluid contexts in which hereditary authority was
weak’ –the practice of capturing non-Muslims for military service persisted
through the medieval and early modern periods.22 The ‘human tithes’ (devşirme)
taken to fill the ranks of the Ottoman Janissary corps and the Safavids’ elite
ghulams (slave soldiers) are notable examples of the practice.23 In north India,
17 The matter of identities is one explored more fully by Kolff in Naukar, 71–199.
20 See: Nath, ‘Military Labour’, who notes that the sources are silent on why such groups offered
their skills and services to the Mughals.
21 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii, 413–14.
22 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 111, for citation. This, and Eaton’s ‘Military Slavery’, are the source
of many of the details in this paragraph.
23 Newman, Safavid Iran, 52– 55, 71–
74. Veinstein, ‘Ottoman Janissaries’, offers an access-
ible introduction to the world of janissary service and its development. See, also: Goffman,
Ottoman Empire, 27–97, for discussion of the janissary and ghulam slave systems in the early
Ottoman Empire and the reaction of Europeans; Yaycioglu, ‘Guarding Traditions’, provides a
sophisticated social history of the janissary class in the later empire period.
Violence 233
the first of the Delhi Sultanates was founded by a former military slave of
Turkish origin known as a mamluk, and the mamluk system remained critic-
ally important to military recruitment until at least the fourteenth century.24
Although largely abandoned in the Mughal north in the sixteenth century,
military slavery persisted in the frontier environment of the south until its con-
quest and incorporation into the Mughal state in the seventeenth century.25
Until then, the demand for military slaves was met by men captured from
Ethiopia (or Abyssinia, known by the Arabic term ‘Habshi’) and brought to the
Deccan via the Arabian Gulf. Habshis were preferred by Muslim and Christian
enslavers and their collaborators because they saw indigenes as pagans, and
thus felt morally free to enslave them. Most famous of all is Malik Ambar
(1548–1626) (Fig. 6B). He was born in present-day Ethiopia in 1548 as Chapu
(his birth name); either sold by his parents or taken as a war captive; then sold
and resold in the slave markets of the Arab world before being brought to the
Deccan. There, he entered a world where Habshis did not merely fulfill the
demand for soldiers, for such men could also rise to positions of power: upon
being freed, they might freelance as warriors so that a master-slave relationship
was transformed to more of a patron-client one, some serving as paid troopers
while others organised units of their own. Thus, Malik Ambar’s master was
a once-enslaved Habshi who was freed and climbed to the position of peshwa
(chief minister) of Ahmadnagar. After being freed, Malik Ambar himself
served the rulers of Ahmadnagar and (briefly) of Bijapur, rose through the
military ranks from a freelancer to a commander and owner of his own mili-
tary slaves, and became the regent and peshwa of the Ahmadnagar sultanate,
marrying his daughter into the royal family.26 He successfully repelled Mughal
armies from the north and –more than the sultan himself –symbolised the
major obstacle to early seventeenth-century Mughal expansion, earning the
Mughals’ ire (and grudging respect). In a grisly fantasy painted by a Mughal
artist, Jahangir shoots an arrow at the dismembered head of his nemesis.27
The advent of Mughal rule in the north in the sixteenth century, and the
empire’s expansion southward later in the seventeenth century, was trans-
formative. To be sure, a lively trade in slaves brought from central Asia
continued, and use was made of enslaved people in numerous different roles
in Rajput courts, throughout the Mughal realm, and in the later Maratha
state, not least within elite households, despite a ban on enslaving the families
of war captives (although not the captives themselves) in Akbar’s time.28
24 Kumar, ‘Military Slavery’; Roy, ‘From the Mamluks to the Mansabdars’.

25 See: Ali, African Dispersal, for a history of Habshis in the Deccan. Issues of race and of the
long-term place of Habshis in Indian society are described by Eaton and examined even more
fully in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture, vol. 11, no. 4, ‘Narrating Africa in
South Asia’ (2020).
26 Ali, Malik Ambar, for an excellent biography with primary source excerpts. See, also: Eaton,
‘Military Slavery’; Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 105–28.
27 Moin, Millennial, 193–96, for analysis of this ‘metaphorical’ picture.
28 Levi, ‘Hindus Beyond the Hindu Kush’; Sreenivasan, ‘Female Slaves’; Guha, ‘Slavery’.
234 Violence
Fig. 6B Portrait of Malik Ambar (watercolour and gold; attributed to an Ahmednagar

artist; early seventeenth century)
© Jimlop collection /Alamy Stock Photo
The Mughals also captured rebels and authorised their sale in slave markets
in central Asia, thereby contributing to the two-way traffic in enslaved persons.
But military slaves were not part of the Mughal conquest, for Babur
was accompanied by kinsmen and ‘free’ warriors from Iran and central Asia.
Military slavery was undesirable from a tactical perspective, furthermore, for
Mughal officers permitted to purchase enslaved people might form devotedly
loyal bands of personal retainers as part of the build-up of their own power
Violence 235
bases –power bases that could be used to launch a rebellion.29 It persisted

but was swamped by ‘free’ labour.30 Of course, the market for military labour
might have approximated a ‘free market’, but that does not necessarily entail
free agency on the part of its participants. In a society defined by customary
rights and obligations (e.g., between peasants and zamindars), and in a context
where retainers were valued for their unswerving loyalty to their master, to say
nothing of military corvée, there are good reasons to believe the rank-and-file
had less freedom than their patrons.
6.1.3 Military Entrepreneurs, Local Elites, and Recruitment
Ultimately, the career of Himmat Bahadur and the trajectories of manumitted

military slaves in the Delhi and Deccan sultanates throw two issues into relief.
First, how important the open market was to the sale and purchase of the ser-
vices of warriors and armed men by the sixteenth century, if not earlier, all the
way through to the end of our period. In fact, the success of the Mughals and
of Sher Shah, as much as their contemporaries who ruled Gujarat and Malwa,
depended on transacting in these markets.31 Second, how a ruler’s military needs
were not primarily met by the state’s own battalions but by transacting with
military entrepreneurs or jobbers (jamadars) and their warbands.32 They often
hailed from Turan, Iran, and Afghanistan and had little interest in possession
of landed right, but some were successfully channelled into imperial service –
for example, through offer of a mansab and jagir in the Mughal context (§7.1) –
while others remained like the roving condottieri of early modern Europe.33
In the Ottoman world, the janissary corps and the timariots and their sipahis
(cavalrymen) were but a part of the combined military forces available to the
sultan, of which the larger part remained diffuse and/or loosely controlled. In
China, too, violence was a fact of everyday life in which, for example, ‘local
officials and ambitious bandit chiefs often competed for men of force from a
common pool.’34
Another component were the zamindars, under whose sway were an
estimated four million men or more. They were probably untrained and undis-
ciplined yet, ultimately, constituted a staggeringly large pool of manpower.35
Their close ties to the soil and local men meant they could inspire –or force –
peasants into military service during the winter slack season for mutual –or
29 Eaton, ‘Introduction’ [1]‌, 11–12.

30 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 83.
33 Ibid, 68.
34 Robinson, Bandits, 167. See, also: Moll-Murata and Theobald, ‘Military Employment’, espe-
cially 355–59 and 382–90.
236 Violence
personal –gain.36 Their local authority meant they could just as well be lured by
the promise of a watan jagir as reject the bestowal of this landed right –which
they felt they already possessed –and the submission to Mughal authority that
it entailed. A further corollary of their connection to the soil was that they
may have been less inclined to fight in distant campaigns than help suppress
local conflicts or else serve as local militias. Over time, moreover, a process
of zamindarisation unfolded whereby mansabdars sought to ‘trade their mili-
tary assets for stakes in agrarian lordships, thus becoming zamindari landlords
themselves’.37
The sheer scale and geographic scope of marketised and usually highly
mobile military labour increased through the early modern period as the
world –as well as the grounds of conflicts themselves –became more globalised.
The picture was similar elsewhere. In mainland southeast Asia, for instance,
Cham, Mon and Malay warriors, and adventurers and mercenaries from Iran,
Japan, and the Iberian world –many of them skilled in the use of cutting-edge
firearms and thus preferred to indigenous conscripts –made up the fighting
power of Burmese and Siamese rulers, though local military training gradually
helped displace such reliance on foreigners in time.38 In Europe, men also left
their localities to travel long distances to offer their services, sometimes under
state sponsorship. The Scottish government, for instance, raised levies to fight
in conflicts across northern Europe, which reached a peak amidst a backdrop
of social and economic hardship at home, c. 1550–1650. There were, more-
over, many unlicensed, unofficial, and hence unaccounted for levies raised by
Scottish lairds to fight across Europe and as far as Russia or the Ottoman fron-
tier.39 By the eighteenth century, continental Europeans joined Scots and other
Britons to cross the Atlantic and voyage back again to fight on both sides of the
revolutionary wars.40 These conflicts even spilled into the Indian Ocean world,
so that European soldiers enlisted in standing armies –not to mention mer-
cenaries and militias absorbed into armies, which remained important in this
period –now fought on Asian soil alongside the European powers’ regiments
36 Note that peasants sometimes turned to plunder and looting if opportunities for military ser-
vice were unavailable: Kolff, ‘Peasants’, 251.
37 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 68–69, on this process, and 53, for a longer-standing and eventu-
ally related process of ‘rajputisation’, whereby there was a ‘gradual transition of mobile, open,
exogamous war-bands into settled, closed, endogamous castes who recognised little else than
unilineal kinship.’
39 Miller, ‘Scottish Mercenary’. The Highland ‘clearances’ of the eighteenth century stimulated
another wave of ‘military migration’ or mercenary service: Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War,
especially 177–91; Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier, 19–32. The market for mercenaries was
highly international before c. 1650; the protracted nature of campaigning changed this for a
time thereafter: Parrott, Business of War, 71–100.
40 Mackillop, More Fruitful than the Soil; Dziennik, Fatal Land. See, also: Conway, Britannia’s
Auxiliaries.
Violence 237
of local conscripts.41 Much as Asians fought for the Europeans, so the reverse
was also true. In fact, so many European soldiers had defected from the Estado
or the East India companies into the ranks of the Mughal army, ‘that a special
district in Delhi was set aside for them called “Foreigners’ town”.’42
The marketisation of military labour, and of the resources for making pol-
itical violence at large, probably intensified through the early modern period in
north India, and likely also the south.43 Although Akbar had tried to subdue
the violent power of refractory zamindars, the Mughals nevertheless relied on
clan leaders and chiefs with close links to local pools of men to broker and
recruit peasant soldiers, receiving in return for their loyalty a share of the spoils
and an official rank in the Mughal state system, thus becoming Mughal ser-
vicemen (mansabdars).44 The ascendance of the Bundela leader and favourite
of Jahangir, Raja Bir Singh Deo (d. 1627), is an outstanding example of the
possibilities open to a talented military entrepreneur. By successfully placing
infantry units at the emperor’s disposal, he was able to channel the empire’s
financial and other resources towards himself in return.45
From the sixteenth century, as new artillery technologies steadily diffused
and became more available, so more and more peasants armed themselves with
handguns via intermediaries like Bir Singh Deo, entered imperial naukari (ser-
vice), and carried the flame of peasant soldiering traditions known by such
names as Purbiya, Tomar, Ujjainiya, Bundela, and Baksariya. From the late
seventeenth century, well-armed peasants became a greater problem for the
imperial centre, while at the same time the latter’s territorial reach and its grip
over society started to weaken. The collapse of the Mughal state system meant
the role played by mansabdars in recruitment shifted to numerous independ-
ently operating jamadars with ‘strong local links and great freedom of negoti-
ating their terms of service’, often working for any one of a range of patrons.46
In the southern sultanates, the control of military manpower was compara-
tively tilted toward regional grandees, rather than the sultans, many of whom
thus tried to emulate Mughal-style centralisation in the decades preceding the
Mughal conquest of the Deccan. It is a matter of speculation whether and to
what extent recruitment reverted in the post-Mughal period.47 Here we find
parallel with the transformation of the Ottoman military after 1650.48 The
empire’s steady decentralisation empowered local potentates, who became
41 Sikora, ‘Change and Continuity’, carefully outlines why, where, and how mercenaries and
militias persisted into the mid-eighteenth century in central Europe.
42 Hunt, ‘Mughal Siege’, 156, 165.
43 Kolff, ‘Peasant’, 248. See, also: Kumar, ‘Bandagi and Naukari’, on the evolution of military
service cultures across the late medieval to early modern periods.
44 Kolff, ‘Peasant’, 248, 261. For the pre-Mughal history of peasant military service and certain
peasant warrior orders: op. cit., 254–59.
45 Ibid, citations 259, and 259–61 for a survey of Bir Singh’s life.
46 Ibid, 248. See, also: Kolff, ‘Mobile Labour’.
47 Dayal, ‘ “Mughal” Soldier’, especially 875–78.
48 Aksan, ‘Mobilization’, especially 337–50.
238 Violence
military contractors, and whose private armies sometimes joined mercenary

forces and state troops to put down local rebellion or fight in Ottoman wars.49
6.1.4 Warrior Ascetics
Aside from jamadars and their warbands or zamindars and peasants, Indian
rulers could make use of the services of leaders possessing spiritual authority.
The shaikhzadas were Indian-born descendants of Sufi saints who, before
settling, had amassed a widespread and devoted following by roving as
dervishes. Since they commanded extensive networks of disciples, they were
perfectly placed to launch a career as a military entrepreneur, as evinced by the
lives of Saiyid Abul Fath and Rashid Khan Ansari, leaders of the Mahdawi
and Rowshaniya sects, respectively.50 Shaikhzadas thus became an important
part of the Mughal imperial service elite.51 A number of historians have also
brought to light the importance of Hindu (and Sikh) warrior ascetics. Some
were yogis, for yoga was a practice aiming toward unleashing power (§2.3);
colonial sources often call them fakirs or sannyasis. Some were gosains (in the
Gangetic valley), bairagis (toward the west), or were known as nagas.52 The
man known in later life by the nom de guerre Himmat Bahadur –which was
bestowed by the Nawab of Awadh in return for his valorous service –was
also known as Anupgiri Gosain, and many of his men were fellow gosains.53
The existence of these warrior ascetics was of long standing but they became
prominent from the fifteenth century, with their heyday in the latter half of the
eighteenth century. Ceasing to be a significant military and political presence
following the colonial transition, they nonetheless remained a source of polit-
ical agitation –protesting cow slaughter legislation in the 1960s, for e xample –
down to the modern day.54
Rather than selling their labour on the market in the first instance, militarised
groups like the Dadupanthi nagas, certain Vaishnava bairagis, and the early
Sikh Khalsa formed with the intention of fighting particular opponents and
perceived injustices, such as confiscation of wealth and tax-free lands from
the monasteries or institutions of particular (faith) communities.55 The spread
of Muslim rule in north India may or may not have increased the occurrence
of confiscations: the evidence is hazy, and a number of Muslim rulers sought
to protect the rights of non-believers, while some conflicts continued to be
between Hindu communities. The perception of injustice and conflict may have
been sufficient to prompt militarised religious bodies into being, nonetheless.56
49 Khoury, ‘Ottoman Centre’, 145–48.

52 Pinch, Warrior Ascetics, 6.
53 Ibid, 5.
54 Lorenzen, ‘Warrior Ascetics’, 61.
55 Ibid, 63, 69–70.
56 Ibid, 68–69. C.f. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics, 7.
Violence 239
Ultimately, the service of Himmat Bahadur/ Anupgiri Gosain to Muslim,

Hindu, and Christian paymasters was far from unusual, and thus stands as a
reminder that the gosains’ beliefs ought not be misunderstood as monolithic
and neatly and narrowly bounded (‘Hindu’) and hence necessarily in antag-
onism with the beliefs of Muslim kings any more than they were at odds with
other Hindus of different and diverse beliefs.57
The military economy engendered by Mughal rule created tremendous
opportunities for the expansion of warrior asceticism, for yogis found ready
patrons in the commanders of Mughal armies.58 To this can be added a push
factor: the frequency of hunger due to environmental fluctuations, worsened
when rulers squeezed their subjects for more tax revenues, during what we now
call the latter phase of the early modern Little Ice Age, for this encouraged
boys and men to join the groups of yogis bonded by discipleship and offering
sustenance.59 In terms of numbers and tactics, small groups of yogis skilled
in guerrilla-style fighting transformed into large warbands made up of cav-
alrymen and infantrymen, although hand-to-hand combat did not disappear
entirely. Himmat Bahadur, for instance, commanded more than 20,000 men in
the late eighteenth century.60
Being highly mobile, some of these warrior ascetics combined armed service
and trade, not least those sannyasis or gosains who were numerous throughout
‘the country lying south of the hills of Tibbet from Cabul to China’, as noted
by Warren Hastings, governor general of the East India Company (1772–
85).61 Occasionally roving around India on pilgrimages armed with swords
and matchlocks, or conducting trans-Himalayan trade in valuable commod-
ities (diamonds, coral, gold dust, musk, pearls, cloth), some settled in monas-
teries or hermitages, others in towns as traders or moneylenders, and others
still employed by landlords to defend the latter’s zamindaris or to extort money
and as soldiers, with many switching between such occupations.62 If Mughal
expansion was connected to one phase of their evolution, so the breakdown of
Mughal rule led naturally to further growth. Indeed, the particular prominence
of warrior ascetics and their leaders in eighteenth century Punjab, Rajasthan,
Bengal, and the Maratha territories is hardly surprising. The opportunities for
leaders like Himmat Bahadur for advancement and reward grew tremendously
in the wake of Mughal decentralisation and decline.63
57 And vice versa, since Jahangir, for example, was said to be a devotee of one Jadrup
Gosain: Pinch, Warrior Ascetics, 22 and n.38. Akbar, of course, took great interest in India’s
diverse religious diverse communities, including yogis: op. cit., 28–58. On the horror of Ahmad
Shah’s soldiers upon seeing naked gosains in amongst the Muslim lines of the Afghans’ allies
at Panipat in 1761: Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 57 and n. 42.
58 Pinch, Warrior Ascetics, especially 59–103.
59 Ibid, 80–81.
60 Ibid, 70–80.
61 Quoted in: Kolff, ‘Sannyasi’, 214.
62 Kolff, ‘Sannyasi’, 214–15, 217; Cohn, ‘Gosains’.
63 Lorenzen, ‘Warrior Ascetics’, 68.
240 Violence
6.2 The Ecology of Violence
6.2.1 Afro-Eurasia’s Arid and Wet Zones
What obstacles thwarted the state’s monopoly on violence? Or, to put it dif-
ferently, why were there so many diffuse and often highly mobile pools of
men ready to make violence? One key factor was ecology. Jos Gommans
foregrounds and develops the environmental currents of Ibn Khaldun’s ana-
lysis, mapping the idea of political cycles born of the dualism of two distinct
yet interdependent spaces onto his formulation of the arid and wet zones. The
arid zone stretches from the parched southeast of the Iberian Peninsula across
north Africa and Arabia, from the fringes of Poland across the steppes and
deserts of central Asia to Mongolia, and southward through the Afghan high-
lands to the Deccan Plateau (Map 6A). The degree of aridity varies but, essen-
tially, this is a space of relatively low agricultural fertility, limited urbanisation,
and low population density, the lifestyles of its inhabitants being nomadic or
semi-nomadic. By contrast, the surrounding area is fertile and lush, with vast
river basins that are the source of agricultural fertility and fecundity, dense
populations with a tendency toward agglomeration in towns and cities, and
centralised states. Straddling the dry and wet zones, while also serving as a
transitory region between the larger arid zone of central Eurasia and the sub-
tropical region of monsoon Asia, Gommans argues, the Indian subcontinent
is fairly unique, these facts also explaining patterns of political change and the
character of Indian states.64
The arid zone of south Asia extends from present-day Afghanistan into the
Thar Desert and over the hills, plateaus, and grasslands of low fertility and low
rainfall in western and central India, such as Bundelkhand, the Malwa Plateau,
and the Deccan Plateau. This space graduates to the more moist and fertile
land of the east, and several rivers –the Krishna, Kaveri, and Godaveri –cut
through parts of the arid zone on their eastward course to the Indian Ocean.
There is no hard boundary between the arid and wet zones, which instead are
knitted into one another at what Gommans calls the ‘inner frontier’. Indeed,
the notion of a dualism between two heuristic zones should not obscure the
deep integration of the two worlds and the back and forth interchange between
them: the use made by pastoralists of town and village markets and the reli-
ance of cultivators on the use of pastoralists’ herds for ploughing; the periodic
settling down of pastoralists from the mobile world of the dry zone, or the
geographic and occupational mobility of inhabitants of the sedentary world of
the wet zone; and the granting of cultivable land to military entrepreneurs and
their men –in return for military service –that needed to be farmed.65
64 Gommans, ‘Silent Frontier’, 4–10; Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 8–10. See, also: Nath, Climate
of Conquest, 6–10.
65 Kolff, ‘Peasants’, 243, and passim.
newgenrtpdf
Violence 241
Map 6A Afro-Eurasia’s Arid Zone
242 Violence
One significance of making this distinction, nevertheless, is that it helps us

to see that durable or successful imperial capitals were often located on the
inner frontier, this space ‘between (semi-)nomadic wilderness and sedentary
centres.’66 Delhi is a classic example, but others include Bijapur, Golkonda,
and Vijayanagara. Rather than being static, the inner frontier was invigorated
from about the twelfth century by ‘the increased input of stronger warhorses,
dromedaries, and cattle, all of which tremendously enhanced the existing cap-
acity for warfare, trade, and land reclamation.’67 Thus, Gommans notes, the
‘dilemma for the Delhi rulers was both a classic Islamic and Indic one: although
their rule belonged to the settled order of sedentary society, their actual power
derived from the arid wastes.’68
Substituting the dualism of rural and urban civilisation posited by Ibn
Khaldun for the dualism of Afro-Eurasia’s arid and wet zones (and the inner
frontier betwixt) offers a more nuanced framework for the study of hard power
and political violence in south Asia.69 The inhabitants of the arid zone fre-
quently enjoyed the material productions and riches of the subcontinent’s
sedentary societies, either through trade or raid and plunder. Their drive
to sequester the wealth of sedentary states might eventually give way to
the desire to establish political authority via conquest. Initially, tribesmen-
turned-dynastic rulers might effectively harness the resources of the arid zone
in furtherance of state building in the fertile lands beyond, and channel wealth
from the latter toward their kinsmen and allies in the former. Over time, how-
ever, these dynasts became too accustomed to the trappings of a settled life,
and too remote from pastoral society, to maintain the unity of tribal power or
to effectively channel tribal resources into their ambit. Invoking the frames of
Ibn Khaldun’s theory, the result was a ‘degeneration’ that led to the decline of
these states, and within it an opportunity ripe for plucking –the opportunity
for a new grand alliance of tribesmen under a new leader to harvest the fruit
of the world of the sown, and thereby begin the cycle anew.
6.2.2 Pastoralists and Militaries
The notion of arid and wet zones, and the successful exploitation of their
respective advantages, helps explain other features of violent power in south
Asia. In the first place, the environmental divide underwrote differences in
agrarian regimes and, ultimately, in settlement versus pastoralism that pro-
foundly shaped military organisation. Food insecurity in the arid zone was a
push to participation in seasonal military labour markets.70 Fortune smiled on
66 Gommans, Indian Frontier, 19–21, and citation on 20.

67 Ibid, 77.
68 Ibid, 77.
69 Ibid, 51–77. Wink, Post-Nomadic Empires’, examines Ibn Khaldun’s ‘environmental deter-
minism’, comparing it to the earlier theory posited by Herodotus.
70 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 11–12.
Violence 243
the inhabitants of the arid zone in other ways, however. The opportunity cost
of fodder production in the wet zone was too high –because of the sacrifice
of cash crops –and the environment ill-suited to raising large herds of horses,
bullocks, dromedaries, or other quadrupeds. The opposite was true in the dry
zone, where the constant search for fresh pasturage incentivised pastoralism
over settlement, while the seasonal migration between the arid and wet zones
to graze herds and to sell animal products (dairy, fats, hides, meat) coincided
neatly with the winter campaign season, creating an opportunity to offer mili-
tary labour and the hire or sale of the pastoralists’ animal power.71
But who were these pastoralists? The semi-arid expanse in south India was
long home to people who made a living by swidden agriculture, herding, and
trade, with the precarity of life on the upland slopes precipitating a tendency
toward the ‘development of martial skills and the emergence of warlords.’72
This tendency was bolstered by the spread of new technologies like stirrups,
saddles, and harnesses, which enhanced the efficacy of cavalry warfare, fuelling
the intensification of militarism in late medieval south India –the crucible
from which the Sangama brothers rose to power to establish the Vijayanagara
Empire.73 On the western side of the Indian peninsula, the Marathas originated
as a loose, open-status peasant-warrior grouping, probably pastoralists before
some of the most important clans (e.g., the Bhonsles) acquired prebends
through service to the Deccan sultans, probably in the seventeenth century, a
mere generation or two before Shivaji was born.74 And in the northwest, the
dry zone extended over the Rajput states, where a distinct tradition of military
service had come into being by the early modern period, and deep into present-
day Afghanistan, Iran, and central Asia.
Known as Pathans, Pashtuns, or Powindas, these mobile groups from
Afghanistan were critically important to the production of hard power across
the Indian subcontinent, not only in the cradle of empires in Hindustan. The
precarity of the Pashtuns’ homeland from the point of view of settled agricul-
ture had long ago spurred into being an economy in which well-armed tribes
(ulus) protected their scarce resources, sometimes turning to reiving because their
livelihoods depended on the possession of large herds; indeed, they can hardly
be called primitive, for their economy required considerable capitalisation.75 The
Powindas were the migratory Pashtun tribes. They spent the summer months
from April to September in the north of their migratory circuit, either on pas-
turage in the Afghan highlands or even as far north as the oases states of central
Eurasia, such as Bukhara. Then, once these places were bitten by the winter
71 For discussion of the role of animals in Mughal warfare more generally, see: Nath, Climate of
Conquest, 131–48 and notes for references to the classic work of Simon Digby and to that of
Jos Gommans in the latter’s Indo-Afghan.
73 Ibid, 69–70.
74 Kolff, ‘Peasants’; Gordon, Marathas, 41–58.
75 Lally, ‘Landscape’. On the latter point, see: Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 15 and n. 8.
244 Violence
cold, and once the summer on the north Indian plain had passed, they descended
onto the pastures of Punjab and Hindustan, some fanning as far south as the
Deccan or as far east as Bengal, where they spent the period from October to
March.76 Much like the gosains, marriage alliances struck with charismatic and
important religious (i.e., Sufi) leaders unlocked the resources of these religious
networks while also allowing Afghans to pass more easily through hostile terri-
tory, this process beginning in the fifteenth century, if not earlier.77
Their arrival in north India thus coincided with the campaign season, when
the rains had passed and when slack labour during the cooler months could
be enjoined into military service to Indian potentates. Afghans sought a share
of the spoils of campaigns but sometimes –under the spell of a charismatic
leader –sought the trappings of sedentary society. As mercenaries and owners
of livestock, Afghans and their leaders held a power that was something of a
double-edged sword from the perspective of rulers of India’s sedentary states.
On the one hand, the subduing and successful control of their restive energies
supported expansionism and pacification campaigns.78 On the other hand, such
resources could as easily be employed by rivals or by the Afghans themselves.
Several ‘Indian’ dynasties were of Afghan descent, their origins laying in con-
trol of the horse trade, Gommans reminds us, namely the Ghurids (879–1215)
and Lodis (1451–1526), as well as the short-lived Sur dynasty that ruled during
the Mughal interregnum (1540–56).79 The rise of the Durrani state was not
the accidental consequence of some chaotic ‘tribal breakout’ (§1.3.3; §7.4), but
consequent to Ahmad Shah’s mobilisation of the resources and representatives
of arid and wet zone society.
6.2.3 Climate, Environment, and Military Strategy
The distinction of the arid from wet zones is not merely a heuristic device
contrived by modern historians. It found expression in Indian sources as an
Ayurvedic divide between the phlegmatic ailments of inhabitants in the east,
where malaria was endemic, and the bilious temperament of those in the west,
where malaria was epidemic.80 Climate mattered in other ways, too, altering
the ease or difficulty faced by those thousands of ordinary labourers who
made campaigning possible, whether by transporting and erecting the mili-
tary encampment, providing carriage services, building bridges and other
structures, and helping to provision the army.81 Climatic difference also made

77 Green, ‘Blessed Men’.
78 For analysis of this problematic into the colonial period, see: Lally, ‘Landscape’.
79 Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 104–43.
81 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 148–64. Reflexively, military manpower was –and still is –deployed
for such purposes as construction of infrastructure or the provision of emergency relief, as
lately brought to attention by a new wave of labour/military histories: Zürcher, ‘Introduction’,
especially 11–12, 18–19.
Violence 245
certain landscapes alien and uncomfortable to invading armies and their

leaders, necessitating collaboration with local intermediaries and powerholders,
without whom campaigns were seldom successful.
Such collaborators occasionally misjudged the capabilities and ambitions
of pastoralists, nomads, and their leaders. Take, as an example, the Ming gen-
erals who opened the gates of the Great Wall for the Manchu-Qing forces,
mistakenly thinking the latter would be content to help put down the disorder
and reassert Ming control in return for the rewards of plunder. They gravely
underestimated the grander and sophisticated ambitions of those they viewed
as mere nomads or ‘barbarians’.82 Ahmad Shah Durrani’s first solo campaign
into north India was likewise encouraged by collaborators busy pursuing their
own political objectives: in the midst of a bitter family feud, one of the rival
claimants to the Mughal governorship of Punjab offered Ahmad Shah the
post of wazir (prime minister) in exchange for helping return order to Punjab,
before turning his back on the Durrani ruler, and thus being held to ransom
in 1747 when the Afghan forces invaded nonetheless.83 More broadly, collab-
oration was not only a means of accessing a military leader’s manpower, but
also their knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of local climate and landscape, and
the resources suited to these environments that they put at the invading army’s
disposal. Mughal expansion vitally depended upon such men, as Pratyay Nath
reveals in work that moves beyond the framework of the arid and wet zones.
That the Mughals harnessed the resources of the arid zone to conquer the
north Indian plain (Hindustan) is not in doubt. The particular technologies
of which they made use are described below, save to say that the flat open
spaces of Hindustan were well suited to fighting pitched battles featuring
‘mounted archery, heavy cavalry, matchlock-bearing infantry, and field artil-
lery’, not least at Panipat in 1526 and again in 1556.84 Thereafter, imperial
expansion entailed movement into a landscape broken up by dense forest or
shrub and populated with defensive forts, so that sieges became more common.
Then, as the imperial army moved outward yet further, they encountered even
more unfamiliar landscapes. The amphibious environments of the Bengal
delta and the Indus basin, the thickly forested tropical uplands of Assam,
and the uplands of the Hindu Kush and the Himalaya each necessitated the
adoption of particular military technologies and tactics suited to the terrain
and climate.85 Nath shows that Mughal success was often the fruit of alliances,
especially with local powerholders. In Bengal, for example, the Mughal com-
mander Raja Man Singh forged an association with Bhabananda Majundar
82 Brook, Great State, 121–25.

83 Lally, ‘Beyond “Tribal Breakout” ’, 378.
84 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 32 for citation.
85 The attention paid by Nath to early modern Bengal’s riparian landscape and its agency within
imperial politics and governance is complemented by some excellent recent work by (envir-
onmental) historians of the early colonial period, for example: Mukherjee, ‘Impermanent
Settlement’; D’Souza, ‘Mischievous Rivers’. See, also: Roy, ‘Where is Bengal?’.
246 Violence
(Mazumdar), who prayed to the local goddess Annapurna to part the storm
clouds. Recorded in a later Bengali literary text, this episode –whether fictive
or not –nevertheless illuminates the difficulties posed by the heavy monsoon
rain, the tangle of tributaries and rivers, and the occurrence of floods that
the Mughals struggled against, not to mention the assistance they necessarily
sought from local potentates. It was through such alliances that the Mughals
acquired the river boats they needed in combat.86 In contrast, where alliances
could not be built, the Mughals faced opponents in possession of similar gun-
powder technologies yet with vastly superior knowledge and control of the
local environment, putting the Mughals at a grave disadvantage; this was the
case in Assam during the campaigns fought in the first half of the seventeenth
century, for example. The enticing of such collaborators forces us to reckon
with how violent conflict was justified and how participants were rewarded,
which are the subjects of the next section.87
6.3 Cultures of Violence

The pursuit of spiritual merit meant military service was possibly its own
reward for the members of militarised monastic orders, while the conscious
crafting of soldierly identities by jamadars helped to entice the jawan (youth) in
search of a brotherhood and a purpose into military service.88 Yet, we should
not overlook the draw of material rewards, which came in the form of cash/
tribute and possibly also a share in the spoils of conflict –what is sometimes
described as plunder, loot, or prize.89 Generally, skilled combatants were paid
off (in arrears) whereas higher-ranking commanders-cum-collaborators and
noblemen were rewarded for their valorous service not only with cash but
through incorporation into the state (§7.1.2).90 The bestowal of office was
marked by ceremonies of incorporation, so that a culture of honourable ser-
vice –especially as a chivalric cavalryman –replete with its own symbols,
rituals, and rewards had come into being by early modern times.91 The centre-
piece of such ceremonies was the bestowal of a khilat, a collective term for the
86 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 60–67. See, also: Eaton, Bengal Frontier, 137–58.
87 To put the issue differently, one might ask ‘why conquer?’, as Zoltán Biedermann has posed in
an intricate and important analysis of the relationship between imperial Portugal and Lankan
rulers, which culminated –only after several decades of diplomatic dialogue –in a shift toward
Portuguese territorial conquest and Portuguese control of parts of the island from 1597:
(Dis)Connected Empires. Flatt, in Living Well, 263–302, looks at culture and violence differ-
ently, focusing on military training as part of the ethical education of Deccani courtly elites.
88 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 48–50. See: Sohoni, ‘Fortified Strongholds’, 112, for an excellent
description of the ‘ritual’ nature of Indian warfare, in which weight was placed on baring one’s
teeth by presenting maximum force and then bargaining for a settlement over actual combat.
89 Kolff, Naukar, 43–53. See, also: Finn, ‘Material Turns’, on the categories ‘loot’ and ‘prize’.
90 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 16, 21, for examples from Akbar’s reign that prefigured and pos-
sibly inspired the mansabdari system into being.
91 Wink, Indo-Islamic World, 161–81, on the Mughal ‘culture of chivalry’.
Violence 247
Fig. 6C Dagger with a Hilt in the Form of a Nilgai (nephrite and steel; north India;
c. 1640)
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985.58a, b
various articles of investiture. Originally, it referred to the robe taken off the
back of the ruler and presented to the recipient as a mark of honour and to
bond together the two men. Over time, it became increasingly elaborate, with
Mughal khilat comprised of several distinct items (turbans, sashes, shawls,
overcoats, and so forth). The dagger with a beautiful hilt fashioned from neph-
rite/jade in the form of a nilgai (blue bull) pictured in Fig. 6C may have been
tucked into a sash tied around a courtier’s waist and may even have been a gift
or khilat. Such ritual investiture was a Mughal variant of a practice of long
standing, already extant in the Delhi Sultanate, but also widespread across
Eurasia.92
By incorporating military brokers and men with impressive martial skills
into the state, India’s rulers at once pacified the ghazi and civilised him into
92 See: Gordon, ed., Khil’at, especially the introduction by Stewart Gordon. See, also: Cohn,
Colonialism, 114–15, 117–21.
248 Violence
the mould of the courtly mirza, a princely or gentlemanly figure.93 To succeed,

Indian rulers had to do more than invest rough brutes with fine robes. They
also had to create shared norms and affects (e.g., feelings of love, a sense of
shame), as the Mughals did early on to bond the conquering elite before it
quickly dispersed across Hindustan, thereby lending a little cohesion to the
nascent body politic.94 Next, Akbar began to embody the ideal of elite manli-
ness found in Indo-Persian works of akhlaq; in effect, he became an exemplary
figure for his nobles to emulate. Such was the movement of elite masculinity
in this direction by the late seventeenth century, that nobles/ mirzas were
lampooned in seventeenth-century literature as fussy and full of graces. Satire
aside, the relationship of contemporary masculine norms to the imperatives of
imperial service may well have become strained, even if not quite tantamount
to a degeneration of the mansabdars into an effete class of dandies.95
Here we find parallels not only with Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory, but
also with Norbert Elias’ famous ‘civilising process’.96 However, much as Elias’
thesis has been critiqued since its presentation in 1969, so we can find reasons
to doubt the extent to which India’s rulers turned a warrior class into a nobility
and dismiss the view that they consequently divorced themselves from the
mobile world of the arid zone and its military resources.97 In the first place,
and for all the mansabdars’ might, power was never so highly concentrated in a
single class arranged around the throne, as the present and proceeding chapters
show. From France to China, secondly, courtiers continued to dip into the
markets for violence to make use of the services of violent men; India was
no different, as we have seen.98 And, finally, fresh insights into the history of
emotions reveal that even the Mughal emperor was capable of extraordinary
and uncontrollable anger, whose image as calm and just is largely a fabrica-
tion of litterateurs who consciously elided his outbursts from the record, such
passion being unbecoming in a king, after all.99
93 Alternately, the king could be conceived as a warrior and a poet, as in the text composed out-
side the Indo-Muslim sphere proper by one of Vijaynagara’s sixteenth-century rulers, thus
paralleling but also modifying the ghazi-mirza alterity; see, for discussion of this text: Narayana
Rao et al, ‘New Imperial Idiom’.
94 The project was not a complete success, but its significance is compelling; see: Anooshahr,
‘Emotional Communities’.
95 O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness’.
96 For application of Elias’ thesis to the Mughal context, which is the basis of much of the present
discussion, see: Gommans, ‘Embarrassment’.
97 Thomas, Pursuit of Civility, 21. See, also: Hasan, ‘Law’, 410–11, for a summary of the cri-
tique of Elias’ ideas by Europeanists, and attempt at applying them to south Asia, nonetheless;
Anooshahr, ‘Emotional Communities’, 5–6.
98 See, for instance: Carroll, Blood and Violence; Robinson, Bandits. Carroll, ‘Thinking with
Violence’, 30–31, notes the problems of validating Elias’ thesis.
99 If we know about such anger, it is because multiple affective communities existed in early
modern India, some holding anger in different regard and/or willing to portray kings as angry
and unjust, all of which is invaluably being brought to light by Cynthia Talbot in, e.g., ‘Anger
and Atonement’.
Violence 249
6.3.1 Jihad
Penned in the later sixteenth century and dedicated to the Bijapur sultan,
Zainuddin al-Ma‘bari’s famous Tuhfat al-Mujahidin fi ba’d Akhbar al-Purtukalin
(‘Gift of the Holy Warriors in Respect of the Deeds of the Portuguese’) speaks
of jihad for the defence of Muslim states, their subjects, and their livelihoods
from outsiders. In this case, those outsiders were the Portuguese, whose
sighting of mosques riled up their religious animosity. Islam was a religion
they recognised from Iberia and saw as an enemy. Portuguese efforts to mon-
opolise the spice trade (§5.3.2) led to violence against Muslim peoples around
the Indian Ocean, or else was detrimental to such groups as the Mappilas in
the pepper-producing regions of Malabar.100 Besides helping to fortify the
faithful against such threats, jihad could also be invoked on the offensive –that
is, upon the initiation of war and conflict to help rally the ruling class, recruit
men of arms, and license political violence.101
Jihad has often been conceived as a crusade or ‘holy war’ led by a faithful
ghazi –commonly translated as a ‘holy warrior’, but more accurately as a
warrior-raider.102 Jihad, so conceived, has long been used to explain the expan-
sion of Muslim states. Where does this interpretation of jihad come from? As
the first Muslim dynasties sought an ideology to justify and legitimate conquest,
so Muslim jurists were induced ‘to define jihad as armed struggle and to divorce
law from ethics.’103 According to Ayesha Jalal, modern scholarship has tended
to focus on these legal treatises at the expense of other writings –whether by
Muslim laymen or learned Sufis, often in the form of works of ahklaq –about
jihad as an ethical struggle, thereby bolstering the notion of jihad as holy war.104
There were many reasons for a leader proclaiming himself a ghazi and
engaging in ghaza or ghazw (raiding, campaigning), however, ranging from
propagating Islam to providing loot and livelihood for his followers. Traceable
to the Prophet’s lifetime, the notion of a ghazi king was not only of long-
standing but also sufficiently well-developed by early modern times, with a
variety of historical role models available to a conqueror like Babur, founder
of Mughal rule in India.105 Analysing the Mughal dynast’s ghazi identity, Ali
Anooshahr has shifted the focus from other-directed reasons for proclaiming
jihad and calling oneself a ghazi (i.e., religious conversion, quest for resources),
to matters of self-fashioning. Babur drew inspiration from Mahmud of Ghazni
(r. 998–1030), who had conquered and extended Ghaznavid rule to India, and
who was portrayed as a ghazi king in a widely influential text that Babur read
and engaged with.106 By speaking of himself as a ghazi king like Mahmud,
100 Prange, Monsoon Islam, 138–57, 222, for valuable analysis of the text and its context.
101 Jalal, Partisans, 4.
102 Cook, ‘Ghazw’.
103 Jalal, Partisans, 9.
104 Ibid, 20–57, and passim.
105 Anooshahr, Ghazi Sultans, 58–73.
106 Ibid, especially 15–37, 118–64.
250 Violence
enacting this identity by tracing his predecessor’s footsteps, and ensuring this
image was committed to posterity, Babur fashioned a very particular image of
his kingship that appealed to his contemporaries on the subcontinent and held
a valence as far afield as the Ottoman world (§8.1).107
Aurangzeb declared his war against the Marathas a jihad in 1699, but how
ought jihad be understood in this case?108 Let us examine the Fatawa-i Alamgiri
commissioned by Aurangzeb and compiled in Arabic by around forty scholars
of the Hanafi school of legal thought between 1664 and 1672.109 One way of
reading its Kitab al-Siyar, as Jalal does, is as a document that ‘provides many
useful insights into legal opinions’ not so much to do with jihad as an ethical
battle but as an armed struggle; the text provides specific guidelines on such
matters as how spoils can permissibly be divided, how defeated enemies should
be treated, and how Muslim soldiers ought to behave.110 Alternately, one might
read the work the other way around: not only as a collection of legal opinions
provided by Islamic jurists to a temporal ruler, but as the emperor’s patronage
of learned men and knowledge production as part of the self-conscious fabri-
cation of Aurangzeb’s kingship and kingly image.
As Alan M. Guenther argues, the text is part and parcel of a much larger
project –namely, the emperor’s open performance of his piety and his use
of Islamic symbols to legitimise his power and at once also persuade critics
that his claim to the throne was superior to the claim of his brother, Dara
Shukoh.111 By commissioning the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, the emperor demonstrated
his commitment to Islam via the promotion of the sharia and its expert
practitioners. But this did not mean he ceded all power to the Hanafi ulama,
for by selecting and funding the scholars involved, he was able to direct those
opinions compiled into a text intended to be a definitive work of Hanafi fiqh,
to the extent that the Fatawa-i Alamgiri is thoroughly imprinted with his pri-
orities.112 Focusing narrowly on ‘theories’ of jihad and not looking into legal
works risks overlooking these manifold and very real ways in which jihad was
alloyed to the expression of universal sovereignty, the exercise of kingly duty,
the deliverance of justice, and thus the protection of the populi (including, but
not limited to, the faithful).
A king might offer supplication in the form of a prayer before battle,
be it silent or more public, centring on repentance or piety or even willing
107 On the Indian and Ottoman contexts to this ghazi identity, see: ibid, especially 38–57, 139–64.
See, also: Kafadar, Between Two Worlds.
109 Khalfaoui, ‘al-Fatāwā l-ʿĀlamgīriyya’; Guenther, ‘Hanafi Fiqh’, 216–19.
110 Jalal, Partisans, 32. For the merits of such a reading of the text, see: Khalfaoui, ‘al-Fatāwā
l-ʿĀlamgīriyya’; Guenther, ‘Hanafi Fiqh’, 210– 13 for Aurangzeb’s various motivations.
Aurangzeb did, in fact, draw from the work in making laws, though he did so in a way that
demonstrates his creativity and independence from –rather than his subordination to or
dependence upon –its contents: op. cit., 222–24.
111 Guenther, ‘Hanafi Fiqh’, 211.
112 Ibid, 213–14.
Violence 251
martyrdom; on the haughtiness, errors, or aberrations of opponents; and on

the latter’s trickery, treachery, or even infidelity. As such, we only know of such
prayers and what they encompassed from whatever may have been subsequently
written down by the emperor, those around him, or even his opponents –each
of whom had reasons to present the prayers differently, post hoc.113 Violence
was not only justified ante-bellum, moreover, for post-war proclamations of
victory as well as biographical and historical works also broached the motiv-
ations for war or armed conflict, or else consciously deployed the notion of
jihad in ways that were expedient. An example of this second sense of jihad
as part of political rhetoric comes from early in Akbar’s reign, when he faced
the need to make violence against his Rajput opponents –chiefly, the kingdom
of Mewar. Upon successfully besieging the fort at Chitor in 1568, the emperor
issued a fathnama (‘proclamation of victory’) declaring ‘the victory of Islam
over infidels.’114 Its text largely followed established precedent by issuing praise
for Allah and the Prophet, describing conquest as necessary to bring right-
eous order, explaining how the wrongdoers were subdued, and closing by
requesting subjects pray for the divinely favoured king. Quotation from the
Quran was used to justify or offer precedent for such actions as the seizure
of booty, but well-known Persian verse was employed for this purpose, too,
and this was not strictly an ‘Islamic’ source.115 All but the Kacchwaha Rajputs
joined Mughal service after this episode, so the impact of Akbar’s largely for-
mulaic pronouncements might have been rather limited beyond rallying his
Persian, Turani, and Indian Muslim contingents. Akbar followed his conquest
with such measures as reintroducing the jizya (the poll tax on non-Muslims)
in 1575, but a volte face –in the form of a more conciliatory policy toward
Hindus –was in store.116
Another set of examples come from the Afghan imperium of the eight-
eenth century. Ahmad Shah Durrani had been exhorted to wage jihad in
the (erstwhile) Mughal lands by Shah Wali Allah (1703–62), who also wrote
to numerous other Muslim commanders and rulers –including the Rohilla
Afghans settled in north India –to do the same as a religious duty and for the
sake of Muslim power at a time of fitna (social discord).117 Wali Allah came
from a family of qazis who had served the Mughals, and his father had been
among those who compiled the Fatawa-i Alamgiri. In his maturity, he came not
only to deplore the degrading effect of the Persian cosmopolis and of Hindu
influences upon Mughal rule, and not only hankered for a turn toward Arabic
and the Arab world to renew Muslim sovereignty on the subcontinent, but also
‘explicat[ed] the most systematic theory of jihad’ in south Asia within a body
113 Flemming, Essays, 317–30, for dissection of early Ottoman examples.

114 Eaton, Islamic Traditions, 123, for citation and useful discussion.
115 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 287–300, for the text of the Fathnama-i Chittor.
116 Khan, ‘Religious Policy’, 123.
117 Jalal, Partisans, 53–55, which includes a balanced discussion of issues surrounding the authen-
ticity of these letters.
252 Violence
of work that exerted considerable influence through the nineteenth century

and, indeed, to this day.118 Wali Allah described how coercive power could –
and should –be used to undergird religious authority.119 Whether or not his
letters and writings played a part, Ahmad Shah did come to the Mughals’ aid
when they faced the Marathas at Panipat in 1761.
Victorious, Ahmad Shah penned a letter to the Ottoman sultan that
broached the motivations underlying his conquest. Islamic rule over India had
prospered since Timur’s lifetime, he claimed, but it was lately in need of res-
toration; hence, his declaration of jihad against the kuffar (infidel) to reinstate
lawful Mughal authority, and his destruction of Hindu and Sikh temples in
Delhi.120 Although his epistle likely contains some truth, it is unlikely that
Ahmad Shah was able to wage a holy war in a land where Hindus were the
majority of the population and in a context where many of his allies or
backers were non-Muslim.121 At once, nevertheless, Ahmad Shah connected
Afghans more deeply with the history of Muslim rule in India, presented the
Durrani kingdom as an ally and saviour –rather than a threat –to the Mughal
imperium, and fashioned his own image as a most upright Islamic prince.122
In turn, the ascent of Durrani power changed the calculus for Indo-Afghan
elites previously reluctant to support Ahmad Shah, with the result that works
such as the Khulasat al-Ansab –attributed to the Rohilla chief, Hafiz Rahmat
Khan –corroborated Durrani legitimacy, referring to Ahmad Shah’s motives
for invasion as jihad against the Marathas, Sikhs, and Jats ‘for the sake of Islam
and the honour and reputation of Afghans (nang u namus-i afghanan).’123 All
this stands to show that discourses of jihad were as valuable after the event as
before, to protagonists and their circle but also to those well beyond it.
6.3.2 Dharamyudh
The clarion call to fight immoral or impious opponents, or those who were
perceived to show no respect for the sanctity of a religious community’s
institutions, could be deeply powerful in a world where even mercenaries were
closely connected to living holy men, departed saints, or sacred places (temples,
shrines, mosques). That said, a ruler had to rein in the desire for rough justice
by armed men in his service, not only their lust for rapine and unnecessary
bloodshed, but also for tyranny and (temple) desecration (§3.2). For a conflict,
any subsequent settlement, and their wider outcomes to be legitimate in the
118 Ibid, citation on 40, 41–42 for this worldview, and 45–57 for discussion of his thought on jihad.
119 Zaman, ‘Caliphate’.
120 Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 56.
121 Ibid, 56–57, 59.
122 Such presentation of Afghans fit with parallel efforts by Indo-Afghans, who were pushing
against their negative portrayal in Mughal propaganda by asserting a more self-confident
identity, sometimes by creatively rewriting history and genealogy to do so: Gommans, Indo-
Afghan, 54–55, 168.
123 Ibid, here 61, but refer, also, to the discussion on 21.
Violence 253
eyes of all involved, they had to proceed according to established norms; the
greater rectitude claimed by the victor over the vanquished would otherwise
ring hollow. It bears remembering that the ‘conquered’ maintained tremen-
dous bargaining power and were critical to the making of those deliberations
and agreements off the battlefield that are frequently elided with ‘conquest’
(§7.3.2).
Was there an equivalent concept or discourse to jihad among India’s non-
Muslim communities? The scriptural concept of digvijaya, or movement and
conquest in all directions of the compass, was instantiated both discursively
and in reality in medieval Hindu society, then becoming an important part of
Vijayanagara imperial ideology.124 As for Sikh discourses rationalising polit-
ical action, these have usually painted militancy and violence as a necessary
response by otherwise peaceful adherents to their own helplessness in the
face of Mughal predation and persecution following the Mughals’ execution
of Guru Arjan in 1606 and especially through the agency of Guru Gobind
(§2.4.4).125 Against this, Hardip Singh Syan discerns highly contested attitudes
toward violence and militancy. In the first step, Syan shows that ‘peace’ and
‘violence’ were not strictly separated in medieval and early modern south Asia,
nor in the Hindu texts and traditions drawn upon by thinkers –including Sikh
thinkers –to articulate their own ideas of the role and place of violence. Yogis,
monks, and other warrior ascetics saw no difficulty in engaging in violence or
politics; religion and violence were not oppositional binaries, no matter how
hard that is for us to understand. Pashtun mercenaries and Sufi qalandars, like-
wise, readily intermarried in furtherance of their mutual social, commercial,
and political objectives, as we have seen.
Violence could take different forms and serve various functions; thus, it was
vigorously debated among Sikhs in the seventeenth century amidst changes
spearheaded by the Sikh leadership. Arranged on one side were Jats, who
aspired to become members of the Rajput/ Kshatriya military aristocracy
(§2.1.2) and consequently saw soldiering as ‘pivotal to their social mobility’.126
Khatris, however, saw ‘violence in terms of purity and Vedic social order’
and considered themselves part of the Persianate elite; their route to social
betterment involved becoming more courtly, which –as far as violence was
concerned –meant engaging with Persianate chivalric codes and normative
texts.127 To appeal to both groups, Guru Hargobind proclaimed the importance
of miri (temporal or princely power) alongside piri (spiritual power or disciple-
ship), and so set about creating a Persianate court and raising a military. His
rival, Miharban, fundamentally contested Hargobind’s guruship and the whole
124 For an elementary foray into discourses of violence and its rationalisation in Indian society
over the longue durée, from ancient India onward, see: Houben and van Kooij, eds., Violence
Denied. See, also: Narayana Rao and Subrahmanyam, ‘Ideologies’.
125 Syan, Sikh Militancy, 6–10 for discussion of such historiography.
126 Ibid, 40.
127 Ibid, 46.
254 Violence
manner of his interpretation and practise of Sikhism, including militarisation

(§2.4.3). However, Hargobind was able to appeal to Jats and lower-evaluated
castes more than Mirharban, and even to some Khatris.128 By the 1670s, the
divisions of the descendants of each lineage had deepened and solidified, with
Guru Hargoibind’s successor –Guru Tegh Bahadur –garnering the far larger
following.129
Tegh Bahadur’s execution has long been portrayed as a flashpoint: as an
instantiation of Aurangzeb’s project to turn the Mughal realm into an Islamic
theocracy, it necessitated the concerted –and violent –reaction of Hindus and
Sikhs to the attendant persecution, with the guru’s son and successor, Gobind
(r. 1675–1708), thus creating the Khalsa and pursuing a more militant path.
This, Syan argues, is doubly misleading. On the one hand, recent studies offer a
corrective to the tired portrayal of Aurangzeb as a Sunni zealot who persecuted
non-Muslims, meanwhile interrogating how and why such characterisation
came into being.130 We might also set Mughal policy during Aurangzeb’s reign
into broader context, comparing it to the (far harsher) measures towards non-
(Shi‘i) Muslims taken by the Safavids in the later seventeenth century, which
has been interpreted as part and parcel with the larger project of strengthening
the state rather than being primarily about religion.131 On the other hand, there
never existed a singular Hindu or Sikh community to rise up in opposition to
Mughal imperialism, so much as a profusion of different groups with varying
relations to the state and highly varied responses to its policies.132 Mention of
Aurangzeb or the Mughal state at large in connection with Tegh Bahadur’s
execution in early Sikh writing is limited, indicative of how his death ‘did not
cause outright revolution’ but instead ‘shifted the attention of Sikh discourse
towards sovereignty and the recreation of an ideal social order’, since the
Sikh community ‘had to possess an alternative vision of political power’ if it
‘wanted to replace or to reform the Mughal state’.133
To do so, Guru Gobind and others –including his rival as Sikh leader,
Harji –engaged with retellings of Hindu tales to validate their own guru-
ship and proffer their own political vision for Sikhs within Vaishnavite and
Shaivite or Shakti frameworks.134 Gobind and Harji’s respective reworkings of
128 Ibid, 48–104.

129 Ibid, 105–43.
130 Truschke, Aurangzeb; Schofield, ‘Aurangzeb’. Another way into this reassessment has been to
interrogate why Dara Shukoh has been presented by generations of historians as his brother’s
‘ill-fated’, ‘liberal’ opposite; see: Kinra, ‘Infantilising’. Another still has been to look at ver-
nacular perspectives on Aurangzeb from outside the Persianate centre, which have added fur-
ther nuance to our understanding: Murphy and Pauwels, ‘Alamgir’, for an introduction to a
special issue taking this direction.
131 See: Newman, Safavid Iran, 81–103; Dale, Muslim Empires, 253.
133 Ibid, 146–47.
134 Note the debates regarding the authorship discussed in §2.4.4 regarding some of the sources
drawn upon by Syan from which the present discussion is derived. See, also: Rinehart, Dasam
Granth, 106–10.
Violence 255
the Ramayana, for example, at once connected both men to Rama (a Vishnu
avatar) through their Sodhi clan lineage and membership of the solar dyn-
asty, yet stressed diametrically different kinds of leadership: Gobind Singh
emphasised the importance of political agency whereas Harji was more
renunciationist, in the manner of Miharban.135 The creation of the Khalsa was
widely embraced by rural, mostly lower-caste Punjabis who had much to gain
from the acquisition of Kshatriya identity upon their acceptance of the Khalsa
code of conduct (rahit maryada) and their initiation as Khalsa Sikhs. Others
saw incorporation into the Khalsa as jeopardising service to the Mughals and
the benefits accruing from it. Anti- and pro-Khalsa factions soon formed in
Delhi, the former representing those who had most to lose from their severance
from established ways of life, like the prosperous Khatris, the latter formed
of those who stood to gain from access to education and the opportunity for
social mobility afforded by Khalsa initiation, such as artisans, peasants, and
petty traders.136
The upshot of Gobind’s and the Khalsa’s ascendance around the turn of
the century was not only the militarisation of the Sikhs, but the elaboration
of a philosophy that emphasised Sikh activism in politics, painting Aurangzeb
as a ‘bad king’ and part of the steadily more hostile stance taken toward the
Mughal state.137 In the last years of his life (1700–08), Gobind wielded both
the sword and the pen against the Mughal emperor’s ‘injustices’, with his
Zafarnama (‘Epistle of Victory’) –written in Persian, replete with references to
the Persian classics and in the Persianate masnavi form –an especially stinging
yet aesthetically stunning critique of Aurangzeb’s kingship.138 It should not
be taken for granted that militarism was the only way forward, nor should we
assume that a Sikh martial tradition was fully realised at the time of Gobind’s
death; the agency of peasants proved vital to the spread of the Khalsa in the
eighteenth century, to its overall character, and to historical and hagiographic
production about it and about the Sikh leadership.139 Banda Bahadur, one of
the tenth guru’s disciples, assumed the Sikh leadership upon Gobind’s death
and adopted a more decisively militant opposition to Mughal authority in the
years that followed.140
The Sikh notion of dharamyudh (holy war or, more literally, a fight for
the faith) was deployed in ways that made it a direct analogue of the con-
cept of jihad. This is because it was used to justify conflicts fought for right-
eousness or justice broadly conceived; rakhi, for instance, was protection

136 Ibid, 186–205.
137 Ibid, 213–50.
138 Fenech, Zafar-namah.
139 Dhavan, When Sparrows Become Hawks, examines the eighteenth-century Sikh cause in
more depth.
140 Grewal, Sikhs, 82– 98, for a survey of Banda Bahadur’s leadership and Sikh political
(in)action in the decades after his death.
256 Violence
provided to cultivators by Sikh leaders, and a means through which the latter
accumulated territorial control.141 The Sikhs pooled their resources along the
lines of kinship, but also likely transacted on the open military labour market,
for non-Sikhs had formed a part of Gobind’s military contingents, much as
non-Muslims fought for Indo-Muslim rulers.142 Thus, dharamyudh ought to
be interpreted as flexibly as jihad. Those leaders proclaiming dharamyudh
against the Mughals and Afghans after Gobind’s death were likewise flexible
in their approach to alliance building, having cut their teeth in the service of
the Marathas, Mughals, or Afghans, while also being willing to occasionally
form tactical alliances with them during conflict with other Sikhs or non-Sikhs
to pursue their personal aims.143
6.4 Gunpowder Empires and the Military Revolution –Reconsidered

Gunpowder recipes ricocheted from China, where vintage concoctions were
improved, to Europe via the Muslim world –all in the span of the thirteenth
century. Gunpowder-utilising technologies –including cannon and handguns –
were honed to a significant degree first in Europe; these, too, soon had a global
career. These stylised facts are the building blocks and point of departure for
a lively set of debates about the ‘Military Revolution’ (MR) and ‘gunpowder
empires’.
6.4.1 The Military Revolution
Presented by Geoffrey Parker in 1988, the MR thesis can be sketched as

follows.144 The development of new artillery technologies from the sixteenth
century necessitated the development of new fortresses able to withstand their
firepower, notably the trace italienne (a bastion fort, usually polygonal). To
successfully besiege these forts, larger armies –biased toward infantry and
away from cavalry –were needed. The enormous cost of such forts and such
huge armies meant only rulers –and not feudal lords –could afford their
construction, which necessitated yet also facilitated centralisation. Another
technology connected to the MR was volley fire, in which soldiers in well-
drilled companies fired in turns to maintain a constant shower raining down
on opponents, usually with one line of soldiers reloading their weapons while
another fired.145

142 Rinehart, Dasam Granth, 20. To this can be added the assistance of Afghans to Gobind’s
cause – op. cit., 22.
143 Dhavan, When Sparrows Become Hawks, 4–50, 99–100; Alam, Crisis, 155–62.
144 A useful guide to Parker’s analysis can be found in: Black, Military Revolution, 1–7, which also
notes his debt to Michael Roberts’ earlier work.
145 Parker, Military Revolution, 6–44, which includes discussion of the original version of the
thesis presented by Michael Roberts in 1955.
Violence 257
Other than the diminished power of the knights and cavalry, a conse-
quence of all this was that drill training became essential, entailing the need
for centralised regiments, and hence a state capable of supporting such a mili-
tary establishment and degree of organisation.146 Again, this made military
and bureaucratic centralisation requisite, with more powerful (absolutist?)
states emerging in consequence. In not being willing or able to keep-up, non-
European powers, such as the Ottomans, supposedly lagged militarily and were
thus overtaken economically and politically.147 Indeed, the even larger outcome
of the emergence of strong and more sharply centralised states in Europe by
1800, Parker and others argue, was their outward expansion. The loading of
cannon onto the naval fleets of militarised European powers paved the way for
the so-called ‘rise of the West’; that is, the spread of European imperialisms
around the globe.148
A number of scholars have critically refined the thesis, whether by
augmenting the timeline on which the MR unfolded, or by suggesting that the
notion of a single Military Revolution obscures the sequence of a number of
smaller and incremental military revolutions in response to a whole host of
ongoing challenges and constraints.149 A more grave critique takes issue with
the accuracy of the underlying analysis: David Parrott observes that through
much of the early modern period, western and central European militaries
continued to contract private suppliers, with European states only substan-
tially centralising their military organisation (and thus their bureaucracies)
from the later eighteenth century. ‘Reliance on private organisation and cap-
ital in raising and maintaining armies and navies was neither synonymous
with military ineffectiveness,’ Parrott argues, ‘nor an obscure historical cul-
de-sac, a system which had no future amongst the rulers and administrators
of early modern states.’150 Rather, a state’s military requirements –whether the
supply of mercenaries and privateers for its army and navy, provisioning and
equipping its forces, manufacturing and distributing munitions and weapons,
or building defensive structures and constructing warships –were all largely
(and largely satisfactorily) met by private contractors before c. 1760, who
146 Parker notes the use of military contractors as a stop-gap until standing armies could be
raised in European states from the seventeenth century: ibid, 45–81.
147 Ibid, 126–28.
148 Ibid, 82–145. Returning to the Military Revolution in light of debates over the Great
Divergence, the economic historian, Philip T. Hoffman, has sought to explain why European
states prevailed in the development of gunpowder technologies and thereby gained tremen-
dous advantages in the production of violence, paving the way for overseas conquest and col-
onisation before the Industrial Revolution: Hoffman, ‘Why Was it Europeans’. In a different
way, Priya Satia’s Empire of Guns has also connected the manufacture of arms and the pro-
duction of violence to empire and industrialisation.
149 Black, Military Revolution, especially 20–65, although his criticisms fall heavier on Roberts’
than Parker’s version of the thesis; Jacob and Visoni-Alonzo, Military Revolution, for a fresh,
global-scale, and comparativist critique and revisionism.
150 Parrott, Business of War, 19.
258 Violence
also financed these undertakings and directed them with (varying degrees of)
autonomy.151
In fact, the British state remained a corporate entity even after c. 1760, as
Priya Satia argues compellingly in an entangled history of Britain’s empire, its
manufacturing sector, and the production of violence.152 It maintained trans-
actional relationships with a range of public institutions (including the Royal
Mint, the Royal Armoury, and the Bank of England) and a range of private
actors and firms through the period of imperial expansion that took place
against the backdrop of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Among the
latter were gun makers and coin minters, who happened to be related both
technologically and at the level of the firm or its owners through marriage and
familial networks, and who were themselves connected to the very trading com-
panies with whom the state’s interests and its business was intimately bound
up, not least the East India Company and the Royal African Company. Given
the weight of such evidence, the processes of military contracting in the six-
teenth to eighteenth-century Ottoman and Mughal empires, described above,
seems part of a far larger pattern, rather than an anomalous or regressive
development. And, finally, we ought to heed the Ottoman historian, Choon
Hwee Koh, when she argues that contracting was neither symptom nor cause
of decentralisation, and could, in fact, support state strengthening even as it
empowered local agents.153
An even graver critique is that the ‘rise of the West’ reeks of teleological
thinking inasmuch as it looks back to explain the European conquest and col-
onisation in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time,
the necessary adaption of military technologies and strategies to the varied
landscapes of conflict is flattened out in favour of a singular, supposedly
superior military complex. Overall, this does little justice either to Asia or
Europe’s historical experience.154 Old World regimes, more so than New World
polities, were able to hold their own against the European cutting edge. A little
divergence between Europe and Asia had opened up in the century before
c.1550, Tonio Andrade lately notes, but the ensuing encounter of Chinese
militaries and the Portuguese triggered imitation and innovation that led to
an ‘age of parity’ lasting until the early eighteenth century (when the ‘great
military divergence’ opened up, paving the way for Qing defeat at the hands
of the British).155 A similar picture emerges of the Ottoman world, thanks to
151 This amounted to a ‘military devolution’ rather than a revolution, occurring in the same
period as the MR is said to have taken place. That said, far from undermining theories of the
growth of the state, it is argued that it was precisely such privatisation that allowed the state to
vastly expand its reach: Parrott, Business of War. See, also: Sikora, ‘Continuity and Change’.
152 Satia, Empire of Guns, especially 25–180.
153 Koh, ‘Ottoman Postmaster’.
154 Roy, Military Transition, surveys developments across early modern Asia in response to these
issues.
155 Andrade, Gunpowder Age, especially 1–12, 103–14, 124–234. See, also: Andrade et al, ‘Korean
Military Revolution’.
Violence 259
the attention Gábor Ágoston draws to the Ottoman state’s creation and rapid
expansion of regular (and salaried) units responsible for use of artillery tech-
nologies, foreshadowing those associated with the MR by centuries, and how
ordnance and musket technology kept up with that of European rivals until
at least the late seventeenth century.156 The fruits of all these developments in
east Asia and those in the connected field of the Muslim world and Europe
were also accessible to southeast Asian states in proximity to the coast, who
harnessed them to their advantage.157 That said, southeast Asian armies relied
on imported firearms to a greater extent, so that technical change was more
anaemic compared to their south Asian neighbours, let alone Europeans.158
But what, indeed, of south Asian militaries?
In India, cannon, handheld firearms, fireworks, rockets, and explosives
were already in use by c. 1500, as drawn to attention by Iqtidar Alam Khan
and which Richard M. Eaton and Philip B. Wagoner’s more recent work
corroborates.159 A number of means made this possible, including the Bahmani
sultans’ exchange of spices with Mamluk agents in return for military tech-
nology from the Ottoman lands, as well as Mamluk or Ottoman gunners and
gunsmiths entering the service of Indian kings.160 After the Portuguese arrival
in the Indian Ocean world, the capture of artillery from defeated Portuguese
naval forces and the employment of Portuguese mercenaries and ‘renegades’
by Indian masters supported further technological transfer and improvement.
As many as two thousand Portuguese mercenaries and freelance warriors
served in armies in India, mainland southeast Asia, and China by the early
seventeenth century, as well as renegades (smaller in number but more sig-
nificant in impact), which puts the great scope for technological transfer into
perspective.161 Another channel, of course, was from the north –that is, via the
Mongol world and through the injections of central Eurasian technology and
knowledge brought by the Delhi sultans from the thirteenth century –though
this seems to have been more important for the introduction of gunpowder and
early explosives and firearms than the most cutting-edge artillery of the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries.162
156 Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan; Ágoston, ‘Firearms and Military Adaptation’.
157 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, especially 48, 59–61, 146, 152, 257, 292.
158 Ibid, 60, 437.
159 Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms, 10, 41–142; Eaton and Wagoner, ‘Warfare’. C.f. Gommans,
Mughal Warfare, 146, and n. 52 for the contestation of Khan’s belief in the Indian use of
firearms technology before the fifteenth century.
There were prior, pre-gunpowder-era changes in defensive architecture thanks to ideas
transmitted from the north following the expansion of the Delhi Sultanate into the south; see
Michell and Philon, Islamic Architecture, 30–32, 84–85, 194–95, 270–21, and passim, with the
volume also surveying the impact of new firearms technolgies.
160 Eaton and Wagoner, ‘Warfare’, 12–14, 16.
161 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire, 262–83.
162 C.f. Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms, 15–33. By the advent of the Mughal period, with Babur’s
invasion bringing to India numerous new technologies, the northern channel was more
important: op. cit., 64–73.
260 Violence
Ultimately, not only did Indian commanders make use of artillery before
c. 1500, but Indian gunsmiths assimilated and adapted Turkish and European
technologies to produce weapons of such quality that they were sought after
by the Portuguese themselves. This fact undermines a central tenet of the
MR thesis concerning the inability of Asian states to forge firearms of suf-
ficient –let alone comparable –quality to those made by Europeans, while
raising the possibility of East-West transfers of technology, not merely West-
East ones.163 Yet, that being said, the use of these innovations was uneven.
The Bijapuri sultans possessed a powerful ‘modern’ artillery, which was carted
off by Vijayanagara’s ruler upon his victory over Bijapur at Raichur in 1520.
Because he had succeeded without these new-fangled technologies, he did not
see the worth of developing local artillery manufacture and of deploying artil-
lery in future campaigns.164 In the meantime, Bijapur and its neighbours learnt
from the mistakes at Raichur and tapped into the continued flow of new ideas
from Eurasia. Having already appropriated artillery technologies, these were
further developed into new forms of firepower, including new types of swivel-
mounted guns and cannon, the latter of a type that represented the cutting-
edge, globally.165
Having combined forces to defeat the Vijayanagara armies in 1565, this
victory vindicating their technological investments, the sultanates of the
north Deccan were enriched enough to make major expenditures. The result,
between 1569 and 1590, was the acceleration of a process started a few decades
prior; namely, the rebuilding of the Deccan’s pre-gunpowder bastions, which
integrated innovative design features to support the effective deployment
of its modern artillery.166 Their borders stabilised, the rulers of the Bijapur,
Ahmadnagar, Bidar, and Golkonda sultanates more confidently asserted
the individual identities of their states, not least through a burst of cultural
patronage and production in styles that became distinctive to their respective
localities.167 Architectural innovation largely ceased, however. Indian rulers
may have known about the trace italienne (Fig. 6D), for instance, and the
163 Eaton and Wagoner, ‘Warfare’, 17. This does not preclude the fact, however, that techno-
logical change in India stagnated by the end of the century.
164 Ibid, 17–22.
165 Ibid, especially 22–28.
166 Ibid, especially 28– 41. For a deeper analysis of these issues, see: Eaton and Wagoner,
Contested Sites, 242–79. For a visual survey of defensive architecture in south India under the
Deccan sultans and their successors up to c. 1800, see: Michell and Zebrowski, Architecture
and Art, 23–62.
167 Eaton and Wagoner, ‘Warfare’, 45–47.
A richer picture is needed of where firearms were made across south Asia through this and
the remainder of the early modern period, for whom (including restrictions on ownership or
trade), and by who. Aside from cutting-edge guns and ordnance, more detail about Indian
manufacture of swords (or else the ‘import’ thereof) would also help enrich our picture of the
market for violence. Lahore, for instance, was famed for its swords into the nineteenth cen-
tury: Francklin, ed., Military Memoirs, 102, 344.
Violence 261
Fig. 6D Indian Draughtsmen Working on Ground Plan of Trace Italienne, from the
Boileau Album (watercolour; Thanjavur artist; c. 1785)
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS.75:5-1954
262 Violence
Portuguese certainly laid out forts on such plans in Goa, but there were reasons
they chose not to build and improve such structures themselves.
Instead of continually ratcheting-up of defensive fortifications through
competitive mimesis vis-à-vis their political rivals, as seen in Europe on Parker’s
analysis, Indian rulers abandoned making improvements to fort designs in
favour of relocating to strategic places.168 This was partly because the Deccani
rulers’ new major opponents were the Mughals, whose large armies and cap-
ability for long-lasting sieges with superior firepower meant fortifying existing
towns provided little protection, whereas the strategic location of new forts
(and towns built inside and around them) upon hilltops afforded greater
advantages.169 There was no cultural or intellectual decline per se, but there was
a drying up by the seventeenth century of flows of technically skilled migrants
from the Islamic world who formerly brought to their patrons a knowledge
of the military cutting-edge. Adopting gunpowder technologies –firearms,
but also defensive structures – did not entail the untrammelled unfolding
of the MR in south Asia, therefore; circumstances mitigated against further
developments in favour of new approaches to defence. As we shall see shortly,
the way gunpowder technologies did (not) develop neither left Indian regimes
at the mercy of the European powers, nor ought we assume that European
firepower and knowhow was intrinsically superior and sufficient to vanquish
Asian rivals.170
6.4.2 Gunpowder Empires
This brings us to the category of ‘gunpowder empire’, which has been used to
describe the Mughal Empire and its Ottoman and Safavid counterparts. This
formulation, deriving from Marshall G. Hodgson’s work and later popularised
by W.H. McNeill and others, connects the highly effective use of cutting-
edge gunpowder technologies to imperial expansion and subsequent ‘flores-
cence’ (§10.6).171 Yet, these ideas have run into trouble on numerous grounds,
including the fact that important phases of imperial expansion preceded the
adoption of the latest artillery; the difficulty in retaining any monopoly over
these technologies, which just as easily landed in the hands of rivals; and the
poverty of reducing military, and thus economic, and thus intellectual and cul-
tural achievements, to the canny adoption of particular technology.172
Nor was artillery the most powerful technology by and of itself, for how it
was used was pivotal. By the mid-fifteenth century, conflicts in eastern Europe
exposed the Ottomans to a novel military technology employed in Bohemia,
168 Sohoni, ‘Fortified Strongholds’, 115–21.

169 Ibid, 113.
170 de la Garza, War, especially 182–99, on the ‘unfinished [military] revolution’, and passim.
171 Hodgson, Venture, especially 17–22, 26, 147. See, also: Streusand, Gunpowder Empires.
172 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 40–50, for useful critical reflections. See, also: Hoffman, ‘Western
Europe’s Comparative Advantage’.
Violence 263
then Hungary and Russia: the wagon laager, ‘a temporary defensive battle-
field entrenchment comprising chiefly wagons, used widely for sheltering the
matchlock-wielding infantry’, which permitted, for the first time, ‘the simul-
taneous deployment of mounted archery, heavy cavalry, matchlock-bearing
infantry, and field artillery.’173 But the Ottomans appropriated this technology
and adapted its use to powerful effect, placing the laager along the front of
their battle formation whereas their European rivals built them at the rear. The
success of this strategy was demonstrated in 1514 when Selim I defeated the
Safavid army of Shah Ismail at Chaldiran. Testament to the ready diffusion of
technologies and the dilution of any technological lead, this defeat prompted
the Safavids to adopt Ottoman tactics, which they did to great success against
the Uzbeks in 1528, who followed their lead in turn, benefiting from the
advice of Ottoman professionals in their service. And, finally, the employment
in Babur’s army of Ustad Ali Quli from Iran and Mustafa Rumi from the
Ottoman Empire, and the deployment of this novel technology and military
strategy, proved critical to Mughal victory at Panipat in 1526–27.174
In the following decades, the Mughals fought few pitched battles, in large
part because of the absence of major adversaries, with heavy cavalry sufficing
to ensure victory.175 In the mid-sixteenth century, sieges were more common –
at the fort of Mankot (1557), Gwalior (1558–59), Chauragarh (1564), Satwas
(1567), Awadh (1567–68), and Ranthambhor (1569), for instance.176 Ideally,
forts would be taken without any siege at all, for their destruction was not only
difficult, perhaps lasting months or years and using vast amounts of materiel,
but necessitated their repair after being taken, for they were important defen-
sive bastions, after all. In all, this entailed huge costs, making it preferable to
negotiate with the commander of the fort; sieges only began once bargaining
had been frustrated.177 One explanation for the frequency of sieges is that the
Mughals’ opponents preferred their chances standing their ground in forts.
Another takes stock of the terrain, for the early battles were fought on the
Punjab Plains and the Gangetic basin, spaces that permitted large cavalry
manoeuvres, whereas subsequent conflicts pushed the Mughals deeper into the
forested terrain of central and western India, which were home to large stone
forts and where sieges were naturally preponderant.178 As the Mughal state
enlarged in this way, so its army developed, moving away from its nomadic
173 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 32.

174 Ibid, 32–34, and 35–36, where victory at Panipat is contrasted with Akbar’s victory over the
Afghans on the same battleground around three decades later, on which occasion the strength
of the opposition was weaker and both sides’ military strategy was fairly matched, causing
something of a ‘tactical stalemate.’ See, also: Ágoston, ‘Firearms and Military Adaptation,
91–93, for discussion of the Hussite Wagenburg and its diffusion and development in the
Ottoman and other Islamicate empires.
175 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 36, building on the work of Douglas Streusand.
176 Ibid, 38.
177 Ibid, 38–39.
178 Ibid, 52–53.
264 Violence
heritage and the use of evasive or shock tactics and mounted archers, to the
techniques of the militaries of sedentary states.179
From the perspective of ruling centres, one key issue was the inability to
monopolise violence in the face of the steady arming of the Indian subcon-
tinent. In the sixteenth century, Mughal firearms technology was improving,
and was certainly not inferior to what was available to middle Eastern and
European states, including the Ottomans. It was not until the seventeenth cen-
tury that such innovation stagnated at the same time that these technologies
diffused more widely. The spread of muskets and matchlocks, and the resultant
arming of local chiefs and peasant communities over the seventeenth century,
meant even the areas proximate to centres of imperial authority (Delhi, Agra,
Ahmadabad) turned into mawas (rebellious territory) requiring zortalab (coer-
cion).180 The spread of firearms manufacture and use beyond the imperial
frontiers was also troubling. If, as Pratyay Nath argues, ‘gunpowder weap-
onry –artillery, matchlocks, or mines –did not facilitate Akbar’s early and
decisive military victories’, it was because their impact was relatively limited or
even blunted, especially in the areas beyond the imperial heartland.181
Against the Ahoms in Assam in the 1660s, for example, the Mughals
were faced with heavy firepower, so diffuse had gunpowder technology like
matchlocks, artillery, and fireworks become. At the same time, they were
confronted with the unfamiliar and difficult environment of the region: thick
vegetation and forests that had to be cleared and felled to allow the movement
of troops, and severe monsoons that led to flooding. The Ahoms turned their
deep knowledge of the terrain to their advantage, attacking the thanas (mili-
tary posts) and granaries, and cutting off the supply lines to the base at Dhaka,
the resultant crisis prompting the Mughals to swiftly sign a treaty and retreat
from Assam.182 Similarly, the extreme cold of the Himalayan borderland not
only altered the timing of the campaign season but also made for challenging
logistics, since all food supplies had to be transported to the front in an area
of limited cultivation, and since armies had to be watchful over the state of
the passes lest heavy snowfall prevent their retreat.183 These factors affected
Mughal campaigns in Qandahar, Balkh, and Kashmir through the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. The local tribesmen of the Afghan highlands, much
like the Ahoms in Assam, used the landscape to their advantage, in this case
taking positions at the top of the passes cut through the mountains and rolling
rocks down toward the Mughal army below, to take one example.184 These
conditions made for the spectacular disaster of the Balkh-Badakhshan cam-
paign during Shah Jahan’s reign, when the Mughals sustained ‘enormous loss
179 Ibid, 110. C.f. Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 186.

180 Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms, 164–90. See, also: Kolff, ‘Peasants, 252–54.
181 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 49 for citation.
182 Ibid, 71–74.
183 Ibid, 82–108.
184 Ibid, 190.
Violence 265
of life, property, and prestige, the survivors crawl[ing] back to Kabul in late
1647.’185 In sum, the utility of ‘gunpowder empires’ seems limited, much as the
idea of the Military Revolution seems flawed.186
6.4.3 European Militaries and European Imperialisms
What, finally, to make of the link between European military developments

and overseas expansion posited by Geoffrey Parker in his version of the MR
thesis? Marketised violence was widespread across the Indian Ocean world,
not only India. South Indian mercenaries served in the Toungoo (Burma) and
in Kotte (Sri Lanka) kingdoms, for instance, often in exchange for cash or sal-
aries rather than land grants (which were otherwise customary).187 Long before
the Portuguese even contemplated the conquest of what they called Ceilao
(Ceylon), which only came about in the latter part of the sixteenth century,
Portuguese renegades and representatives of the Estado were serving as mer-
cenaries and the military allies of Kotte’s rulers. And, in the 1620s, the Dutch
executed their massacre of the inhabitants of the Banda archipelago with the
assistance of ronin (masterless samurai from Japan).188
Such facts place European militaries in Asian political contests entirely two
centuries prior to the East India Company’s lease of its military might to Indian
rulers, the latter phenomenon becoming part and parcel of the process of colo-
nial expansion.189 If anything, it was into a ready-made and well-developed
world of marketised violence that the English and French merely inserted them-
selves in the eighteenth century. Most notably, the Marathas offered their troops
to the players in numerous early eighteenth-century succession disputes; when
these conflicts and their associated costs spiralled, so the Marathas’ claims to
land and revenues increased. The ‘subsidiary alliance system’, Stewart Gordon
notes, ‘was not a brilliant strategy developed by the French or the English,
but a common and probably inevitable feature of post-Mughal, eighteenth-
century politics.’190 It was essentially a kind of protection racket; when Indian
rulers defaulted on payments, the Company took control of ‘assets’ –namely,
the kingdom itself –thereby enlarging its territory.191 That said, one ought not
understate the extent to which Europeans transformed the nature of killing for
185 Ibid, 108 for citation.

186 See, also: Wink, Indo-Islamic World, especially 161–68; Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 134–
36, for a summary and evaluation of Douglas Streusand’s testing of, and objections to, the
Hodgson-McNeill thesis.
187 Biedermann, (Dis)Connected Empires, 23, 71–72, 78, and 142.
188 Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse.
189 Another precursor was the farming of tax revenues in the Estado’s settlements, the enrich-
ment of Banias, and the latter’s loans to the Portuguese to finance their military competition;
see: Münch Miranda, ‘Fiscal System’, 216. The English vitally depended on Indian financiers
to fund their wars of expansion in the next century, as revealed by Bayly, Rulers.
190 Gordon, Marathas, 138.
191 Bayly, Indian Society, especially 89–95.
266 Violence
the worse, even as the path to British dominance over south Asia and the wider
Indian Ocean arena was partly paved by their Indian predecessors.192
There were important differences in the capacity to make violence among
the ‘official’ European presence in the Indian Ocean world. The largest cap-
acity was possessed by the Portuguese Estado, while the Jesuit missionaries
accompanying the Portuguese may have been the ‘world’s first global arms
salesmen’.193 They were followed by the VOC, and distantly trailed by the EIC;
the latter’s forces did not come close to matching those of the Dutch until the
1740s. That said, Dutch massacres in the Spice Islands were almost synchronous
with English atrocities in north America, such that the implication ought not
be that the English were uncapable of waging extraordinary violence, and we
must not forget that the EIC was supported by the Royal Navy from time-to-
time.194 Nevertheless, the larger differences reflected the Portuguese and Dutch
strategy, which was to pursue conflict as a means to acquiring territory for the
furtherance of trade, and exercising sovereignty on the seas (specifically in the
Portuguese case), unlike the English strategy, for the most part.195
Competing ambitions on the terraqueous Mughal-Portuguese ‘frontier’,
c. 1590–1640, or between the Dutch and Madurai state following the establish-
ment of a VOC factory in 1645, to take two examples, gave rise to a generally
uneasy coexistence, occasional strategic convergence, and sporadic flashpoints
of (contained) conflict.196 Of the relatively few wars between a European power
and an Indian military before c. 1750, however, little evidence can be found
of the former’s outright military superiority in the sense of bringing them
192 This is also not to deny the conscious prising open by the Portuguese and other Europeans
of hostilities among the rulers of Asian states in their own interest. Europeans also recruited
local men into their militaries, so the flow between the Europeans and the military labour
markets was two-way in nature. On both points, see: Scammell, ‘Indigenous Assistance’, 5–
10; idem, ‘Pillars’, 481–86. On European genocide in the early modern Indian Ocean world,
see: Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, especially 31–47.
193 Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 23, for the citation deriving from Peter Perdue’s work.
C.f. Pearson, Indian Ocean, 99, 123, who argues that rulers could not afford to be too coercive
or use excessive compulsion because the range and competition between entrepôts and ports
meant merchants could readily relocate.
194 Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, 23–27, 44–45, for this comparison, and passim. On the fraught
dependence on the Navy, see: Chaudhuri, Trading World, 109–10.
195 Pearson, Indian Ocean, 122–27, for a useful exploration of Portuguese concepts of sover-
eignty on the seas, its ramifications, and the views of Asian political and commercial elites.
See: Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 252–97, for an evaluation of European and Asian
coercive capabilities and strategies in the Indian Ocean world before c. 1700 leading to the
characterisation of the period as an ‘age of contained conflict’. Kruijtzer argues that the
Portuguese were to some contemporaries ‘the cause of the Dutch in Asia’; Dutch aggression
against the Portuguese was viewed by some Dutchmen as ‘a just war and the foundation of
colonies and intimidation of Asians […] only as a necessary step in the extension of the Dutch
struggle for liberty and redress of the, in the words of Grotius, “manifestly unjust…situation
in which the Iberian peoples hold the entire world tributary.” ’ –Kruijtzer, Xenophobia, 67, for
citation, and 18–73.
196 Flores, Unwanted Neighbours; Vink, Encounters.
Violence 267
decisive victories.197 One striking example is the Anglo-Mughal War (1686–

90), the first attempt to aggress the Mughals by the Company –in collusion
with the British state –under the leadership of Sir Josiah Child, a merchant
turned Company grandee. Anger and frustration over their trading conditions
was enough to convince the belligerents to act, though we should set this
decision within the context of the Company’s steady militarisation in Asia to
counter threats posed by English interlopers and the Dutch; an unmandated
and unsuccessful yet decisive and roughly concurrent turn to empire-building
by its servants in such locales as western Sumatra; desperate efforts to pre-
serve its monopoly privileges in the face of challengers and critics in Britain;
and its alliance with the ‘Stuart absolutist project’.198 Indeed, the war strategy
was broad, encompassing ‘the Persian Gulf, to recover payments the English
felt they were owed based on the agreement reached after the expulsion of
the Portuguese in Hormuz in the 1620s; Siam, which had become a haven
for English interlopers as well as a growing French ally; Bengal, where the
Company also wanted expanded trading privileges as well as an independent
settlement to fend off Mughal, Dutch, and Portuguese rivals alike’, and the
war fought around Bombay in western India, which was the locus of their
greatest tactical failings and ultimate humiliation.199
The British sent a vast armada to the Indian Ocean –the largest, in fact,
before the Anglo-French conflicts in Asia during the Revolutionary Wars of
the 1790s. The Mughal navy was actually the fleet of the Sidi admiral, Yakut
Khan. It outnumbered the combined Anglo-Maratha opposition in Bombay,
readily pushing it back in 1689 at the same time that the British were pushed
back in the Bay of Bengal. The defeat was disastrous: Bombay was so flattened
by the closing Mughal siege, and its population so depleted, that the survivors
almost blew up the fort before sailing for England once and for all. They sued
for peace, nevertheless, but the attack and capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai and the
Fateh Muhammad by the pirate captain Henry Every a few years later resulted
in Aurangzeb embargoing the Company’s trade in retaliation.200 This latter
incident reminds us that the fruits of military innovation could be enjoyed by
European interlopers and pirates to the detriment of the ‘official’ European
presence and its supposed ‘rise’ over the rest of the world.201 The Company’s
197 Wilson, India Conquered, 27–81, for Anglo-Indian tensions before Plassey. See, also: Wink,
Indo-Islamic World, 225–47, on the gradual ‘closing of the maritime frontier’ by Europeans.
198 Vaughn, ‘John Company Armed’; Veevers, ‘Great Rajah’. See, also: Veevers, British Empire,
79–108.
199 Hunt and Stern, eds., Soldier’s Diary, 12.
200 Hunt, ‘Mughal Siege’, for analysis of the siege, its context, and consequences; Hunt and Stern,
eds., Soldier’s Diary, for an overview of this neglected episode in the Company’s history and
reproduction of James Hilton’s diary of the siege and other contemporary perspectives. See,
also: Kruijtzer, Xenophobia, 191–223, for an adjacent analysis that moors the war waged by
the English in a slightly larger context, at once opening up the issue of identity and difference
in Indian political affairs.
201 See, also: Smith, Merchants, 147.
268 Violence
trade and reputation was in tatters as its stock price crashed; it was not until
the early eighteenth century that its fortunes revived.202 The ensuing decades,
furthermore, saw the EIC lose more ships than it gained in its conflict with the
Maratha navy under the command of Kanohji Angria.203
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the Company was well
on its way to becoming the paramount power on the subcontinent, a status
attained following the defeat of the Maratha armies. By that time, the Indian
political landscape was marked by a higher degree of competition between
a greater number of political actors, who could make use of peasants and
professionals toting firearms.204 It was in the course of the conflicts fought
on Indian soil between Great Britain and France and their respective client
states –not least the Carnatic Wars (1746–63), the last of which was part
of the global spillover of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) –that the power
of European infantries is said to have been impressed upon Indian rulers. It
was many of these same Indian rulers who entered into subsidiary alliances
with the Company. If this seems to vindicate that part of the larger Military
Revolution thesis about an ‘infantry revolution’ and the decline of cav-
alry in the making of European states’ supposedly extraordinary power,
think again.
The impact of infantry across south Asia was hardly uniform, being
more prevalent in the south than in the north.205 This was not for lack of
interest among north Indian rulers; European defectors helped drill and train
European-style infantry regiments from Bengal to Punjab, much as they did
in Nguyễn Vietnam.206 Rather, the suitability of the landscape to cavalry and
the proximity to the breeding grounds of war animals in the arid zone, the
cost of modern infantry regiments (including the cost of materiel, which also
gave the Europeans pause), and the flow of new technologies that supported
cavalry warfare, all gave cavalry an advantage over modern infantry, as the
Company was chagrined to discover when it expanded into such areas in
time.207 Priya Satia even suggests that the Mughals’ focus on marksmanship
influenced their Maratha rivals’ and, in turn, the latter’s British opponents.
This is because Europeans had hitherto been focusing on improving the rate
of fire, rather than accuracy. The challenge posed by the Maratha armies
prompted British gunmakers and military establishments to improve guns
202 Wilson, India Conquered, here especially 30, 50–51.

203 Elliott, ‘Politics of Capture’.
204 Kolff, ‘Peasants’, 248.
205 See, further: Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 203–07.
206 Chakraborty, ‘Desertion’; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. I, 426.
207 See, for an overview and further references: Lally, Silk Roads, 36–40; Hoffman, ‘Western
Europe’s Comparative Advantage’, 54 and n. 46. The shock of the traditional trumping
the modern worked both ways, however. At Assaye, in 1803, ‘modern’ Maratha infantries
were defeated by ‘traditional’ British cavalry, as we are reminded by: Sohoni, ‘Fortified
Strongholds’, 123.
Violence 269
and firing techniques.208 Thus, not only did the military ‘revolution’ turn
out to be rather protracted, rather than a decisive snap; it was perhaps also
less a phenomenon and more of a process, complete with feedback loops
between India and Britain. Viewing what Philip T. Hoffman unconvincingly
calls Europe’s ‘comparative advantage in violence’ from an Indian stand-
point helps cut the twin notions of the MR and the ‘rise of the West’ down
to size.209
6.5 Conclusion
Guns, much like other ‘things’ or goods, had a social life that was highly con-
tingent on their local context; their meaning, use, and significance varied
across the world, as Priya Satia reminds us.210 Their introduction did not every-
where mean an escalation of interpersonal violence and a shift from cavalry to
infantry, in part because popular understandings of such weapons were not
everywhere reduced to their brute killing power. Thus, for instance, the use of
firearms provided a critical military advantage in Burma and other parts of
southeast Asia, facilitating the creation of larger and more centralised states.
But indigenes had ‘a tendency to regard guns of imposing appearance as a
source of spiritual power, regardless of how well they functioned.’211 The role
of guns as weapons largely came to an end early in the Tokugawa period, to
take another example, but they obtained new meanings and ‘social lives’ in
the countryside, where well-armed peasants used their guns to frighten or kill
animals who might destroy their crops rather than to maim or kill their (human)
enemies.212 Guns could be weapons, therefore, yet also gifts, ornaments, and
currency –a fact attested by the fine gun made in Tipu Sultan’s kingdom,
decorated with his favoured motifs (prancing tigers, tiger patterns), and seized
and sold as booty by the British following the conquest of Mysore in 1799
(Fig. 6E).
Ultimately, we know relatively little about exactly how, when, and why those
Indian peasants and other groups recruited into Indian armies, or who acquired
firearms some other way (for they were widely available and ranged in price
more narrowly than bows), used their weapons off the campaign ground.213
Abhishek Kaicker notes, for example, how the central Asian (Turani) retainers
of Mughal grandees in Shahjahanabad mounted the rooftops and pointed
down their muskets at Nadir Shah’s men as the latter plundered and killed
208 Satia, Empire of Guns, 250, 276, 286. British victory against the Marathas in 1805, further-
more, was down to the bayonet charge rather superior firepower, because the firepower of the
British and their Indian rivals was at near parity; Satia, Empire of Guns, 295.
209 The phrase is Hoffmamn’s; see his: ‘Western Europe’s Comparative Advantage’.
210 Satia, Empire of Guns, 183–90 for the ideas and examples described in this paragraph.
211 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 165.
212 Howell, ‘Firearms’.
213 On prices and availability in north and south India: Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 90.
270 Violence
Fig. 6E Flintlock Blunderbuss from Tipu Sultan’s Capital (steel, wood, gold, silver;
Mysore; dated 1793/94)
in 1739, while yet other men in the city brandished mock firearms made from
bamboo and iron implements; the effect was sufficient to prompt the brokering
of a truce.214 A richer picture of such quotidian recourse to firearms and their
use in everyday or exceptional encounters, as in 1739, would be a welcome
addition to the scholarship. In places where the honour and social prestige of
mounted knights persisted, as in south Asia and west Africa, men might tote
firearms even as they actually used spears or other technologies, or even com-
bine mounted service with the use of firearms. Across significant swathes of
Afro-Eurasia, the spread of artillery and infantry was even met with hostility
from cavalrymen.215 Instead of taking wholesale to the European-style infan-
tries of the eighteenth century, therefore, a different and regionally variegated
development unfolded.
By thinking about violence, rather than narrowly about military labour, we
run the risk of underplaying the distinct soldiering traditions to be found in
early modern Indian society –traditions that attracted men of arms to mili-
tary service, cohered them as a social group in place of ‘national armies’, and

215 Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms, 6–7.
Violence 271
helped channel them toward patrons to enlarge or contest a ruler’s authority.216

By the same turn, however, casting a wide-angled gaze over all those men ready
to make violence, or provide their labour or other resources to that end, brings
into view the range of actors upon whose energies and abilities the produc-
tion of hard power rested. These included peasants from the inner frontier as
well as warrior ascetics, both of whom were steadily arming themselves in this
period; pastoralists, who sold their military labour and animal power in the
winter campaign season; military entrepreneurs who, as clients, intermediated
between these men and their own patrons; and numerous ordinary labourers
and collaborators who made the progress of the war machine possible by pro-
viding their brawn or specialist knowledge. In all this, India appears broadly
comparable to other parts of the world in respect of being peopled with a var-
iety of men ready to make violence for pay and the existence of markets for
violence, with marketisation deepening –rather than dissipating –through the
early modern period.
Violence was marketised to some degree in the past and remains so even
today, as amply indicated by the threat in parts of the modern world posed by
pirates and mercenary armies, not to mention most states’ reliance on contracts
with private firms for the production and delivery of weapons, warships, and
tanks. The early modern period was not a clearing house in the shift from
‘medieval’ decentralised militaries and delegated authority to the ‘modern’
monopolisation of violence by increasingly centralised and powerful states. If
anything, the marketisation of violence deepened in the early modern period.
The rise of the European military contractor, for example, reached its high
point during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), according to David Parrott.
This was roughly the same time as a comparable shift toward contract armies
in the Ottoman world and the career of Raja Bir Singh Deo in the Mughal
Empire, which saw him monopolise north India’s markets for military labour
and pave the way for the jamadars of the later seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. That all being so, the persistence of markets for military labour and
other resources requisite for the making of violence was not necessarily an
obstacle to state modernisation; in some cases, this may have helped extend
the state’s reach where the latter might otherwise have been restrained by the
limits of its expertise, credit, or capacity. And, vice versa, the fact of the state’s
inability to either monopolise military training or the manufacture (and use)
of military technologies did not mean these remained in a backward state; the
increasingly rapid circulation of printed texts, prototypes and embodied forms
of information, examined in Chapter 10, indicates how readily useful know-
ledge travelled in the early modern world.
But we must not lose sight of the wood for the trees. Animating the entire
MR debate is the relationship of war and state transformation: did war bring
216 On the traditions and identities formed around soldiering and military service (naukari) which
undeniably had a bearing on matters of recruitment and reward, see Kolff’s path-breaking,
Naukar, especially 71–199. See, also: Pinch, Warrior Ascetics.
272 Violence
the strong state into being, as suggested by Parker, or did the return of abso-
lutism after c. 1660 stimulate the most decisive phases of military transform-
ation in the century or more that followed, as given credence by Jeremy Black
and David Parrott?217 A comparison made by Karen Barkey instructively
reframes the problem in ways that make it more relevant for Indian historians.
On the one hand, there were those European states more or less following the
‘capitalised-coercion’ path to centralisation famously posited by Charles Tilly.
Having demilitarised the nobility and thereby broken its power, the English
and French states’ ability to make war depended on the forcible extraction of
resources from peasants (coercion), which it necessarily fused with turning to
merchants for finance (capital) –when faced with peasant rebellion, among
other threats –in return for protection (by the state). On the other hand, there
was the Ottoman state, whose centralisation was based not quite on confron-
tation with the nobility and peasants so much as bargaining with peasants and
merchants and those deemed ‘bandits’ (the celalis, most especially), as Barkey’s
own work reveals.218 The outbreak of the Celali Rebellion toward the close of
the sixteenth century compelled the Ottoman state to dispatch officials to the
localities to negotiate, a central principle of which was inclusion; by presenting
itself as the sole centre for rewards and privileges, and distributing these as the
fruits of bargains struck via negotiation, the process actually deepened central-
isation.219 Thus, for instance, one celali chieftain famously wrote to the sultan
promising ‘more than 16,000 soldiers in return for fourteen high-level adminis-
trative positions for himself and his lieutenants.’220 In this light, those debates
concerning the relationship of centralisation to war (or vice versa) appear to be
drawn from the limited field of western European history as much as they are
limiting; other paths to centralisation were possible.
What, then, of India, where society was not as corporate as in western
Europe, but where power revolved around the distribution/accumulation of
rights, like in the Ottoman Empire? Were bandits incorporated as state func-
tionaries? The phenomenon of social banditry has not been the subject of
rich social histories, perhaps because of the absence of trial records and other
sources containing bandits’ testimony that have provided rich rewards for
European and east Asian historians. The only sustained analysis of premodern
banditry focuses on a figure named Papadu.
A sometime south Indian toddy-tapper, Papadu’s audacious raids provided
plunder, cash, and cattle. These were not mindless acts or villainy, for some
217 For analysis speaking to the latter proposition, see also: Braddick, State Formation, 177–86.
218 Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats, 55–84, for analysis of why the prebendal elites were unable
and unwilling to seriously oppose the Ottoman centre, occasionally rebelling but only to
demand deeper incorporation into the state and its structure of privileges (even as the out-
come was in some cases to make them more autonomous, with their own sources of income
and their own armies), and seldom seeking to usurp the ruling dynasty.
219 Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats, 13. See, also: White, Climate of Rebellion, 163–226.
220 Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats, 190.
Violence 273
of the less liquid booty (such as goods and carpets) served as currency for
the purchase of more immediately necessary goods and provisions (European
muskets, for instance), while the rest supported capital accumulation of sorts.
His seizure of 10,000 to 12,000 cattle from a caravan of Banjaras passing by his
purview was, Richard Eaton believes, put to the service of the plough. Papadu
and his supporters thus brought land under cultivation, perhaps waste or forest
previously not used as arable, indicating the ultimate identity he wished to
fashion for himself was as a member of the landed gentry.221 Here, then, we see
evidence of the lure and reach of commercialisation examined in the previous
chapter and, to preview ideas described in the next, the aspiration for zamin-
dari right. Such aspirations were recognised by the Mughal emperor, Bahadur
Shah I (r. 1707–12), but Papadu rapidly fell from grace to be executed, his body
dismembered so it could be displayed as a warning across the Mughal domains.
In many ways a singular example, Papadu’s incorporation by the state is
nevertheless in tune with the more general strategy toward those individuals
or groups –including hostile zamindars –that the Mughal state cast as rebels.
Take, for instance, the history of the Roshaniya, which exemplifies many of the
points made in this chapter about the links between violence, faith, commerce,
and animal power, while also revealing how the Mughal state dealt with
pockets of resistance. The Roshaniya was a heterodox movement founded in
the sixteenth century by Bayazid Ansari, the Pir Roshan (‘enlightened one’).
Bayazid followed in his father’s footsteps by plying the Indo-Afghan horse
trade; had exposed himself to the teachings of Hindu yogis and Sufis as he
moved between far-flung locales as a dealer; and then amassed a following,
subsequently dispatching his disciples as missionaries to places within the
ambit of the horse trade network –Delhi, Balkh, and Bukhara, for instance.222
Bayazid’s great success was his following amongst the Yusufzai rank and file,
no matter that he was not a Pashtun or Afghan himself. They responded to the
Mughal intrusion in the Peshawar valley by rallying behind Bayazid and his
descendants, who possessed a charisma that helped unite a number of otherwise
conflicting Pashtun lineages or tribes.223 But the Roshaniya had less traction
amongst the tribal elite, so that –while Bayazid’s successor began calling him-
self the badshah-i afghanan (king of the Afghans) as he demanded tribute from
Yusufzai landholders –the movement in fact alienated local powerholders.224
In the 1580s, appealing to the millenarian fervour of the times (§3.3.5), the
Roshaniya leadership launched an anti-Mughal campaign, for Akbar had
ordered the building of forts and the forging of local alliances to support his
221 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 155–76. On the ‘intriangulateable’ gap between popular memory
and folk tales as indicators of intentions and identities, and the historical record written from
opponents’ perspectives, see: Richards and Rao, ‘Banditry’, 114–20, and passim, for the his-
tory of Papadu.
223 Nichols, Settling the Frontier, 10.
274 Violence
consolidation and deepening control of the Kabul province of the Mughal

Empire.225 A farman (decree) of 1588 granted to Muhammad Khan of Hoti –
a descendant of Babur’s sometime ally during the conquest of north India in
1526 –the rights to collect land revenues (malguzari) from the area inhabited
by the Yusufzai tribes and appointed him the local leader, all in return for
his subordination of the restive Yusufzais under the spell of the Roshaniya.226
In the long-term, the result was the establishment of patron-client relations
between the Mughals and their allies in the tribal elite, on the one hand, and
the growth of competition (and resentment) between the imperially-appointed
rulers and the inhabitants of the area, especially more marginal tribes, on the
other, thereby fracturing interests into bitter rivalries over rights to land and
its resources and revenues. When the tribes revolted in 1667, for instance, the
efforts of the Mughals ‘to blame trouble on individual “rebels” and deceitful
religious charlatans, rather than on generalized unrest caused by unwanted
interference, was [part of] a recurring response to instability’.227 We might,
therefore, question the durability of imperial strategies of control centred on
the distribution of prebends.
All this suggests the Mughal path to centralisation was like that taken by
the Ottomans. At the same time, a key difference between the Mughal and
Ottoman states was the former’s rapid and terminal fragmentation starting
around the close of the seventeenth century, during Papadu’s lifetime. This
makes the discussion about the relationship of war and violence to state cen-
tralisation or modernisation rather moot, at least in the Indian case.228 Yet, the
very fact of the empire’s collapse at the peak of its centralisation forces us to
examine the nature and workings of the Mughal state, its institutions, and their
role in so-called ‘decline’. Was the demise of the Mughal Empire because of, or
in spite of, the particular nature of its centralising institutions and strategies of
imperial control? This is among the subjects of the next chapter.

226 Nichols, Settling the Frontier, 12.
227 Ibid, 37.
228 Whether or not the Mughal state could have survived into the modern period to then ‘re-
centralise’ –like its Ottoman counterpart –were it not for the East India Company’s take-
over from 1757 can only be a matter of speculation, and certainly one outside the scope of
this book.
7 The State
Statecraft was the subject of a highly diverse body of literature in south

Asia. The corpus’ origins lay in such ancient texts as the Arthashastra, and
blossomed in the Middle Ages to ‘range from grandiose imperial ideological
statements to recipes for the survival of small kingdoms that are squeezed
between massive rivals’.1 If anything unified these works, it was a pervading
belief that states existed to ‘manage social conflict’ –the only legitimate
reason for the levying and collection of taxes from subjects.2 Authorship, too,
became more varied. Take a Telugu-language work known as the Amukta-
malyada (‘The Woman Who Wears a Garland Already Worn’), composed
by the Vijayanagara emperor, Krishnadeva Raya (r. 1509–29). The advice
portion of the text is framed by a discussion depicting the king at once as a
warrior, protector, and patron of Brahmans, and as a connoisseur of poetry
and drama. Krishnadeva Raya synthesised Indic, Islamicate, and Persianate
sources of wisdom on statecraft to produce what some modern commentators
call ‘a unique concoction of pragmatic wisdom, specific constraints, an
inherited normative politics, and a meditative sensibility capable of formu-
lating something entirely new.’3
Through what concepts did early modern Indo-Muslim rulers, such as the
Mughals, describe and understand power and politics? The languages of pol-
itical Islam, Muzaffar Alam argues, had to be adapted as they were translated
from the Arabo-Persian world, where Muslim rulers held sway over largely
Muslim populations, to India, where Islam was a minority religion.4 Among
the texts connected to this development were ethical treatises or works of
akhlaq, which outlined the proper qualities of those individuals –including
the king –involved in government; advice (nasihat) literature, which was fre-
quently topical, addressing issues or deficiencies in government at the time; and
manuals (dasturs) written for a range of different types of functionaries in the
1 Narayana Rao et al, ‘New Imperial Idiom’, 70.

2 Ibid, 70.
3 Ibid, 80.
4 Alam, Languages.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-7
276 The State
regime (e.g., bureaucrats, accountants).5 Already underway in the Middle Ages

following the creation of the Delhi Sultanate, political Islam was transforming
to fit the Indian context as it also spread further afield in Mughal times. This
was increasingly a two-way process, not least as a growing Indian audience
exerted their influence upon these political languages, in turn.
Yet, before proceeding, it is worth briefly stating that the political wisdom
contained in these texts was not so idiosyncratic to the Indic or larger
Islamicate worlds as to be alien and incommensurable to readers from other
ecumenes. A Jesuit, for instance, penned a text for Jahangir in 1609 akin to
a mirror-for-princes. Mirrors texts were common enough in early modern
Europe; Erasmus (1466–1536) and Machiavelli (1469–1527) penned works in
this well-established genre, for instance. Mughal and Ottoman writers were
certainly familiar with an analogous genre (§7.2.3): Babur’s autobiography
has been described as a kind of ‘mirror for Timurid princes’, while Ottoman
writers started churning out mirrors-type works from the later sixteenth cen-
tury.6 Only very recently discovered and analysed, the Jesuit padre’s work was
hardly unusual, therefore, and yet its structure was remarkable in one respect: it
follows Timurid and Indo-Persian exemplars –rather than any from Europe,
such as Erasmus’ –even as Biblical and Western Classical references are used
in place of Sassanian and Islamic(ate) ones.7 Overall, it stands as an example
of cross-cultural exchange and hybridity.
Not only did a range of political concepts have currency, but their meanings
and valence were unstable and liable to change, especially given greater cross-
cultural exchange. Consider the term saltanat (sultanate): ‘depending on
context,’ Nicholas J. Abbott summarises, this could ‘denote royal power or
sovereign authority (“kingship”); institutions and individuals through which
that power was projected; and the territory over which a king or emperor ruled
(his “kingdom” or “empire”).’8 By the late Middle Ages, thanks to Mongol
rule, saltanat had blurred with khilafat, the latter initially referring to a Muslim
ruler’s succession to the Prophet’s political authority as caliph or leader of the
caliphate. By the dawn of the early modern period, sultanic kingship ‘drew
from idioms of Sufi preceptorship, Perso-Islamic royal justice, and the Turko-
Mongol sovereign as dynastic law-giver’.9 But the concept did not stand still.
With the direct control of territory by the Mughal ruler steadily shrinking
5 Sood, ‘Art of Governance’, 261, and passim, for a comparison of a Mughal and an Ottoman
example of advice literature. Haider, ‘Accountancy Manuals’, for a guide to such texts and their
readers. See, also: Howard, ‘Ottoman Advice’.
6 Dale, Babur, 6–7.
7 Lèfevre, ‘Circulation’, 131–37. A book of didactic poetry penned by a Mughal poet and noble,
Mirza Khanjar Beg, has very recently been interpreted as a kind of mirrors text intended for
Akbar, even though it is not of the mirrors genre proper, suggesting the range of ways elites
guided –and much more seldomly, dared to directly criticise –emperor and state; see: Haque,
‘Advice Literature’.
8 Abbott, ‘Mulk’, 477.
9 Ibid, 477.
The State 277
in the eighteenth century, the notion of Mughal universal sovereignty (§8.4)

seemed hollow, so that Mughal power was described in qualified ‘territorial
terms as “the saltanat of Hindustan” (saltanat-i hindustan)’.10 One further
dimension of saltanat was its use to capture ‘a corporate body and institutional
structure’ –that is, the state as a house inhabited by numerous individuals,
whose actions constituted government, and laid on the foundations of various
governance institutions.11 This dimension of saltanat’s usage also morphed as
the Mughals’ fortunes were altered in the eighteenth century, with some seeing
new competitors to political authority as sinister agents, while others painted
themselves as rescuing the house from dilapidation.12
To saltanat can be added daulat, a term often taken to mean government
or state, and sometimes wealth or felicity, and which held currency across
the Indo-Islamicate world.13 These and other concepts (mulk, riyasat, sarkar)
describe power and territorial right, but where do the people –as subjects –fit
in?14 ‘Sovereignty’, Abhishek Kaicker observes, ‘finds no direct coeval or par-
allel in Mughal intellectual culture, where no equivalent term merited similar
theoretical discussion.’15 From the perspective of Mughal ideologues, ‘the rela-
tionship between the king and his subjects was essentially one of pastoral care’,
with the people figuring as ‘the passive objects of governance’.16 Within this
framework, the Mughals saw differences of opinion or dissent as the ‘conflict
(fitna) and corruption (fasad) of rebels (mufsidan)’, and its ‘primary impulse
in responding to those who “raised their heads” (sar-kashi) in rebellion was
to detach them from their bodies’, though clemency and conciliation were
often the order of the day, for ‘tyranny (zulm) and oppression (taʿaddi) –the
very opposite of justice –delegitimised the ruler.’17 We have seen, nonethe-
less, how the people of Shahjahanabad found their voice, developed their own
conceptions of sovereignty, and rallied around their king in 1739 –a develop-
ment that began to flower, in a cruel irony, in the Mughal Empire’s twilight.
The history of political thought is a small yet steadily developing sub-field
in the history of early modern India, with the scholarship cited above being
good examples of its output. This chapter, however, focuses not on polit-
ical ideas but on the nature and evolution of the state, and focuses on the
Mughal state in particular. Its students remain lavished by an embarrassment
10 Ibid, 478.
11 Ibid, 479.
12 Ibid, 479.
13 Sood, ‘Art of Governance’, 265.
14 Abbott, ‘Mulk’, 480–85 on sarkar, as well as riyasat and mulk, and their appropriation –and
shifting meaning –in the hands of provincial governors as they gained local autonomy when
Mughal central control weakened during the eighteenth century.
16 Ibid, 149. See, also: Sood, ‘Art of Governance’, for evidence from Mughal and Ottoman
sources claiming that the population at large did not have what it takes to participate in sover-
eign governance.
17 Kaicker, The King, 149 and 150, for respective citations.
278 The State
of riches compared to those of the Vijayanagara Empire, the Delhi or Deccan

sultanates, and the Maratha state –and this in spite of new pockets of research
on each of these polities. In their extensive survey of Mughal historiography,
first published in 1998, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam urge us
to ponder what exactly the ‘Mughal state’ was –perhaps a Leviathan, or little
more than a paper tiger, an ‘[i]‌nexorable instrument of political and fiscal cen-
tralisation, or mere carapace’.18 In their own and rather oblique response to this
problem, they emphasise two things. First, spatial diversity, so that ‘adjustment
to local conditions’ meant ‘the state eventually resembled a “patchwork quilt”
rather than a “wall-to-wall carpet”.’19 Second, historical change, for imperial
rule (in terms of its institutions, technologies, practices, ideologies) had not
been concretised by the end of Akbar’s reign, but naturally continued to
develop as a ‘process’.20 In light of work published in the past thirty years, our
understanding has only become more complex. It now seems like the Mughal
state was somewhere between the poles set out by Alam and Subrahamanyam,
yet also that these extremes of Leviathan vs. paper tiger hardly do it justice and
straitjacket its analysis.
This chapter studies power from the process of conquest and the first and
rather fragile decades of Timurid-Mughal rule, through to the consolidation
of state authority, from the ‘mature’ centralised imperial polity, through to
the era of decentralisation and ‘decline’. It looks at institutions but also at
processes (e.g., bargaining), and ranges from the Marxist analysis of the so-
called Aligarh historians to Weberian ideas to the impact of the Foucauldian
turn.21 With our focus resting primarily on the Mughal state, something must
be said for the generalisability of the northern experience to the south at the
outset.22 Against the predominant picture of a Mughal state possessed with
coercive power and exhibiting a high degree of fiscal-military centralisation,
Burton Stein utilised the model of the ‘segmentary state’ to characterise the
state in the Deccan, where the allegiances between a tiny centrally administered
core and its nominally-held provinces were basically ritual rather than fiscal in
nature.23 As will become clear in this chapter, the older view of the all-powerful
Mughal state has been significantly revised. At the same time, a number of
historians have identified similar institutions in the Deccan plateau to those
extant in the north (e.g., inam), not to mention the gradual blending of
north and south through the process of imperial conquest and inter-imperial
exchange and mimesis, even as the early modern Deccan could only play

19 Ibid, 57.
20 This cue comes from: Subrahmanyam, ‘Structure or Process’.
21 For a guide to Mughal historiography and an introduction to the ‘Aligarh school’,
see: Subrahmanyam, ‘Structure or Process’, especially 293– 96. On Foucault’s impact,
see: Hasan, State and Locality, 7.
22 Adjacently, Kumar, ‘Delhi Sultanate’, makes the case for ‘empire’ as a category relevant to the
pre-Mughal north, even if empire was of a very different sort.
23 Stein, Vijayanagara, 62, for definition of the concept, and passim.
The State 279
home to ‘non-imperial states’.24 Another distinction has been drawn between

the small, coastal, trade-based states and the large, ‘hydraulic’ (i.e., irrigated),
agrarian-based states of the interior, the former sadly remaining fairly mar-
ginal in much of the literature.25 Again, this distinction has been softened, not
least by historians who have brought to light those ‘portfolio capitalists’ whose
fields of activity knitted trade at various scales (including maritime trade)
with property in prime agricultural land.26 Without flattening India’s regional
diversity and the variety of state forms, therefore, we might usefully take from
Mughal history certain ideas or hypotheses to the study of those states that
have received relatively less scholarly attention.
7.1 The Sinews of the State: The Mansabdari-Jagirdari System
7.1.1 Dividing the Spoils of Empire: From Ulus to Jagir
The ‘problem of imperial relatives’ plagued most premodern dynasts. These

unwelcome or unwanted family members and would-be pretenders to the throne
could be excluded from political and economic life by forcing their seclusion in,
say, the palace compound, as was the fate of relations of the Ming emperors of
China. Alternately, they could be neutered through their transformation into
bureaucrats responsible for the running of the central administration in return
for ranks and honours, even as they were barred from acting independently as
local rulers, as was the case in the Russian and Qing empires.27 Another tact
was to satisfy their hunger for riches or status through the grant of a provin-
cial appanage and thereby remove them to a safe distance, or else award them
responsibility for the conquest and administration of outlying regions, perhaps
even the frontier. What of the Mughal dynasts and their relatives?
In the first decades after Babur’s conquest in 1526, the nascent Mughal state
was incredibly fragile. In part, this was because he had to win the support of
local elites by appealing to their particular ideas about royalty, as well as their
sensibilities concerning his Timurid heritage (§8.1). In part, the scion of the
Mughal house faced the upset and difficulties that came with sharing his sov-
ereignty, for he was seen by his own family members as merely the first among
equals, as per central Asian tradition, if not actually looked down upon by
certain Turani aristocratic lineages.28 Like the Lodi sultans, the predominant
strategy in the early Mughal state involved dividing newly conquered land
among the ruler’s followers in a fairly egalitarian manner, each holding their
share as a princely appanage (ulus). Thus, Timurid princes –not only Babur’s
sons, but also his brothers, cousins, uncles, nephews –abounded in the new
24 On this last idea, see: Fischel, State and Locality.

25 See, however: Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, especially 94–185.
26 Subrahmanyam, ‘State Formation’, opens-up all of the issues described in this paragraph.
27 Keliher, ‘Problem’.
28 Anooshahr, ‘Mongrels’.
280 The State
conquest state, each lurking in his appanage, where they were free to build
up horizontal alliances with other powerholders (e.g., other family members,
the leaders of pastoral tribes, warlords and military jobbers, etc) and thereby
potentially contest Babur or Humayun’s claims to the throne. This persisted
until the 1580s when, under Akbar, the appanage system was abolished, ending
what Munis Faruqui calls a ‘corporate-style clan dynasty’.29
Thereafter, all family members were given a (transferable) jagir, so that they
became responsible for imperial administration. Because only the emperor and
his sons and grandsons were granted the largest jagirs, other family members
lacked the financial resources to contest the reigning sovereign’s authority. The
system became more limited in that the pool of candidates was carefully limited
to the emperor’s direct male progeny.30 The system remained open-ended in a
vital respect, however, for succession was not governed by the rule of primo-
geniture but by tanistry. Imperial succession was the outcome of a successful
rebellion against the reigning emperor (e.g., Prince Khurram’s successful rebel-
lion against Jahangir and his coronation as Shah Jahan) or those wars of
succession fought by brothers around the time of the emperor’s demise (e.g.,
the one fought by Aurangzeb against his four brothers, in which he defeated
the favourite, Dara Shukoh).31 Guided by the pithy maxim ‘ya takht, ya tabut’
(‘either the throne or the grave’), the emperor’s sons and grandsons spent their
childhoods learning to be princes, before reaching their majority and immedi-
ately launching their political careers via the building-up of their households-
cum-headquarters and the brokering of alliances with powerful supporters,
all in preparation of the inevitable fight for life and for the throne that was to
come, and to which we shall return (§7.3.1).32
A legacy of the Mughals’ central Asian heritage, the ulus-system was
only one way of dividing the spoils of conquest. Among the other legacies
of Turko-Mongolic empire were decimal systems of military-political organ-
isation, though these could also be found in southeast Asia, which had been
left untouched by the likes of Chinggis Khan and Timur.33 A closely related
feature of the Timurids’ nomadic inheritance was the central role retained by
warhorses ‘in the political organization of the great empires that bordered on
the pastoral heartlands’ until the nineteenth century.34 Jos Gommans highlights
how this shaped post-nomadic political culture in those polities around, and
with origins in, the arid steppe and its pastoral economy –such as the Mughal
and Qing empires –where a roving military camp (ordo), a cavalry horse-based
29 Faruqui, Princes, 20, for citation, and 24–65, for analysis. See, also: Balabanlilar, Imperial
Identity, 100–39.
30 On the role of female progeny in this process: Faruqui, Princes, 38.
32 Faruqui, Princes, 7, for the alternate phrase ‘ya takht, ya takhta’ (‘either the throne, or the
bier’).
33 Scott, Art, 68.
34 Gommans, ‘Post-Nomadic Empire’, 1.
The State 281
system of civil-military government, and the support of the latter through dis-
tribution of the spoils of empire were its central features long after the con-
quest of zones of sedentary cultivation and rain-fed agriculture.35 On such a
system, the spoils were distributed through the award of prebendal rights to
land revenues, which were tied to jagirs in Mughal India following Akbar’s
reforms, tiyul in the Safavid polity, and in the Ottoman world to timar.36 One’s
rank determined the size of the award; higher-ranked family members or
imperial servicemen received a larger jagir or timar that brought in a greater
income but also came with the responsibility of recruiting and maintaining a
higher number of cavalrymen and horses.
The ulus-system left individuals relatively free to form horizontal alliances
with other nobles, potentially stirring competition for the throne. Against this,
decimal systems of military-political organisation revolved around the centre’s
employment of militarised gentry and military entrepreneurs, their granting
of a rank to correspond to their status, and their subordination to the crown.
The system established vertical bonds of reward and loyalty forged between
emperor and rank-holders –and the complete exclusion of those without
rank. Given many of their founders’ origins in central Asia, it is unsurprising
that horse-based decimal systems of administration were extant in the Delhi
Sultanates. Despite the prevalence of the system of princely appanage in the
early Mughal period, even Babur and Humayun made some limited use of
horse-based decimal systems.37 Their efficacy was highlighted during the inter-
regnum in Mughal rule, when Sher Shah Suri (r. 1537–45) and his descendants
briefly ruled north India while Humayun was in exile at the Safavid court. The
changes Sher Shah made to extant models of rank and reward foreshadowed
those introduced during Akbar’s reign, the latter giving rise to what is known
as the mansabdari system.38 How, then, did the mansabdari system work and
wherein lay its novelty and genius?
7.1.2 Prebendal Rights, Imperial Ranks, and the Mansbadari
Found across the Islamic world, the Arabic term iqta denoted land granted
by a sovereign. It gradually came to signify revenue assignments connected
to land by the Delhi Sultanate period, and in this latter sense became syn-
onymous with jagir in the Mughal Empire.39 Though our focus is on the north,
it is worth mentioning that a corresponding system prevailed in the south. This
35 Ibid.
36 Tekgul, ‘Ottoman Timariots’, 595.
38 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 19–21 usefully summarises Sher Shah’s many other
innovations, although they also draw our attention to the reliance on a single source whose
author had much to gain by presenting the erstwhile ruler in a positive light.
39 In another sense, iqta denoted revenue farms. See: Sheth, ‘Revenue Farming Reconsidered’, for
a useful delineation of the concept and its differing means.
282 The State
was the grant of transferable revenue assignments known as nayamkara that

supported the nayaka lords of the Vijayanagara Empire, this system resem-
bling the Mughal mansabdari-jagirdari.40 In the Mughal system, the emperor
granted the revenues of an area (i.e., the jagir) to an individual known as the
jagirdar or iqtadar. All imperial servicemen held jagirs, so that the mansabdars
were also jagirdars, but some jagirdars did not hold imperial ranks (mansabs)
and therefore did not give service in return for their revenue assignments. Areas
that had not been assigned were designated as paibaqi, while those that formed
the Crown Estate –their revenues flowing directly to the imperial treasury –
were termed khalisa, which represented an estimated 13.6 per cent of the total
land revenue of the Mughal Empire in 1647.41 Assignees were entitled to collect
for themselves the entire revenue (mal) owed to the sovereign of the designated
territory, comprising revenue from the land taxes but also a range of rural
taxes or cesses.42 Urban marketplaces might be so valuable that they were
designated as separate entities before being assigned as jagirs. The market dues
from Hansi and Hisar –in the vicinity of Delhi –were part of the khalisa, for
example, while the surrounding parganas were assigned as jagirs.43
A mansabdar (holder of a mansab or rank) was granted his rank and
designated a zat and sawar locating his place within the official hierarchy. His
zat indicated status and pay, whereas his sawar stipulated the size of the mili-
tary contingent (cavalrymen) he was required to maintain.44 His emoluments
were received either in cash from the treasury or, more commonly, derived from
his jagir. Having said that, there were several reasons why the centre had to
pay servicemen a cash salary (naqdi) or advance cash loans against expected
prebendal income, to the extent the procedure became systematised in both
the Mughal and Ottoman empires.45 In return for all this, the serviceman
submitted to a master-slave relationship, for the mansabdari was not merely
some abstract or impersonal military- administrative institution, but part
of the reformulation of affective ties between emperor and nobles and thus
a daily instantiation of imperial power and Mughal ideology.46 It may have
been unattractive to the central Asian nobles who sought a more egalitarian
division of the spoils, but their power was precisely what the emperor sought
to break in the later sixteenth century, whereas Persian Shi‘is in Humayun’s
and thus Akbar’s elite were supposedly more amenable to such a hierarchical
arrangement of authority.47 It was also a means of incorporating more local
40 Palat, Indian Ocean World-Economy, 108; Asher and Talbot, India, 68.
41 Habib, ‘Capitalistic Development’, 39.
44 For the reformulation under Akbar and subsequent changes instituted by Jahangir and Shah
Jahan, see: Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, 39–49.
45 See: Habib, Agrarian System, 306–10; Tekgul, ‘Ottoman Timariots’.
46 Richards, ‘Imperial Authority’.
The State 283
elites (e.g., Rajputs), while a system rewarding loyalty with an elevation of rank
helped dilute the power of unruly individuals or groups.
The mansabdari was ultimately designed to strengthen the emperor’s
control. Its very creation involved the transfer of all land to the state, even
land that would be granted (or confirmed) as the watan jagirs of hereditary
zamindars and rajas. In this way, the dispensation of rewards –namely, land
revenues –was the perquisite of the king and tied to meritorious service and
loyalty. Rolling out the mansabdari-jagirdari system involved the flattening
of local traditions of landlordism and military service. These were most dis-
tinct in the regions farthest from the empire’s agrarian heartland, such as the
paik system in Assam and Kuch Bihar (basically a form of military corvée
taken by local elites from peasants). Rebellion thus attended the ‘intrusion’ of
imperial expansion and consolidation in such areas, its suppression a neces-
sary step in the process of centralising power relations and subordinating local
potentates to the hierarchically organised structure of the Mughal state.48
From the centre’s perspective, it was better to offer vanquished leaders a share
of the spoils through imperial service, and thereby incorporate them into the
state structure as known and controllable entities, than to mercilessly try and
eliminate them altogether or allow them to remain outside the state system
like unpredictable and dangerous free radicals.49 At the same time, their vio-
lent potential was valuable, if usefully channelled into good use, so that the
mansabdari was also an instrument by which to ‘turn the noble savages of the
mawas [rebellious areas] into the savage nobles of the empire.’50
A great deal of complexity was involved in distributing and redistributing
jagirs in such a way as to ensure stability, for not all land was alike. Some
areas were described as mawas or zor-talab (rebellious), unlike the raiyati or
revenue-paying villages. Such places formed an excellent base for raids into
areas of settled cultivation by so-called predatory groups: the Meos in the hills
in Mewat or the Dogars and Gujjars of the shifting marsh and forest around
the Lakhi Jungle, but also the Koli peasants in Gujarat, to mention but a few
examples.51 Only the elite servicemen –whose higher-rank denoted their mili-
tary and leadership skills –were assigned to such jagirs, with lower-ranking
servicemen assigned jagirs in raiyati areas.52 Within this framework, a prac-
tice developed from 1568 onward whereby jagirdars were routinely dislodged
from their assignment and given a new jagir of corresponding value, so that a
defining feature of the mansabdari-jagirdari system was that assignments were
transferable and non-hereditary, with the notable exception of watan jagirs.53
48 Bhadra, ‘Frontier Uprisings’, especially 481–90.

49 For a careful reading of the (complex) perspectives of the vanquished or their descendants: Talbot,
‘Justifying Defeat’.
53 The exception was the watan jagirs held by certain zamindars (see: §5.1.2), such as the Rajput
chiefs, which were non-transferable and hereditary.
284 The State
The intention was to preclude the accumulation of local landed power and
its resources and, therefore, to limit rebellion. There is scattered evidence of
reassignments as frequent as every 1.7 to 3.5 years across the reigns of Akbar
to Shah Jahan in areas as close to the capital as Vrindaban or as distant as
Bhakkar (Multan suba), Sehwan (Sindh), and Indur (Telangana).54 There is
also scattered evidence of the slowing down or even the cessation of regular
transfers toward the end of the classical age –though this has been hotly
contested.55 Whatever happened at the level of the jagirdar belies another
underlying process by which those who came forward to offer to collect the
jagirdar’s revenues were often able to pass the baton to their own heirs, so that
the connection between land, cash, and power did become hereditary at a lower
level of society, if not at the regional level, too.56
To speak of the Mughal ‘nobility’, M. Athar Ali reminds us, is a slight mis-
nomer. The umara (pl. of amir or noble) did not for the most part form a
hereditary nobility, as in Europe, but was largely the creation of the Mughal
sovereign and defined solely by holding the higher ranks (mansabs) of 1000
or more.57 They were a motley bunch, their diversity –in terms of regional,
religious, clan, lineage, or other markers of ‘ethnic’ identity –richly described
and celebrated in a passage by Chandar Bhan Brahman.58 Among the larger
groupings were Uzbeks (Turanis), Iranians, and Afghans, Indian Hindus and
Muslims (both Sunnis and Shi‘is).59 The most highly skilled were usually away at
an official posting and seldom recalled to court unless necessary. Others were a
sort of reserve force, so they were not necessarily the dross of the mansabdari.60
Accepting a mansab meant being willing to be deployed in a military campaign
at a moment’s notice or being posted to a faraway province (as a subadar or
governor), although only first-tier mansabdars were posted to Kabul, Gujarat,
or Bengal, while those of the second tier became governors of Kashmir or
Ajmer.61 A mansabdar’s incentive was the riches brought by imperial service, a
fact that inspired the migration of Iranians through the seventeenth century,
when the Safavid economy was especially troubled.62 That said, entry into ser-
vice required the backing of a high-ranking patron at court; the possession of
sufficient starting capital –borrowed from a moneylender where not readily

55 See: Richards, ‘Imperial Crisis’, 242, 252; Habib, ‘Eighteenth Century’, 74, n. 7, for citations
reflecting both sides of the debate. See, also: Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, xx.
56 Raychaudhuri, ‘Agrarian System’, 269–73; Alam, Crisis, 31.
57 Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, 2–3, where he also discusses his debt to the work of the colonial
Indologist, W.H. Moreland.
58 Too long to reproduce here, it can be found in: Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, 15, while 11–37
gives wider insight into the precise composition and its change over time.
59 Dayal, ‘ “Mughal” Soldier’, especially 888–99.
61 Ibid, 146–48, where the posts of faujdar and thanadar and their connection to particular ranks–
depending upon the location –is also discussed.
62 Flatt, Living Well, 74–119; Subrahmanyam, ‘Iranians Abroad’.
The State 285
available –to offer tribute or pay surety to the emperor; and the perseverance
with a fairly bureaucratised process of recruitment. The greater the patron’s
clout, and the denser the candidate’s networks of clients and the deeper his
pools of recruitment, the more likely he was of success.63
The system was predicated on the centre possessing a clear and reliable
sense of the fiscal yield of each jagir, necessitating its assessment of each
unit of territory to prepare what was known as the jama. The jama did not
accord perfectly with actual collection (hasil), so one objective was to improve
information about each unit to ensure the jama was not set too high or too
low, while another was to fine-tune the institutional architecture to suppress
discrepancies arising from official corruption. Akbar inherited figures from
Babur’s reign that turned out to be fairly inflated, necessitating consultations
with knowledgeable record-keepers at the very local level and, eventually,
entirely new cadastral surveys from 1560, which saw the careful assessment of
the land –its size, its yield –according to newly standardised measures.64
Overall, this interlocking system at the local level was part of the larger,
interlocking, and hierarchically stacked revenue- bureaucratic apparatus
of empire.65 The parganas were organised into districts (sarkars) and these
into the provinces (subas) of the empire. The suba had its own adminis-
tration corresponding to that of the centre: it was governed by a subadar,
who reported to the emperor, and shared power with a diwan (revenue
officer), who reported to the wazir. The faujdars represented a kind of mili-
tary and police power; their coercive force was mobilised in support of
the functioning of this apparatus.66 At the heart of these overlapping and
interlocking arrangements were checks and balances on governors’ or other
officeholders’ powers. A similar gubernatorial system developed a little
later in the Restored Toungoo Empire in the seventeenth century, although
the requirement to reside at court substituted regular transfers from post
to post as the main prophylactic against insubordination, much as in con-
temporary Russia, France, and Japan.67 Yet, as André Wink reminds us,
the Mughal system was ‘ramshackle’ at best, a significant improvement on
its predecessors but often quite inefficient, with functionaries not always
operating as their masters might like and with new surveys commissioned
only when it was found that yield was much higher than understood, so we
should not overstate Mughal fiscal-administrative might, as later sections of
this chapter also make clear.68
63 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 84, 89, 94–96.

66 Habib, Agrarian System, 318–49. See, for a look at the faujdari and the functions performed by
officers: Siddiqi, ‘Faujdar’.
67 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 161–62. Note: the First Toungoo Dynasty witnessed an
expansion roughly contemporaneous to that under Akbar: op. cit., 151–52.
68 Wink, Indo-Islamic World, 191–92.
286 The State
7.1.3 The Mansabdari in Explanations of Mughal Expansion and Decline
Viewed through the lens of the mansabdari-jagirdari system, and from the per-
spective of those writers stationed in the imperial centre, the Mughal Empire
appears as a hierarchically organised state staffed by a correspondingly finely
graded hierarchy of servicemen, with crisp vertical lines of authority from the
imperial centre down to the lowest level of the village circle. Interlocking with
military and civil administration and revenue management, the mansabdari-
jagirdari system was the empire’s preeminent institution of governance, while
incorporation –of land and landholders –into the system was part of the very
process of post-conquest pacification, consolidation, and control of opponents.
Institutions were thus the bedrock of the Mughal centre’s hegemony, while
established schemes of reward (and punishment, less commonly) incentivised
deference to the emperor above all, and certainly above the formation of hori-
zontal networks or groupings to mount a coup d’etat. How, then, to explain
imperial collapse? Might this to be located in either institutional maldesign,
malfunction, or breakdown?
In his seminal work of the mid-twentieth century, Irfan Habib analyses the
Mughal state through a Marxist frame, focusing on economic institutions –
namely, the jagirdari system.69 In his view, the Mughal state was essentially
feudal, highly centralised, and capable of expropriating most of the peasant
surplus through its revenue-bureaucratic institutions. Habib viewed the under-
lying logic of regular transfers of jagirs as sound, but the system was neither
foolproof nor free of adverse effects. Regular transfers disincentivised invest-
ment in the locality of the sort that would lead to long-term gains and, to the
contrary, incentivised jagirdars and their agents to bleed the land and its people
dry by levying additional cesses, bribing the qanungos to buy their silence as
revenue was extracted in excess of the jama, and so forth.70 The higher-ranking
jagirdars’ frequent posting to other areas and departure to distant campaign
grounds meant it was easy to neglect affairs in their jagirs and the proper exe-
cution of work by their charges.71
By this account, the jagirdari system was inherently unstable, for the extent
of surplus extraction, combined with the jagirdars’ and other officials’ strong
incentive to abuse their offices, whether by neglect or by design, meant that
‘class conflict’ between the peasants and the state was inevitable. True, peasant
revolt against taxes and other expropriation by the centre was not new in
the Mughal period, for it was a persistent feature of state-society relations.72
Those peasants who ‘were protected in some measure by ravines or forests or
69 Habib, Agrarian System.

70 Satish Chandra has asserted that it was not transfer per se, but its frequency, that was the
problem: ‘Review’, 358.
71 Habib, Agrarian System, 327–28, 366–69.
72 See, for example: Asher and Talbot, India, 49, for details of peasant resistance to taxation in
the thirteenth-century Delhi Sultanate.
The State 287
hills,’ Habib writes, prefiguring yet also subverting James C. Scott’s famous
arguments about Zomia, ‘were more likely to defy the authorities than those
in the open plains.’73 These were the areas described as mawas or zor-talab.
Of course, this was merely the view of a centralised state, and the situation
looked different from the vantage point of indigenes themselves. The Bhils, for
instance, had not ‘retreated’ to the forest of the western Deccan to escape the
state so much as use it as a base from which to establish their dominance over
the peasantry. They variously cooperated with and resisted one or other party
in the Mughal-Maratha conflicts in furtherance of their own aims, therefore.
Yet, they became such a problem for the late Maratha (and colonial) polities
that they were literally smoked out as the forest was cleared and burnt to rid
the landscape of hiding places (in one stroke also creating more areas of settled
agriculture).74 Around this time, the Russian imperial state, too, took resort to
similar strategies of eco-destruction in their war against Muslim groups in the
forested uplands of the Caucasus.75
It was also true that some of the pools of peasant movements were galvanised
by caste allegiances or the appeal of egalitarian, liberationist philosophies such
as Sikhism or the beliefs of the Satnamis.76 In Siam, too, opposition between
hereditary local lords and commoners –spurred by commercialisation and
growing tax burdens –coalesced in years of poor harvests under the leader-
ship of charismatic saintly figures, as in 1581, 1694, and 1698.77 By the 1660s
or 1670s, however, the zamindars were willing to join forces with the peasants,
according to Habib. He views the state’s squeezing of rural surplus as a motive
not only for peasant resistance, but also for an uprising of the zamindars, since
the latter had been left with little scope for their own exactions and repudiated
the centre’s consistent efforts to strip them of their autonomy and turn them
into creatures of the emperor.78 The area around Agra had for some time
been an area of fomenting tensions, with a number of revolts by Jat peasants
through the early seventeenth century, but the Jat rebellion really took off
in the final quarter of the century under the leadership of Raja Ram Jat (d.
1688), characterised by plundering of the parganas around Delhi and Agra.
In the south, too, peasant grievances were coalesced under the direction of
the Maratha leader, Shivaji. The great tragedy, according to Habib, is that the
ultimate outcome of these uprisings was not the eclipse of the Mughals for
a different and better future, but something more reactionary –namely, the
creation of new baronies, kingdoms, and imperial polities that were hardly a
break with the social and proprietary relations of times past.79
73 Habib, Agrarian System, 380; Scott, Art of Not Being Governed.

74 Guha, ‘Forest Polities’.
75 Reynolds, ‘Muslim Mobilization’, especially 194–95.
79 Other explanations link unrest to price inflation in the seventeenth century, but the evidence for
Asia is more speculative than for Europe; see: Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 157.
288 The State
Habib’s argument is classically Marxist structuralist-functionalist, locating

imperial crisis in the last quarter of the seventeenth century and seeing it
as the product of class conflict born of exploitation.80 Since its publication,
other historians have called to issue both the extent and nature of conflict.
Some claim that the particular phase studied by Habib soon cooled, having
more to do with the scarcity and famines of the 1660s than maldesigned
institutions that encouraged stripping peasants of all their surplus in the face
of weak checks and balances.81 M. Athar Ali offers a different but nonethe-
less structuralist-functionalist interpretation. The late seventeenth- century
imperial crisis occurred not because of mal-incentives or malfunction, but
rather a breakdown in the core institution of empire. This ‘crisis of the jagirdari’
amounted to a widening gulf between the cost of supporting servicemen and
the capacity of the land to yield the necessary revenue. It arose because of
inflation in mansabs, the cost of Aurangzeb’s prolonged war in the Deccan,
and the strategic incorporation of Deccani and Maratha warrior-nobles into
the mansabdari, often into elevated ranks, on the one hand, and the shortage
of paibaqi (land awaiting assignment as either jagir or khalisa), on the other.
It was sufficiently palpable for one writer to lament that the world was be-
jagiri (without jagirs), others saying that land was like a single pomegranate
put before a hundred sick men (‘yek anar, sad bimar’). In the face of all this, a
policy of expediency –namely, recruiting would-be opponents into service –
remained in place.82 Inevitably, Athar Ali claims, the only way for servicemen
to acquire sufficient jagirs was to employ agents or request patrons intercede
on their behalf, paying bribes where necessary, which was out of the reach of
the smaller mansabdars.83
Aurangzeb was thankfully no Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–98) –a king whose
religious fervour all too frequently led him to imprudence, whether in the form
of political disaster or financial ruin.84 The empire may have been overstretched,
J.F. Richards argued, but in a different way. There was no shortage of paibaqi
in the 1680s, but rather the deliberate and calculated transference of land to
khalisa instead of jagir. The cause of crisis was a failure to properly distribute
these lands, combined with how Maratha, Telugu, Bedar, and Gond leaders
were incorporated into the imperial system. Theirs was a ‘shallow’ incorp-
oration, in the sense of not being as deep as that of the Rajputs’ and other
khanazads’ incorporation, who were more affectively tied to the centre through
marriage and social relations of long- standing. There was also a failure
to incorporate –perhaps even to aggravate –other Deccani groups on the
empire’s southern periphery.85 Where the Mughal leadership failed, the Asaf
80 Habib was not the first to pivot his argument on class-conflict. For an earlier exposition along
such lines, see: Smith, ‘Lower-Class Uprisings’.
81 Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility, xxiv.
82 Ibid, 11, 92–93.
83 Ibid, 93.
84 Parker, Imprudent King.
85 Richards, ‘Imperial Crisis’. See, also: Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 77–79.
The State 289
Jahi dynasty –erstwhile Mughal subadars themselves –succeeded by skilfully

incorporating these very groups into the successor state known as Hyderabad
(formerly Golkonda).86
7.2 The Kingdom as Household?

Already, by the late 1970s, the application of Marxist theory to historical
problems –with its structuralist bent and preoccupation with economistic
reasoning –was no longer en vogue. The problem with Habib and Athar Ali’s
analyses of the 1960s, brilliant and important though they remain, are sev-
eral. First, the explanation builds up a picture of the empire in its classical
ideal or perfectly functioning form, often based on sources penned by its prin-
cipal architects, to then demonstrate how some fault or other precipitated
a crisis. The empire is doomed on Habib’s account, a little less so on Athar
Ali’s, insofar as the seed of crisis is sown into its institutional core. Besides
making crisis and decline seem inevitable, their frameworks make it difficult
to properly account for the frequent occurrence of rebellion, whether by high-
ranking nobles or even imperial princes. And there is little room for culturalist
explanations, which are largely consigned to the background. It would take
longer for historians to properly address the former of these problems, but the
place of culture and affect as well as social themes was coming into view by
the late 1970s.
7.2.1 The Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire
Inspired by Max Weber’s concept of traditional authority, Stephen Blake

defines a kind of state that emerged in the early modern period –the
patrimonial-bureaucratic empire. This was somewhere between the Weberian
ideal types of the (pre-modern, personalistic) patrimonial kingdom and the
(modern, impersonalised) bureaucratic state. The ruler of the patrimonial-
bureaucratic empire could not rely on his family and loyal household troops
alone for the business of ruling his vast domain; he additionally had to rely
on other nobles and their soldiers, as well as an increasingly large cadre of
bureaucrats, yet all the while strived to establish close and personal ties of
allegiance with such actors where possible, so that his kingdom was like an
extension of his household.87 Some of the means by which he achieved this
have already been described: the award of mansabs to loyal servants of the
state, their regular rotation between official postings and stints at court, and
the creation of provincial and district offices with overlapping responsibilities.
Power relationships in Mughal India, Gommans observes, ‘were indicated
by the image of near and far, in and out, or movement in either direction’.88
86 Faruqui, ‘Hyderabad’.
87 Blake, ‘Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire’.
290 The State
Fig. 7A Portrait of Raja Man Singh of Amber (ink, watercolour, and gold, by Mughal
artists, c. 1590)
The amir’s dignity could be assessed based on his proximity (taqarrub) to the
emperor and, relatedly, his love (mahabbat) for him. This proximity meant
the king’s generosity (sakhawat), magnanimity (hilf), and favour (lutf), while
love was connected to devotion (mawaddat) and friendship (dosti).89 These
affects, Gommans notes, were consonant with medieval European notions of
familiaritas or fides.90 They were made manifest in court institutions such as
khanazadagi, by which nobles were incorporated not merely as mansabdars but
even more closely as ‘sons of the royal house’.91 The selection of special wet-
nurses for the imperial princes gave rise to a parallel family of foster brothers
(kokas), mothers (amagas), and fathers (atagas). The kokas’ intimacy with the
princes from birth made them lifelong and loyal companions and meant the
former were often given senior positions in state.92
89 Ibid, 57.
90 Ibid, 57.
91 See: Richards, ‘Norms’, especially 262–67.
The State 291
Offering daughters in marriage to the imperial family was another route

to this closest kind of incorporation, as pursued by the Rajput Kachhwahas
of Amber and the Rathors of Marwar from Akbar’s reign to that of
Farrukhsiyar.93 The fruit of Akbar’s matrimony to a Kachhwaha princess,
for instance, was the future emperor, Jahangir. Also the emperor’s kinsman,
therefore, Raja Man Singh I of Amber (1550–1614) was one of Akbar’s
most trusted servicemen (Fig. 7A). He grew up enjoying the fondness of the
emperor and was bestowed the title of farzand (son), before reaching maturity
to become a grandee with a mansab of five thousand, then the highest attain-
able, and ascending to the throne of his own Rajput state in 1589.94 Others,
too, developed such proximity to the king as to be referred to as baradars
(brothers) or farzands. Of course, another reading of khanazadgi is as a form
of hostage-taking, which –alongside the regular appearance of servicemen at
court or these other means of quasi-familial incorporation –was a means of
affirming face-to-face and deep, personal bonds of loyalty to the emperor.95
Proximity was also experienced through the emperor’s approach toward a
noble, his touch or embrace, the exchange of gifts and his bestowal of a robe
of honour (khilat), and even performative weeping, such as Khan Jahan Lodi
and Jahangir’s weeping upon their separation as the former left for service in
the Deccan in 1609.96
Proximity was of such importance that the Mughal emperor and his court
were continually on the move. This peripateticism was part of their Turko-
Mongolic inheritance, for the moving court and camp of the Mughals –and,
for that matter, the Safavids and Qing –was linked to notions of the saddle as
a throne and to the ordo (moving camp), although it found Indic counterpart
in the notion of digvijaya, while also being comparable to kingly processions,
royal entries, pilgrimages, martial rituals and hunting expeditions as far afield
as late medieval and early modern Iberia or England.97 Prior to launching
his campaign to conquer Hindustan, for instance, Babur went on a tour of
the autumn harvest in and around Kabul, inviting local men and women, a
dervish, and musicians to a party in his tent. There was a playfulness about
this gathering, but also a curiosity in local society and a desire to dip into its
wellsprings of local knowledge.98 Indeed, the advantages of movement were
several: to suppress local rebellion or reaffirm the bond with local elites as
93 See: Ziegler, ‘Rajput Loyalties’. Such marriages were cast as ‘shameful deeds’ and thus struck
from Rajput royal and local histories, hence the comparative silence surrounding them despite
the continuation of this practice until at least 1715, as Taft has highlighted in ‘Honor and
Alliance’. See, also: Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 427–29.
94 Asher, ‘Architecture’, 183–84.
95 Blake, ‘Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire’, 80.
96 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 59–60.
97 Gommans, ‘Post-Nomadic Empire’; Kinra, Writing Self, 158. On the latter point: Ruiz, King
Travels, with a useful comparative discussion on 13–15.
98 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 69; Lal, Domesticity and Power, 78–81, for a larger analysis of
Babur’s ‘drinking parties’.
292 The State
a prophylactic against their disobedience, not least in the mawas; to gather

information about the imperial domains, particularly newly conquered and
administered areas; for the surveillance of imperial servicemen and the (sur-
prise) inspection of the contingents they were expected to keep at the ready;
and to practice military manoeuvres and martial skill.
In the foreground of Fig. 7B, we see Aurangzeb being carried in a palan-
quin; before him are hunters bearing firearms, men carrying leafy shields for
camouflage, and deer awaiting release as bait for big game. In the background,
we can see the procession of the vast imperial camp –led by elephants carrying
imperial banners, as well as camels and horses –toward what looks like a town
or city (top left), from which the hunting party must have broken away for sport.
The Mughals processed in a vast camp. Two identical sets meant one could be
erected up ahead, ready for the emperor’s arrival, the first then dismantled. It
was peopled with tens or even hundreds of thousands of courtiers, retainers,
soldiers, scribes, artisans, household staff, and the like.99 The camp reproduced
the finely graded hierarchies of the static court and all its activities, from prayer
and darshan to public and private audiences (§8.2).100 Akbar was celebrated
for his regular movement. Aurangzeb’s own council for kings advised that a
king should never rest, a view echoed by the Mughal viceroy in the eighteenth-
century Deccan. On average, the Mughal emperors from Akbar to Aurangzeb
spent 65 per cent of their reign stationary and the remainder on tour, hunting,
or on military campaigns, a figure not dissimilar to estimates of how the
Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I spent his reign (1588–1629) or the pressing import-
ance of movement to maintaining Qing identity and prowess articulated by the
Kangxi (r. 1662–1722) and Qianlong emperors (r. 1736–95).101
Patrimonial themes, Rosalind O’Hanlon notes, are also evident in imperial
presentation from the Delhi Sultanate era, in which the emperor was father
to all his subjects and husband to the wider realm, the kingdom thus a giant
household.102 The plausibility of the Mughal state evolving even more closely
toward Blake’s model of patrimonial-bureaucratic empire is not in doubt and
the model certainly has advantages over terms like ‘gunpowder empire’ used
to describe the Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid polities because it captures ‘a
real and important functional aspect of all three states at various times in their
histories.’103 Yet, there are limitations.
In the first place, Blake’s analysis is static and synchronic, for much of his
evidence derives from the Ain-i Akbari.104 A work penned by a chief architect
99 Richards, ‘Imperial Authority’, 136–38. Kinra, Writing Self, 131–35 offers detail of the
moving court/camp based on Chandar Bhan Brahman’s account.
100 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 106–07, 109–11; Blake, Shahjahanabad, 94–95, 97–99, 101–02.
101 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 100–02; Gommans, ‘Post-Nomadic Empire’, 13–16.
102 O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness’, here 54.
103 Dale, Muslim Empires, 5.
104 Blake, ‘Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire’, 81–94. That said, these ideas also surface in Blake’s
monograph, Shahjahanabad, which necessarily involved the author’s engagement with sources
from Shah Jahan’s and later reigns.
The State 293
Fig. 7B Aurangzeb Carried on a Palanquin to a Hunt (watercolour and gold; by the

Mughal artist Bhavanidas; c. 1704-20)
294 The State
of Mughal imperialism can hardly be expected to offer a reliable and represen-

tative snapshot of the state and power relations in the late sixteenth century,
however, to say nothing of how these changed in the face of further expansion
in the century that followed. It helps to remember that empires were seldom
uniform so much as ‘lumpy’, a fact of which Ottoman historians have been
more honest: direct rule and dense bureaucracy could be found in the imperial
core (e.g., Anatolia and the Balkans), with indirect rule and patrimonialism
being common in places at a greater distance from the centre (e.g. the Arab
provinces).105 Blake’s model flattens some of the spatial diversity in ruling
arrangements and those resulting from the empire growing and evolving.
Because he relies upon imperial sources, secondly, Blake’s model attributes
all authority to the emperor and his ruling centre, from whence power radiates
outwards along strictly vertical lines of command. Such an emperor-centric
vision of the Mughal state, which itself appears as hegemonic and highly
centralised as it does in the works of historians like Habib and Athar Ali, runs
into numerous difficulties. One problem concerns the role of imperial princes,
to which we shall return in the next section, but others must be dealt with pres-
ently. On Blake’s analysis, which relies on the image of the ideal king prescribed
in contemporary ethical-moral treatises, not only is the very fraught process of
self-fashioning that produced the actual kingly subject eliminated from view,
but we also catch little sight of the bureaucratic rank-and-file in the so-called
patrimonial-bureaucratic empire, while the important political roles of royal
women seem not to feature at all.106 Until very recently, in fact, women have
only made an appearance in Mughal historiography where the emperor has
been deemed ‘weak’, either as conniving figures preying upon the emperor’s
aloofness from his kingly duties, or as figures for whom a space is opened up by
virtue of the emperor’s ineffectualness as a ruler.107 To form a richer and more
accurate picture, therefore, we might begin by asking: what roles could royal
women play in politics?
7.2.2 The Political Roles of Royal Women
Queenship studies is a newly invigorated field. Its purview now extends well
beyond Europe and scholars have brought to light the roles of females as
monarchs, regents, and consorts around the globe, not to mention their ‘queenly
patronage, political agency, household dynamics, reputation and representa-
tion, and, more recently, diplomatic activity.’108 Regnant queenship was not
105 See: Barkey, ‘Bureaucratisation’.

106 Lal, Domesticity and Power, 1–23, including a valuable critique of Blake’s analysis on 12–13.
See, also: Subrahmanyam, ‘Structure or Process’, 307–10, for another critique.
107 Lal, Domesticity and Power, 24–68, for a different view derived from the analysis of European
and Mughal sources.
108 Woodacre, ‘Introduction’, 1, for citation, and the volume as a whole, which presents recent
work from the field.
The State 295
impossible within the framework of Islamicate monarchy and society: Jalalat

al-Din Razya, better known as ‘Razia Sultana’ (r. 1236–40), was a female mon-
arch of the first of the Delhi Sultanates, albeit the only regnant queen of the
Sultanate and Mughal states, while later seventeenth-century Aceh was ruled
by four women in turn, beginning with Sultana Tajul Alam Safiatuddin (r.
1641–75).109 Rare but hardly impossible in the Muslim world, therefore, female
monarchs also came to power in the Hindu dynasties of north and south India
from time to time.
By turning to indigenous and Dutch East India Company sources, Lennart
Bes describes the reigns of four Hindu queens of the newly established royal
houses of Vijayanagara’s successor states: Chennammaji (r. c. 1673–97) and
Virammaji (r. c. 1757–63), who ruled over Ikkeri, and Mangammal (r. 1691–
1707) and Minakshi (1732–39) of Madurai. They were queen consorts turned
widow queens and then queen mothers (and grandmother, in Mangammal’s
case). They avoided the ritual practice of dying with their husband on his
funeral pyre (sati) by claiming to be pregnant or having the duty of raising the
new king to his majority, suggesting that their contemporaries saw them merely
as regents whose rule would be temporary. True, some of their successors
sought to present their rule as unwise even as they tacitly acknowledged them
as fully-fledged monarchs, yet these women sought to present themselves as
monarchs (not mere regents) and made full use of their authority, much like
their Achenese counterparts or those in Africa and Europe.110 Other royal
women or female courtiers, moreover, continued to play a part in diplomacy
and trade negotiations in these southern courts.111
Women might try and smooth relations between siblings, as Jahanara did
when she beseeched Aurangzeb not to fight his brother, Dara Shukoh, for the
Mughal throne.112 Women also played a central role in faction- or alliance-
building in the process of fitna (described later in this chapter), but it was as
regent and queen mother that significant political power could be wielded more
readily, as evinced by the lives of Khanzada Humayun of sixteenth-century
Ahmadnagar or the remarkable Tarabai.113 Born into the Mohite clan, a key
Maratha lineage group, and with her father at the top of the service hierarchy,
Tarabai’s marriage to one of Shivaji’s sons strengthened the Maratha dynasty
and her family’s fortunes at a stroke. Her early life played out against the back-
ground of Aurangzeb’s campaigns in the Deccan and the hostility between the
Mughals and Marathas. Tarabai was well respected even in her enemy’s camp,
109 Phulera, ‘Queenship’; Khan, Sovereign Women.

110 Bes, ‘Ambiguities’. Among early modern African regnant queens was Aminatu –a direct con-
temporary of Elizabeth I –who ruled over Zazzu, a Hausa kingdom in what is now Nigeria.
111 Gomez, ‘Sanskrit’, 193.
112 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 245–47, for her letter to Aurangzeb.
113 On Khanzada Humayun, see: Michell and Zebrowski, Art and Architecture, 144–47. On
Tarabai’s role in Maratha politics, see: Wink, Land and Sovereignty, discussion on 51–115.
296 The State
however, with Mughal writers noting her courage, independence, and know-
ledge of civil and military matters.
Upon her husband’s death in 1700, she declared her son the new king and
assumed the position of regent, for he was in his minority, effectively making
her the ‘Queen of the Marathas’, as Portuguese officials in Goa called her.
Under her leadership and supported by men such as Kanohji Angria, the
Maratha armies were not only driven deep into nominally Mughal zones,
but made to settle and thereby establish a deep and permanent Maratha
presence –a policy of open conflict and ‘creeping colonisation’ also pursued
by her successors in the Maratha government. Unfortunately for Tarabai, the
release from Mughal captivity of Shahu, Shivaji’s eldest son and heir, created
a contest for the Maratha leadership; even men such as Kanohji Angria even-
tually defected to Shahu’s camp. Tarabai’s son had just come into his majority,
and so Shahu moved to imprison them both. Thirty-four years later, in 1748,
while living under house arrest at Shahu’s court, she convinced Shahu that
her grandson should succeed him. In so doing, she returned herself to power,
albeit sharing the reins with the Maratha peshwas.114 Besides such royal women
as Tarabai, finally, were figures like Suraya Murad Begum (d. 1779), wife of the
Mughal subadar of Lahore, who became de facto ruler after the death of her
husband and periodically thereafter.115
Why has it been so hard to visualise the political roles of such women,
let alone do so positively? Referring to the period when Scotland, England,
and France were all ruled by female monarchs, John Knox proclaimed des-
pairingly in 1588 of the ‘Monstrous Regiment of Women’.116 Significantly, this
period overlapped with the so-called ‘Sultanate of Women’ (1534–1683), when
high-ranking women of the Ottoman dynasty wielded an unprecedented pol-
itical power. Some contemporaries –and historians later relying on their testi-
mony –felt the relocation of politics to the women’s quarters was illegitimate
and reflected the corruption and decay of the Ottoman dynasty as much as
it caused the Ottoman state’s weakening and decline. True, sultanic authority
was departing from that which held strong in the classical age: no longer a
conquering khan or even a righteous ghazi or caliph, the Ottoman sultan’s
legitimacy derived from a new ideal of the sovereign as ‘a sedentary mon-
arch whose defence of the faith was manifested more in demonstrations of
piety, support of the holy law, and endowment of religious institutions than in
personal participation in battle, and whose charisma was derived more often
114 See: Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 177–202, with discussion of less sanguine portraits of her in
the historiography as a cunning genius (on account of her conflict with the Brahman Peshwas)
on 200–01.
115 Khoja, ‘Gender’.
116 Langlois, ‘Comparing’, 271, for reference, and passim, for an analysis of female leadership
in France and the Ottoman world. The backdrop to this misogynistic tirade against female
monarchs was the religious change of the Reformation, and it was ‘popish’ (i.e., Catholic)
queens who were really Knox’s target: Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 414, 431.
The State 297
from seclusion broken by ritual ceremony than from martial glory.’117 This
did not entail weakness, however, and –as Leslie Peirce’s seminal study of
the Ottoman imperial harem shows –women played an important and posi-
tive role in giving shape to the new division of sovereignty and power-sharing
that was coming into being as the empire moved into its post-expansionary
phase.118
A mix of misogyny and Orientalism has likewise blackened the reputations
of Mughal royal women like Nur Jahan (d. 1645), the wife of Jahangir, to say
nothing of the tacit andro-centricity of models like Blake’s that provides little
space to examine the roles of female elites.119 Although nothing like a Mughal
‘sultanate of women’ existed, female royals were never limited to being consorts
and companions, nor played a political role only by manipulating the relations
of ‘soft power’ via benefactions to religious and charitable institutions or as
patrons of urban infrastructure –although they readily did so, thanks to their
tremendous accumulated wealth.120 Taking inspiration from Peirce’s work,
Ruby Lal focuses on the imperial harem in the period of Babur, Humayun,
and Akbar’s reigns, and from that vantage point sets out what it meant for
Mughal royal women to be sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and wives, while
also bringing into view their other roles. Among these were guidance and
peace-making or conciliation in the course of war, either by virtue of their
age/generation and wisdom, or through their agency as brides, captives, and
hostages.121 As the Mughal state became somewhat more rooted and slightly
less of a peripatetic entity in Akbar’s reign, moreover, so the harem came to
be located in a clearly conceived physical space. In this development, we find a
parallel with the sedentarisation of the Ottoman sultan in the imperial palace,
and with similar consequences, in turn.122 One was the influence of matriarchs
and older generations over younger ones; another was the significance of
relationships forged in the harem –including milk ties to wet nurses and their
families –to patterns of patronage and the careers of servicemen in the world
117 Peirce, Imperial Harem, 185, for citation.

118 Ibid, especially 148–49, 177–275. Lal, Domesticity and Power, 14–20, sets Peirce’s contribution
in the context of feminist critiques and debates of the time, while noting some criticisms of the
volume.
119 Nur Jahan, for instance, is remembered as a beauty who became the favoured wife of
Jahangir –himself frequently painted as disinterested in politics and addicted to opium –from
which position she connived with her father, brother, and the would-be emperor Shah Jahan
to domineer the emperor and exert effective control over the Mughal realm; Richards, Mughal
Empire, 102–03, 112–14. See, also: Khoja, ‘Gender’, which examines how the prejudices of
colonial-era historians like Jadunath Sarkar reduced Suraya Murad Begum to a mere ‘oppor-
tunist who used her feminine wiles to secure and maintain power’ (19). See, as a path towards
a corrective: Balabanlilar, ‘Women’. On the political lives of Safavid royal women: Szuppe,
‘Jewels of Wonder’, 331–37.
120 Alongside examples elsewhere in this book, see: Kozlowski, ‘Women’.
121 Lal, Domesticity and Power, especially 128–39, 166–75.
122 Lal is attentive to differences in the harem as an institution, and its history, in the Mughal,
Ottoman, and Safavid empires: ibid, 215–25.
298 The State
outside. Overall, changes in Akbar’s domestic life were part and parcel with
those changes ‘that went into the making of the empire more generally.’123
7.2.3 Bureaucrats and the Bureaucracy
If the kingdom was the extension of the household, therefore, then it seems
unwise to neglect the roles played by the queen mothers, wives, and princesses
of the imperial family. For the same reason, recent interest in scribal com-
munities and the careers of high-level bureaucrats is very welcome, helping
us flesh out a part of the patrimonial-bureaucratic empire so vital to Blake’s
model yet virtually absent from his analysis. The state’s capacity to suck-up
material and military resources rested upon the capabilities of a verbally and
numerically literate service gentry. This was not the realm inhabited by the
better-studied lord of the sword (arbab-i saif), but top-level bureaucrats and
the vast number of lower-ranking pen-pushers (ahl-i qalam).124 This was not
a single class, centrally-disciplined by the education in a common curriculum
and inculcation into the practices of the modern state, à la Weberian bureau-
cracy, but an early modern bureaucracy nonetheless.125
Take, for instance, Chandar Bhan Brahman. Born into a Brahman family
sometime in the later Akbari era and educated in Sanskrit, he chose not a
priestly career but that of a munshi (state secretary), working through the reigns
of Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb before his death in the late 1660s.
Beginning as a clerk in his native Punjab, he distinguished himself from men of
similar backgrounds by rising through the ranks to serve Shah Jahan’s wazirs
(prime ministers) while working in the diwani (fiscal office), even ascending
to the office of the emperor’s personal secretary and diarist.126 He was a bur-
eaucrat but also an esteemed writer of poetry and prose in Persian, penning
the Chahar Chaman (‘The Four Gardens’), a memoir of his life at court, and
the Munsha‘at-i Brahman (a collection of his personal letters), that became
‘two of the most widely circulated –and emulated –Persian prose texts in
seventeenth-and eighteenth-century South Asia.’127 His life overlapped with
Mustafa Ali’s, the Ottoman bureaucrat and prolific litterateur and intellectual
whose career also spanned the reigns of several sultans.128
123 Ibid, 196–215.

124 For a sense of the interest in scribes and the service gentry, including the reconstruction of
their social worlds and worldviews, which is but one slice of the abovementioned endeavour,
see: O’Hanlon and Washbrook, ‘Introduction’, especially 441 and n.1. For details of the dis-
tinction of ‘men of the sword’ and ‘men of the pen’ in the Ottoman and Safavid empires
compared to the Mughal Empire, see: Blake, Shahjahanabad, 149.
125 C.f. Richards, ‘Norms’.
126 Kinra, Writing, 2–5, 21–22.
127 Ibid, for citation, and 52, where Kinra notes the esteem in which Chandar Bhan Brahman was
held among contemporaries.
128 Fleischer, Bureaucrat. Mustafa Ali eventually had a patrimonial relationship with the sultan
yet did not always serve each of his sultans directly, finding offices in Ottoman households,
The State 299
Chandar Bhan’s aims in composing these works were only partly self-
serving, whether in flattering the emperor by revealing the workings of his
government, in drawing on his own varied and impressive career, or in show-
casing his flair as a Persian stylist. But the most significant objective was to
offer existing and future bureaucrats a guide on exemplary conduct and good
administration –a kind of ‘mirror for munshis’ in complement to the manuals
for ministers (dastur al-wizarat) and rulers (nasihat al-muluk) that circulated in
the Indo-Persianate worlds, and which were akin to mirror-for-princes texts.
By ‘describing the excellent qualities of the great Mughal wazirs of his era
such as Raja Todar Mal (d. 1589), Afzal Khan Shirazi (d. 1639), Sa‘d Allah
Khan (d. 1656), and Raja Ragunath (d. 1664),’ for example, he ‘showed that
successful governance was not simply about military authority (imarat) but
also a matter of balanced temperament, managerial skill (wizarat), a keen mys-
tical and literary sensibility (ma‘rifat), and a deep concern for the public wel-
fare above one’s own.’129 A competence in Persian was not enough to make
a successful and adept secretary. A wide-ranging knowledge and ability to
emulate Persian epistolary styles was necessary, but so, too, was knowledge of
canonical treatises on statecraft, ethics (akhlaq), political history, and civility
and manners.130 Accounting (siyaq) skills were not remiss, either, sitting beside
more highbrow talents like reciting ghazals and masnavis (poetry and rhyme)
as part of the secretarial arts (munshigiri). Other qualities included a spiritual
or mystical detachment from the world, toleration, and a sense of discretion.
Overall, high birth was less important than the mastery of such skills, which
were the vehicle to upward social mobility and grace.131
The early modern period was an ‘age of secretaries’. This is hardly sur-
prising, for ‘institutions that sought to capture the world in writing’ –namely,
‘companies, universities, religious foundations and, above all, governments’ –
were in greater contact with each other than ever before.132 It fell to secretaries
to issue communications, craft relations, and record proceedings, but some –in
the guise of chancellors, chief ministers, and ambassadors –became agents of
the exchange of gifts and goods, as well as ideas and culture, more broadly.
This upsurge in communication and record-keeping was often accompanied
by a drive toward preservation and archiving. When considered alongside the
impact of printing, the innovations brought about by new forms of accounting
and the enhanced numeracy of commercial actors, as well as the tendency
toward empiricism in intellectual circles, we might begin to conceive of an
which were –as in many parts of the early modern world –alternative loci of bureaucratic
energies, as well as in Ottoman ministries.
129 Kinra, Writing, 6, for citation, and 68–84, for analysis. See, also: Kinra, ‘Master and Munshi’,
especially 541–58.
130 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 505–20, for primary source material.
131 Kinra, Writing, 60–61, 64, 67, 84–94, for the details in this paragraph.
132 Dover, ‘Introduction’, 1, for citation, and the wider volume for a geographically wide-ranging
survey of the topic.
300 The State
‘information revolution’ in the early modern period (§10.1).133 We know much

more about the highest-ranking secretaries; undoubtedly talented, some never-
theless ascended as ‘royal favourites’. These grandees served emperors, kings,
and the rulers of republics or city-states like Florence, and include such figures
as Mercurino Gattinara (1465–1530), Francisco de los Cobos (1477–1547),
and Bernhard Cles’ (1485–1539) in the Habsburg world; Thomas Cromwell
and William Cecil (1521–98) in Tudor England; Michel de l’Hôpital (1507–
73) and cardinals Richelieu (1585–1642) and Mazarin (1602–61) in France;
Celalzade Mustafa (c. 1490/1–1567), Ramazanzade Mehmed (d. 1571), and
Feridun Ahmed (d. 1583) in the Ottoman Empire; Qadi Ahmad Qummi (d.
after 1606) and Iskandar Munshi (1560/61–1633) in Safavid Iran; and, of
course, Abu al-Fazl, Afzal Khan Shirazi, and Chandar Bhan Brahman in
Mughal India.134
Chandar Bhan Brahman was outstandingly accomplished but not entirely
singular; he was part of a larger service gentry, after all. Like his counterparts
across Eurasia, he depended upon a vast and often hierarchical network of less
powerful secretaries more remote from their ultimate master (the emperor). In
more textually literate societies, they might coalesce into a class even as they
hailed from a diverse range of backgrounds, whereas secretaries in places like
the early modern Ottoman world or India often originated in communities
known for their traditions of service or scribal skills –the Phanariot Greeks
and the Kayasthas in these respective contexts. This was not the case from
time immemorial, however. The bureaucracy of the Tughluq state was dual-
istic: its lower reaches were staffed by some Muslim scribes and supplemented
by Hindu scribes known as kayasthas, while its uppermost part (the chan-
cery) was formed of a Persianate Muslim elite. This formed the inheritance of
the Mughal state until, under Akbar, all but the bottom-most record-keepers
wrote their accounts in Persian. The higher tiers of the bureaucracy thus used
Persian, even if they were drawn –as in the case of Chandar Bhan –from
Persian-speaking but not necessarily Persian or even Muslim communities
(§10.1).135 Political change combined with the growing hunger for information
to propel the advancement of Indian scribal groups in early modern India,
therefore, with something similar underway in Safavid Iran, too.136
What sort of persons composed the Mughal bureaucracy’s lower rungs?
First, there was the qanungo, as he was known in north India, or deshpandia, as
he was called in the south. They were generally drawn from the accountant or
133 Ibid, 3.
134 Şahin, Empire and Power, 5. See: Kinra, ‘Learned Ideal’, on Afzal Khan. The so-called ‘pol-
itical vakils’ were agents of eighteenth-century rulers operating beyond the court for the
purposes of concluding transactions, negotiation, diplomacy, controlling intelligence, etc.
Their identities and functions differed from the ambassadors and diplomats of Chandar
Bhan’s times, even as they were in flux on account of the post-Mughal political system being
highly dynamic; see: O’Hanlon, ‘Entrepreneurs’.
135 Guha, ‘Serving the Barbarian’, 499–500.
136 See: Mitchell, ‘Wax and Wane’.
The State 301
scribal castes of Kayasthas or Khatris, the office usually ran within particular
families, and this meant that they were valuable repositories of local know-
ledge. This ever-developing body of knowledge furnished the centre with what
it needed to assign and reassign jagirs, but he also received the amils’ returns and
checked these against those of the zamindars, so that his office was positioned
to detect corruption. (By contrast, the amils or amalguzars –who were the
jagirdars’ revenue agents –did not come from the locality). Second, there was
the chaudhuri (in north India), desai (Gujarat), or deshmukh (Deccan), who
acted as a revenue collector for the locality, and was thus a sort of counterpart
to the qanungo in the latter’s function as an accountant and record-keeper. He
was usually the leading zamindar in a pargana (a cluster of villages), although
powerful zamindars posed a threat to imperial stability. At the very local level,
we necessarily find village accountants (patwaris).137 Aside from this vast array
of record-keepers were news reporters (waqa-i navis), who submitted infor-
mation up the food chain regarding noteworthy developments, criticisms or
complaints, and the conduct of local gentry (zamindars, jagirdars).138
The kayastha (as a functionary) was a scribe in the service of a political
master, and the term refers to a number of caste-based communities or fam-
ilies in such service (i.e., Brahmans, Khatris, and the caste of Kayasthas). This
was especially so in the north, where kayasthas were ‘part of the official class
of the Mughal empire, imbued with its Persian literary culture and ethic of
loyalty to Mughal imperial service.’139 Such ethics and standing were somewhat
weaker in the Maratha domains in western India, but this had changed by the
end of our period.140 The bureaucracies of south Indian kingdoms may have
been distinct on account of being biscriptural and bilingual (Persian and other
local languages), but they were otherwise comparable to those of the north,
Sumit Guha tells us. Members of established north Indian and/ or non-
Brahman kayastha families tended to occupy a few positions in the upper
reaches of south Indian bureaucracies, while local ‘Brahman [scriveners]
established a firm grip on the lower clerical positions under the Bahmani sul-
tanate and Vijayanagara kingdom’, thereby taking on ‘prominent political
roles in the late seventeenth to eighteenth century.’141 By erecting barriers to
entry revolving around a specialised script used for record keeping unfamiliar
to outsiders, and by producing their own training manuals (mestaks), these
Maratha Brahmans made themselves indispensable within the bureaucratic
apparatus of the state, often into the twentieth century.142 That said, some
Kayastha households enjoyed success in the Maratha lands, like the Chitnis
137 Habib, Agrarian System, 152–53, 160.

139 O’Hanlon, ‘Social Worth’, 565.
140 Ibid, 565–66, and 573–76, for discussion of the history of migration of Kayasthas to western
India at the Delhi Sultanate’s zenith in the thirteenth century. See, also: Vendell, ‘Pathways’.
141 Guha, ‘Serving the Barbarian’, 498.
142 Ibid, 506–22.
302 The State
family under the Maratha sovereign Shahu Bhonsle (r. 1707–49), who used
their toehold to acquire vast portfolios of rights and privileges that, in turn,
secured their virtual monopoly over certain secretarial offices.143
Such acquisition of offices and estates raises an important issue explored
recently by Nandini Chatterjee in a unique micro-history of the family of
Jayanti Das (fl. 1570s) from Dhar in central India. The family claimed to have
been in state service during the Malwa Sultanate, secured their rights and
perquisites under the Mughals, and survived through successive changes of
regime –first to Maratha rule, then British. They were at once low-ranking
zamindars yet also chaudhuris and qanungos, militarised landed gentry
yet also kayasthas.144 Their history muddies the distinction of ‘men of the
sword’ from ‘men of the pen’, therefore, while their amassing entitlements
from the emperor or his representatives in return for the execution of their
official duties blurred the line between private rights and public office. None
of this is surprising in light of what we know about the marketisation of vio-
lence and localised resistance to the agrarian order described in the previous
chapter.145 On the one hand, after all, ‘[t]‌ax-collection, however systematised
on paper, was only one step away from minor warfare; combinations of skills
therefore made good entrepreneurial sense’.146 On the other hand, ‘successful
office-holding led to acquisition of lands and tax privileges, pulling the proto-
bureaucrat into the militarised world of landlordism.’147 Yet, all this stands
at odds with the idealised picture of the Mughal order described in imperial
texts, including the kinds of manual written by the likes of Chandar Bhan
Brahman or what we can glean from Abu al-Fazl’s Ain, so that Chatterjee’s
bottom-up perspective vastly enriches our understanding of how the empire
was actually run.
Recent work on bureaucrats and the paper bureaucracy lends weight to the
notion –at the heart of Blake’s work, in fact –of a critical transformation or
‘modernisation’ of the state underway in the early modern period. We might
link what has been described here to findings made by Ottoman historians, like
Abdurrahman Atçil, Kaya Şahin, and Baki Tezcan. Their work shows that
a bureaucratic career –and the status and opportunities that came with it –
was open to men of Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds, so long as they
possessed the necessary skills; how the bureaucracy itself deepened and had
become more sophisticated and specialised by the seventeenth century, while
‘a new style in Ottoman bureaucratic practice’ was put in place by Celalzade
Mustafa; how it sucked-in men of talent who might otherwise have pursued
143 Vendell, ‘Pathways’.

144 Chatterjee, Negotiating, especially 70–140, 211–23.
145 See, also: Fleischer, Bureaucrat, 61, which notes the division of the Ottoman ruling elite into
men of religious learning, of the pen (bureaucrats), and of the sword, yet observes how indi-
viduals like Mustafa Ali could combine all three, more or less.
146 Chatterjee, Negotiating, 140.
147 Ibid, 140.
The State 303
a juristic or pedagogical career, such madrasa-educated scholar-bureaucrats

fulfilling ‘functions at every level of the Ottoman administration and govern-
ment’; and how they authorised and legitimised (and critiqued) sultan and
state, to the extent that we cannot understand the state without them, and
are hamstrung by emperor- or executive-centric concepts like ‘domination’
and ‘cooperation’.148 All of these developments had reached a sufficient pitch
by the end of the sixteenth century, thus forming a vital backdrop to the whole-
sale reformulation of the state from c. 1580 identified by Baki Teczan, which
was of such magnitude as to inaugurate the ‘Second Ottoman Empire’ –a
version 2.0 marked, among all else, by new limits upon sultanic absolutism set
by state institutions and elites.149
Thus, empires with origins or roots in the Middle Ages could meet the
challenges of governing a vast domain by innovating, their novel technologies
of rule in turn bequeathed to their successor states, which included the Company
state in the Mughal case.150 Against the notion that Portugal was a backward
medieval kingdom, it has also lately been shown how overseas expansion
stimulated a ‘new science of administration’ into being, adding to this picture
of bureaucratic modernisation in the beginning of our period.151 Such findings
dampen the notion that only a new kind of state was capable of producing the
new kinds of information necessary to secure their control over a new kind of
world empire; the British and French imperialisms that were rapidly spreading
toward the end of the early modern period had important precursors and even
depended upon the achievements of prior regimes, in other words.152 Looking
inside such new and supposedly modern imperial states, furthermore, we find
evidence of patrimonialism and absolutism enduring in Stuart England, whose
growing empire remained ‘bureaucratically challenged’, all of which tempers our
understanding of its ‘modernisation’.153 Ultimately, the sharp contrast drawn
between an increasingly bureaucratic and modern West and a resolutely patrimo-
nial and medieval Orient no longer seems tenable.154
7.3 Of Davids and Goliaths

Once the spell of a powerful emperor ruling from a hegemonic centre was
broken, it became necessary to reconceive the state and power relations
entirely.155 How might we characterise with greater subtlety and complexity the
148 Şahin, Empire and Power, on Mustafa’s life and career, especially 214–42, on the new bureau-
cratic esprit d’corps, and 124, for citation; Atçil, Scholars, 220, for other citations, and passim.
149 Tezcan, Second Ottoman Empire.
150 See, for instance: Travers, Empires of Complaints.
151 Xavier, ‘Casa da Índia’.
152 See, Sivasundaram, Waves, for a new history of this phase of empire-building.
153 Greene, ‘Britain’s Overseas Empire’. See, also: Mishra, Business of State.
155 In truth, some of the damage was done by the ‘revisionist’ work on the eighteenth century that
is reviewed in the next section. In essence, by emphasising decentralisation and the continuity
304 The State
nature of power and the state in early modern India? Might we be able to shift
from a fixation on political and economic structure(s) or forms to seeing the
Mughal state as a process with spatial and temporal dynamics as well as ‘per-
sonalistic’ and even environmental dimensions?156 Can we think of the state as
emerging from below?157
7.3.1 Princes vs. the Emperor

If the continuity of service across several reigns provided by men like Chandar
Bhan smoothed transfers of power, rebellions and wars of succession stand out
as disrupting that process.158 In a system where succession was not determined
by primogeniture, princes had to devote some of their energies to building
up their households in preparation for the struggle with their brothers and
other contenders for the throne, something generations of commentators and
historians have seen as entirely negative and wasteful.159 Acknowledging the
psychological and material toll this took on princes and their supporters, the
career cost to those nobles supporting an unsuccessful prince, not to mention
the scarring of the land and the hardship suffered by Indians when war broke
out, Munis Faruqui’s study of princely households (sarkars) nevertheless
challenges the prevailing view in four respects.160
First, since a prince’s political stock was ‘dependent on the quality and
strength of his sarkar’, it was imperative that he secured income, both by
finessing the management of his jagir, and by engaging in trading ventures and
military campaigns, as well as by amassing and setting aside valuable gifts, all
of which were good training for a future leader.161 Such activities also helped to
better integrate and consolidate control over the erstwhile imperial frontiers –
in Bengal, for instance –which bore long-term benefits to the empire.
Second, this process forced him to seek out men of talent and recruit them
into his household, so that the institution of the princely sarkar became a vehicle
through which ‘a wide range of political, ethnic, and class outsiders were first
assimilated, acculturated, and socialised within the Mughal system.’162 This
between the imperial centre and the ‘successor states’ over any outright imperial collapse, they
forced, reflexively, a reckoning with the image of the state as Leviathan in the Mughal classical
age. Long-run models of the state, such as Lieberman’s in Strange Parallels, however, return
emphasis to the Mughal state as Leviathan by contrasting its relatively high degree of central-
isation with prior regimes while also seeing centralised states as a repeat phenomenon in the
millennium from around c. 800 CE.
156 Subrahmanyam, ‘Structure or Process’. See, also: Hasan, State and Locality, 1–8, for an
instructive historiographical review and conceptual mooring of such new-wave approaches.
157 Yes, according to Hasan, who valuably argues thus in Paper, especially 96–120, which add-
itionally brings under-utilised documents like petitions into the discussion, and passim.
158 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 219–60, for primary sources.
159 See: Faruqui, Princes, 235–36.
160 Ibid, 204–05, 238, 242–64.
161 Ibid, especially 91–102. See, also: Flores, Jesuit Treatise, 51–52, 90–92.
162 Faruqui, Princes, citations 91 and 9, respectively.
The State 305
included imperial nobles, Rajput chiefs, zamindars, and men from military
and service lineages; caste-based scribal groups (e.g., Kayasthas) and bankers
(Khatris); Muslim clerics, Sufi saints and their silsilas, and Hindu temple
networks; and even the representatives of European trading organisations.163
The sarkar was not only an alternate locus of power to the imperial court; it
stimulated dialogue that could address problems of access to, or representa-
tion at, the centre by offering an alternative to the status quo, thus helping the
empire to evolve.
Third, a lifetime in preparation and alliance- building meant successful
princes had a coalition of supporters upon whom to rely once in power, in
this respect smoothing transitions from one reign to another, although this is
somewhat speculative.164 ‘Princely courts were models of the imperial court,’
Peirce observes in her study of the Ottoman harem, and successful contenders
to the throne turned their establishments into a ready-made nucleus of the
imperial household.165 Finally, in a somewhat perverse way, the princely sarkar
and contests for the throne strengthened the dynasty, for they reaffirmed the
emperor –incumbent or waiting in the wings –as the wellspring of rewards,
dampening the appeal of challenges from rival dynasties.166
Other scholars have variously emphasised the significance of the household
as the ‘primary unit of political organisation’, ranging from classic and new
work on the Ottoman world to fresh research into Afghan military households
in seventeenth and eighteenth-century south India.167 Selim’s accession to
the Ottoman throne in 1512 is revealing, being nothing short of a violent
coup against his father and brothers, H. Erdem Çipa argues.168 It was possible
because Selim had built-up supporters across social and military classes, in
the centre at Istanbul and in the province of the Balkans, which was the fruit
of negotiation and renegotiation with individuals or groups, sometimes even
those who had supported his rival brothers or the sultan (even more signifi-
cant as the latter was still living).169 If the reigning sultan’s power was vested
in relations with his elites, the fact that such relations were ‘constantly tested,
fissured, fractured, renegotiated, and rebuilt begs the question of whether the
Ottoman polity ever epitomised the patrimonial empire imagined by most
modern scholars.’170
163 Ibid, 140, 214–17, and passim.

164 Ibid, 254–64.
165 Peirce, Imperial Harem, 46, for citation, and 45–47.
166 Faruqui, Princes, 238, and also 274–308, where the author links the decline of princely
households from the 1680s to ‘imperial decline’, since the process of building-up the prince’s
sarkar was undermined by widespread unrest and the empire’s supposed financial crisis, in this
way retrenching such interpretations and their significance.
167 Lord Archambault, ‘Geographies’, 5, for citation, 51–53, for an instructive survey of the typ-
ologies of households to be found in early modern India, and passim, for analysis.
168 Çipa, Making of Selim, 29–61.
169 Ibid, 62–108.
170 Ibid, 67.
306 The State
What emerges from Faruqui’s and Çipa’s studies, therefore, is a picture of

power that does not look like the neat hub (emperor) and spokes (elites) of
a bicycle wheel, where all power qua ranks and rewards radiated out of the
centre in vertical lines to elites in return for loyalty and service, as per earlier
scholarship. The emperor and his court constituted but one locus of power.
The existence of princely courts shows that power was diffuse and labile, while
the princes’ cultivation of horizontal alliances were not mere expediencies, but
a fundamental part of the process of state-building (or, rather, reign-building)
in the Ottoman and Mughal empires. What is more, a ruler could not take his
power for granted once seated on the throne and in command of the assignment
of ranks and rewards along vertical lines, for power was fluid and had to be
amassed and maintained through alliance-building and ongoing bargaining
with those in possession of the resources he needed (i.e., manpower, weapons,
cash) in return for what such persons desired (e.g., salaries or profits, offices,
status, honour). In what other ways, we might then ask, was power negotiated
or else contested by the centre and other actors?
7.3.2 Locality vs. the Empire
Mughal sources speak of the ‘darwaza (doorway), farakhna (highway), and

rah (road)’ because they conceive of imperial power radiating from the centre
along major military-cum-commercial arteries to the most distant fort under
imperial control, with what lay beyond being the territories of rival or as-yet
unsubordinated powers.171 Pratyay Nath’s attentiveness to the north Indian
landscape and climate helps conceptualise Mughal imperial frontiers a little
more precisely, not merely as distant spaces where imperial power was weak
or met some natural limit, but as spaces –near or far –produced as a result of
the combined ‘failure of the empire to control routes of communication, tackle
interlinked environmental and military challenges, and to find local allies.’172
Such environmental and military factors made local collaboration absolutely
critical (§6.2.3, §6.4.3).173 At the same time, (un)successful bargains struck with
local allies were seldom the product of the Mughal emperor or the ‘imperial
centre’, but the work of the proverbial man on the spot –usually a mansabdar –
so that ‘ground realities and individual agency deeply shaped the course of
imperial expansion.’174
Maintaining Mughal rule was likewise a process of ongoing negotiation or
re-negotiation. ‘As late as 1584’, notes Irfan Habib, ‘we find the jama of a jagir
in Delhi province subject to bargaining between the admionistration and the
171 Nath, Climate of Conquest, 217 for citation, although the ideas are derived from: Gommans,
Mughal Warfare.
173 Ibid, 192–206. See, also: Lally, ‘Landscape’, especially 278–81.
The State 307
prospective assignee’ on account of the jama differing from the hasil.175 Hardly
the mere caveat it seems in Habib’s larger account, it was more like the tip
of the iceberg: bargaining and negotiation capture centre-province relations
better than the any notion of the centre effecting its hegemony. Much like other
empires down to modern times, the Mughal Empire was a spatially lumpy
entity, with power stronger and relations smoother vis-à-vis provinces closer
to the centre, and vice versa in the case of more distant subas. Take Gujarat,
a suba conquered in 1572–73. This was a successful and lasting conquest not
only because the ruling elites entered into alliance-making and political nego-
tiation, but because a range of ‘subordinate social groups’ did so, too. The
‘religious leaders, petty merchants, local gentry, tribal lineage groups, warrior
clans and even common urban dwellers’ of the key cities of Cambay and Surat,
Farhat Hasan’s important study reveals, used the conquest as an opportunity
to ‘manoeuvre for a greater share in the state redistributive system.’176
If such was the case at the point of annexation, it stands to reason that
the consolidation and maintenance of Mughal rule likewise vitally depended
on the participation of local corporate groups, for whom participation was a
vehicle for the re-negotiation of their rights and entitlements or to contest what
they saw as unwarranted.177 In fact, they became ‘co-sharers’ in sovereignty, and
strived to preserve their relative autonomy vis-à-vis any larger ruling centre as
manifested in the latter’s representatives (i.e., officeholders like the mutasaddi,
responsible for the collection of trade revenues, or the kotwal, who kept the
local order); such officers were influenced to a high degree, as we shall see, by
local factors.178 Though not quite municipal bodies in the European sense, the
tug-of-war over rights and autonomy between powerful urban institutions and
communities, on the one hand, with the ruling centre, on the other, that Farhat
Hasan describes in the context of seventeenth-century Gujarat is nonetheless
reminiscent of similar tussles in Europe from at least the Middle Ages.179
Between the grandiose self-image of the state, with power coursing outward
from its centre via the imperial highways, and the messier reality of striking
deals with vested interests, where can the state actually be located and how can
it be best characterised? Borrowing from Michael Braddick’s work, we might
conceive of the early modern state neither as a figment of the imagination nor
as a mere process.180 The state is ultimately defined, Braddick argues, by its
exercise of political power. Whether at the centre or in the locality, this political
175 Habib, Agrarian System, 306. See, also: Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 15–16, for
a questioning of whether the fiscal system ever operated as its architects intended that, inad-
vertently, opens up the whole issue of negotiation between imperial officials in the centre and
those in the provinces and localities.
176 Hasan, State and Locality, 30.
177 On their resistance: ibid, 52–70.
178 Ibid, 31–51.
179 Clark, European Cities, 91–105, for a survey of those developments.
180 Braddick, State Formation, which –it is worth noting –has exerted an influence on those
aspects of Hasan’s thinking described in this chapter.
308 The State
power resided in officeholders –not individual persons –chief among them the
lord lieutenants and their deputies (exercising military-policing functions over
their respective counties), sheriffs and justices of the peace (law and order),
and the high constables and village constables operating below the justices.
They operated in a landscape where non-state institutions of long-standing
exercised some administrative and legal power of their own, such as the
courts of assizes, which exemplifies ‘the intimate and ambiguous relationship
between the state and the legal system.’181 As for the bureaucracy proper, the
late Tudor state relied on perhaps one-thousand persons, the vast majority of
whom were to be found in the localities. And, much like other officeholders,
they ‘constantly exercised discretion in implementing their formal powers’,
revealing ‘another level of political decision-making’ and the relative weakness
of the coordinating centre.182 Besides these functionaries were those who held
lucrative monopolies as well as ‘saltpetremen, purveyors, patentees, licensees,
hunters after concealed lands and informers’, each carrying out ‘specialised
functions with formally prescribed powers’, Braddick tells us, typical of the
intimate reliance on contractors or other parties outside the early modern state
apparatus proper that we have already seen in relation to trade and economic
management (§5.4.3–§5.4.4, §5.5) as well as warmongering and the making of
violence (§6.1) in numerous locales across the early modern world.183
The state, so conceived, was ‘a coordinated and territorially bounded
network of agencies exercising political power’ that ‘was distinct from the
locality, not by being central but by being more extensive than the locality –
it was one of the things common to a number of localities’.184 It was suf-
ficiently useful to all sorts of people to the extent that, ‘far from having
to penetrate the localities’, the state ‘was frequently invited in’.185 In turn,
this reveals something beyond the role of war in the state’s expanding and
deepening reach amidst its centralisation and modernisation, which has so
preoccupied scholars (§6.5).186 It was the demand for the ‘everyday use of
political power’ that spurred the development of the state already in the two
or three generations before the Civil War (1642–51).187 This demand often
came from the localities in their bid to deal with social problems (e.g., plague,
famine, poverty), and often involved the wider use of the law to maintain
social order (e.g., in the regulation of alehouses and sexual behaviour, to deal
with the problems posed by witches and vagrants).188 There was also a boom
in litigation. This resort to the law strengthened legal authority and, thus,
181 Ibid, 38.

182 Ibid, 28, for citations, and 44.
183 Ibid, 86.
184 Ibid, 92.
185 Ibid, citations 9, 93, respectively.
186 Ibid, 177–286.
187 Ibid, 94, for citation.
188 Ibid, 101–76.
The State 309
the state’s authority amidst the expansion of the state’s regulatory power and
‘the routinisation of government by local officeholders.’189 The Tudors and
Stuarts endeavoured to centralise the state, laying the foundations for even
more rapid change in the later seventeenth century. Yet that process could
never have been an entirely or largely top-down one, which is precisely why
Braddick’s analysis is so valuable for historians of the early modern state in
south Asia. Indeed, all this helps us visualise a parallel process in Mughal
India, where the locus of state formation and development was, as Farhat
Hasan duly observes, likewise ‘shifting downward to the lower, more locally
rooted, links in the system.’190
7.3.3 Everyday Legal Process vs. the Law of the Land
Maintaining Mughal rule depended not only on constant negotiation with

powerholders over their rights, but also the management of diversity (§3.3),
the maintenance of order, and the dispensation of justice –all of which were
tasks of the Mughal legal order. Akbar and Jahangir spoke to the learned
representatives of different communities of belief, one fruit of which was the
Majalis-i Jahangiri, as much a record of Jahangir’s discussions as a presentation
of an imperial judicial assembly, in which the monarch was qazi al-quzat (judge
of judges) and rightful interpreter of dharma. Although the emperor sought
to manage diversity by establishing a common framework of understanding
and by acting as arbiter, the direct impact was probably rather limited.191 More
wide-reaching, by contrast, was the turn to legal formalism palpable in what
Alam and Subrahmanyam describe as ‘canonisation’ –or ‘qanun-isation’, more
aptly –from Shah Jahan’s reign.192
Before proceeding, we might pause to consider the similarity of this
qanunisation to the earlier codification of both religious and secular law under
the aegis of the Ottoman centre. Religious law, here, means a branch of Hanafi
jurisprudence, which was elevated to the status of the official school of law
within the empire.193 Secular law refers to sultanic or dynastic law, known as
kanun in the Ottoman sources. Its codification encompassed numerous laws
on various matters under the sultan’s purview (e.g., criminal law, land tenure,
taxation) and was begun after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, with a
major contribution to this development made under Suleiman I (r. 1520–66),
earning him the epithet kanuni (‘the lawgiver’). Ottoman kanun was an amalgam
189 Ibid, 166.

190 Hasan, State and Locality, 51.
191 See: Lefèvre, ‘Mughal Legal Ideology’, 124–36. Sunnism was, of course, the overarching
structure of reference for this project.
193 Burak, Second Formation, sets out this development and concludes by opening out to
comparisons with Safavid, Mughal, and other early modern Muslim polities. Beyond com-
parability, Burak also suggests that Ottoman developments were linked to Mughal ones; op.
cit., 212–13.
310 The State
of sharia, Turkic and local laws and customs, Byzantine fiscal practices, and so
forth.194 Obviously, it was not strictly secular, for it absorbed parts of sharia or
else coexisted and even competed with it in the process of standardising or rec-
onciling potentially different interpretations.195 Such was its esteem that writers
in the post-Suleymanic era possessed a ‘kanun-consciousness’, penning mirrors
texts that laid the blame for perceived Ottoman decline in the abandonment
of the rigorous standards of Ottoman kanun –that is, the abandonment of
justice and law so integral, they believed, to the Ottoman state.196 This decline
in standards, however, was partly linked to such processes as the interpret-
ation of kanun in ways that suited local powerholders, sometimes by redrawing
the boundary between kanun and sharia. Especially in places distant from the
centre like Mosul and Basra, this formed part of the wider bargaining between
centre and provinces occurring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries –
and typical of the negotiated and processual nature of power laid out in the
present section of this chapter.197 Everyday legal process was thus a venue for
the striking of those bargains that steadily reformulated the state, yet was also
where the state came into being and was often most visible, as we shall see by
looking at the Mughal case.
A centrepiece of Mughal qanunisation was Aurangzeb’s sponsorship of
a Hanafi legal-literate tradition, which culminated in the Fatawa-i Alamgiri
(§6.3.1). The Fatawa was a collection of rulings, thus striving not only toward
the codification of legal opinion, but to settling what rulings Mughal jurists
were to use on matters where Hanafi scholars were in dispute amongst them-
selves.198 More broadly, it was under Aurangzeb that Mughal legalism reached
a high point and that a ‘paper empire’ emerged, thanks to men of the pen and
their work as judges, their submission of regular flows of information to the
capital in the form of newsletters (akhbarat), and even the measurement and
re-surveying of the land as part of the larger turn toward improving preci-
sion and, ultimately, greater rationalism.199 Impetus came as much from the
need to widen the tax base as to give the expanding empire a greater coherence
and to strengthen the centre, although this last was not necessarily achieved.200
We might link this attempt at qanunisation to the rebellions that sprang up
during Aurangzeb’s reign, for they ‘appear to have been as much related to
an attempt to preserve and redefine local and regional autonomy’ as they
were part of any economic crisis in the empire.201 We have also encountered
194 Khoury, ‘Administrative Practices’, 311.

195 The support for an official Hanafi school was part of the effort to diminish the friction
between sharia and secular law, as Burak argues in Second Formation, here 18 and passim.
196 Fleischer, Bureaucrat, 95–105, 191–200.
197 See: Khoury, ‘Administrative Practice’, passim, with an instructive comparison to the Qing
state on 327–30.
198 Burak, Second Formation, 212–13.
200 Chatterjee, Negotiating, 112–13.
The State 311
other side-effects of these projects, including the growth of a political con-

sciousness among ordinary Shahjahanabadis (§4.2.4). Yet, the major outcome
of Aurangzeb’s ‘bureaucratic systemisation of the delivery of justice’ was to
change how ordinary subjects experienced the delivery of justice and, ultim-
ately, the state.202
Aurangzeb sought at once to give the law greater coherence and a Mughal
imprint. At the same time, the state-appointment of qazis not only represented
the assimilation of a key part of the religious/legal establishment, but also
made these judges servants of the state, much as in the Ottoman Empire, in
both cases contributing to state expansion in a distinct yet broadly analogous
manner to that described by Braddick for England, c. 1550–1640.203 Yet, a
little nuance is needed, lest we either overstate the importance of the imperial
centre or conflate ‘Mughal law’ with ‘law in Mughal India’.204 In the first place,
the law may have been communicated from above –from the imperial court,
through legal or legal-cum-sacral texts, and via the offices of state-appointed
judges –but it was shaped in very real respects from below, through the
myriad encounters people from all walks of life had with legal documents and
processes. The assimilation of qazis into the Ottoman and Mughal states did
not quite remove them from local influences and make them instruments to
help regularise or standardise Islamic law in the land. Their courts were also
spaces for the ‘archiving of justice’ (including judgements and legal opinions),
so that a qazi in a particular place could refer back to his predecessors, reinfor-
cing the power of locality.205
And this is to say nothing, secondly, of the fact that there was no single
legal tradition or even a single legal system, but such a multiplicity that we
can speak of ‘legal pluralism’. To make sense of this, it is worth remembering
that Islamic law (sharia) and Hindu law (dharma) were not universally agreed
upon. There were variations in legal opinion across the Muslim world, not
to mention changes in how the sharia was operationalised over time, and the
same was true of dharma, with special rules for particular castes, regions, and
kingdoms. This meant the everyday legal sphere was inherently layered and
multifarious in early modern India, even before we consider the monarch’s
power as a lawmaker and the state’s jurisdiction over administrative and penal
matters (zawabit), dropping like ‘gentle rain from heaven’, and the manifold
customs of local communities pushing up from below.206 The Mughal legal
order as represented by the qazi co-existed with other, often localised juridical

203 Al-Qattan, ‘Courthouse’, for the Ottoman side of things.
204 Hasan, ‘Law’, 398–99. Or, more precisely, the imprint destined by the reigning monarch, for
Aurangzeb’s initiative was a reflection of his stance, for example. See, also: Hasan, Paper,
for a fuller explication of these ideas. On the latter distinction (Mughal law/law in Mughal
India): Chatterjee, Negotiating, 38–40.
205 Al-Qattan, ‘Courthouse’.
206 Lefèvre, ‘Mughal Legal Ideology’, 116–18.
312 The State
institutions, making it much like its Ottoman cousin in this respect: corporate
merchant bodies (mahajans), caste-based groups (panchs), urban corporate
institutions (nagarsheth), community heads, and mahalla elites.207 They over-
lapped, as we shall see, and there does not seem to have been a ‘conception of
a hierarchy of fora’, Sumit Guha argues; ‘instead there was a rough idea of the
ranking of disputes in order of magnitude.’208 The fact of such ‘legal pluralism’
meant that, as Farhat Hasan puts it, ‘the legal domain in the Mughal period
was in excess of the state’.209
Let us focus on qazis, nevertheless, for they could be found in urban centres
across the varied domains of the Mughal state and probably constituted the
most consistent feature of the legal landscape (§4.2.2–§4.2.3).210 The local
qazi was supported by the kotwal and faujdar (military-police officials) and
was under the purview of the sadr (who oversaw religious and, derivatively,
all judicial affairs in the empire). The execution of his duties was subject to
oversight, therefore, as well as being moulded by Mughal directives, including
those to be attentive to local customs and social structures. His post was an
official appointment, meaning the emperor also had the power to remove a
qazi from office when his rulings were at odds with imperial interests.211 Akbar,
for instance, dismissed a qazi who defied his wishes to acquit a Brahman
of charges of blasphemy, instead ordering his execution, while Aurangzeb
dismissed the qazi who refused to convict Dara Shukoh of heresy.212 More
commonly, Mughal qazis –like their Ottoman counterparts –dealt with such
issues as registering rights and notarising transactions (sales, mortgages, gifts),
matters of inheritance, marriage contracts with or without a guardian, settle-
ment of law-suits, and so forth. They also meted out punishments to wrong-
doers and –in their capacity as pillars of local Muslim society –were meant
to induce proper religious observance and righteousness among the people.213
As magistrates, they admitted pleas, reviewed witness and documentary testi-
mony, and then consulted with experts in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) known
as muftis, who issued an opinion (fatwa, pl. fatawa). Following the compilation
of the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, the mufti’s opinion may or may not have taken its
207 Hasan, ‘Law’, 404; Gradeva, ‘Court in the Balkans’, 60–61. C.f. Chatterjee, Negotiating, 38–40.
208 Guha, ‘The Qazi’, 107.
209 Hasan, ‘Law’, 398. There were other aspects to legal pluralism emanating from the everyday
experience of the law, for most people did not speak Persian, so legal documents scribed in
Persian by Mughal qazis produced a ‘legal order [which] was sustained by the obdurate per-
sistence of oral, performative traditions in the textual habitus, and the co-existence of written
statements with spoken pronouncements within a shared legal space’ –Hasan, ‘Law’, 408.
Similarly, on the multilingualism of the law: Chatterjee, Negotiating.
210 Their status did change in the later Mughal period, however, at least in the Maratha-controlled
west of India; see: Guha, ‘The Qazi’, 99–107.
211 Chatterjee, ‘Reflections’, 405.
212 Chatterjee, Negotiating, 174. See, also: Lefèvre, ‘Mughal Legal Ideology’, 120.
213 Chatterjee, ‘Reflections’, 406–07. Gradeva, ‘Court in the Balkans’, for the Ottoman qazi in the
majority non-Muslim context of Sofia.
The State 313
cue from that text; we do not currently know how and how far the Fatawa
impacted such decision-making. Furthermore, qazis were free to follow or dis-
regard a mufti’s opinion –or even to seek further opinions –before making
their rulings, which were recorded by a scribe.214
In all but the business related to marriages, the majority of his attesters
were non-Muslim, and these included women as well as men.215 Such recourse
to the qazi’s court, rather than other juridical institutions available to non-
Muslims, could be described as ‘forum shopping’ –a term denoting a plaintiff’s
search for the venue in which they were more likely to obtain the desired justice
or best outcome. Although the Ottoman sultan’s Jewish or Christian subjects
did the same, it bears remembering that the Mughal state was ‘overwhelm-
ingly inclusive’ from the point of view of its juridical institutions; Mughal
legal institutions often ‘ended up reinforcing the local norms and customary
procedures’ more usually associated with the courts for specific communities
(e.g., the panchs) and other local powerholders.216
Nor were Mughal courthouses separated from the latter, who sometimes
interrupted cases brought to the qazi and resolved disputes themselves, or else
overturned the qazi’s ruling by making their own. Now and again, the two were
blended, either because they worked together, or because the qazi functioned
to turn a text or record of testimony into a legal document, his seal imbuing
it ‘with a sanctimonious status.’217 Much as Ottoman kanun and sharia and
the boundary between them were not immutable, so the qazi was able to exer-
cise latitude in his deliberations, fitting his understanding of Islamic law –or
even preferring to make a decision based upon local custom –as suited local
contexts and the maintenance of law and order, so that the qazi punished by
Akbar is perhaps remembered precisely because this instance was so excep-
tional.218 Ultimately, it was ‘the need for secure commercial transactions, the
smooth functioning of the state, and the resultant creation of entitlements,’
Nandini Chatterjee argues, ‘as well as a shared culture of Indo-Persian legal
forms, that brought litigants into the ambit of these formally Islamic courts.’219
Besides the appearance of the revenue collector, it was in the qazi’s office that
the emperor’s subjects and foreigners –including European merchants –came
face-to-face with the Mughal state.220 Among the business brought to the qazi
was the registration of rights to land or office and its associated emoluments,
214 Chatterjee, Negotiating, here, 172–73, and the chapter as a whole for a rich picture of the qazi’s
lifeworld.
215 Chatterjee, ‘Reflections’, 408–09; Hasan, State and Locality, 71–109.
216 Hasan, ‘Law’, 405, for citation, and 409, for examples. On Ottoman forum shopping: Barkey,
‘Legal Pluralism’, Gradeva, ‘Court in the Balkans’, especially 60–61. See, also: Chatterjee,
Negotiating, 158–62. For a case in which, vice versa, a Muslim called upon Brahmans to settle
a dispute once and for all according to Hindu law: Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 145–50.
217 Hasan, ‘Law’, 405. See, also: Chatterjee, Negotiating, 175–78.
218 Eaton, ‘Introduction’ [2]‌, 23.
219 Chatterjee, ‘Reflections’, 403, for both citations.
220 See, for instance: Veevers, British Empire, 143.
314 The State
which were stated in a document known as a mahzar.221 Thus, for example,

when one Purshottam Das succeeded his uncle to the village headmanship of
Dhar and related office in the late seventeenth century, he took care to have
his family’s long-standing and hereditary connection to these offices ratified,
the confirmatory documents (sanads) held by one of his predecessors having
been stolen before he came into his inheritance. In 1684, however, a challenger
emerged and Purshottam Das was obliged to call on all those who could render
their testimony to his ancestral claim in writing.222 In the paper trail left by
this dispute over hereditary rights to local office, the Mughal state appears not
only as an entity disbursing salaries and offices within the revenue-bureaucratic
system, but also in the form of the qazi, his office, and the legal process. Or, to
look at it another way, the state not only manifested itself in these institutions,
but was actually produced on a day-to-day basis through the recourse of
petitioners like Purshottam Das to the office of the qazi; their interactions with
one another, with scribes writing in Persian, as well as other parties drawn into
the fray; not to mention the documents they created and archived for future
reference, which manifested the state each and every time they were examined.
Combined with Aurangzeb’s bureaucratisation of the law, two factors
increased the traffic to the qazi’s office. Economic growth in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries produced ‘new social classes’ who were less
constrained by the narrow and ‘particularistic norms and values’ of their com-
munities than established groups in possession of rights.223 Eager to press their
claims, they turned to –and thereby expanded the role of –the state. Another
factor was the distribution and steady subinfeudation of rights through the
Mughal classical age, for this created layers of complexity in which confu-
sion and competition seeded itself. Precisely at the moment when the reach
of Mughal authority began to wane, the Mughal legal order became more
important as people brought disputes to the qazi’s court. In fact, the crumbling
of Mughal authority spurred the rush to confirm or contest –fraudulently or
without basis, in some cases –rights and entitlements granted at some point by
the Mughal emperor or his officers, motivated by the fear of a family’s claims
being dislodged amidst the political change in motion after 1707.224
Thus, somewhat paradoxically, such business kept Mughal sovereignty in
repair in the eighteenth century and through the colonial transition. None of
this is to say that mahzars or other writs were Mughal inventions, even if they
took a specific form in the Mughal world on account of the realm’s diver-
sity; the former had a long pedigree in the Indo-Islamic world and were extant
in such places as western and south India prior to the Mughal conquest. No
221 See, valuably: O’Hanlon, ‘Petitioning’.

222 Chatterjee, ‘Mahzar-namas’, 379–82.
223 Hasan, ‘Law’, 410.
224 See, also: Chatterjee, ‘Mahzar-namas’, 400–04, for the new lease of life granted to such
documents through their use in polities as different as the Sikh kingdoms and the early
Company state.
The State 315
surprise, then, that ‘mahzar-writing survived and flourished under the self-
consciously Brahmanical Maratha Empire of the seventeenth century’, and
later in the Sikh kingdoms and the early Company state.225 Nevertheless, what
is significant is how such everyday encounters made the imperial state even
as it decentralised. Reflexively, the processes of state formation in the local-
ities and via the legal system that have been described in this section critically
shaped the Mughal successor states, which necessarily had deeper local roots
in consequence.
7.4 Beyond Decline: The Mughal Empire after the Death of Aurangzeb
The eighteenth century was a ‘special time’ in the history of Islamicate Eurasia.
On the one hand, it witnessed a letting up of several centuries of dominion
following in the wake of both Timur’s conquests and the Ottoman, Safavid, and
Mughal regimes moulded by those conquests in vital respects (see, e.g., §8.1).
On the other hand, for the most part, the eighteenth century was a period in
which European imperialisms were yet to be ‘intimated by contemporaries’.226
The notion of a prolonged decline of the Ottoman Empire after defeat
at Lepanto in 1571 is no longer tenable. The origins of this notion are to be
found in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century declinist literature produced
by Ottoman elites with their own literary, political, or other ends in mind,
much as the talk of Portuguese decadencia in the later sixteenth century
might also be read as a literary response to social realignments.227 This has
been accompanied by several decades of scholarship that has at once taken
the Ottoman seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on their own terms, rather
than seeing them in the shade of the classical age through Mehmed II’s to
Suleyman I’s reigns, meanwhile emphasising the flexibility and extraordinary
durability of the Ottoman state, which was dissolved only in 1922. Among
the major developments brought to light by these studies was the so-called
‘age of the ayan’ or provincial notable, a broad catch-all for a complex, multi-
faceted decentralisation of power and authority toward the provinces. As
the centre renegotiated obligations –fiscal and military, in particular –with
existing or newly-emergent powerholders in the provinces and localities,
so power became lumpier still from the late seventeenth through the eight-
eenth centuries, not least because none of the new local regimes succeeded in
overthrowing the emperor and his court.228 The Safavids, by contrast, were
225 Ibid, 392, for citation, and 391–93, 395–96, for pre-Mughal and post-Mughal examples, and
those from outside India, as well as subtle but important differences between these and the
Mughal form of the mahzar.
227 Howard, ‘Ottoman Advice’; Howard, ‘Ottoman Historiography’; Faroqhi, Approaching, 144–
56; Subrahmanyam, ‘Written on Water’, 63–64.
228 Yaycioglu, Partners; Khoury, ‘Ottoman Centre’. For a similar picture of Mughal western
India: Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat; Hasan, State and Locality.
316 The State
toppled in 1722 yet their aura remained potent and magnetic for decades.229
What, then, of eighteenth-century India (Map 7A)?
If we view the Mughal Empire from a top-down and centre-outward perspec-
tive, imbuing it with hegemony, then its shrinkage to the ‘saltanat-i hindustan’,
and eventually to Delhi and its environs, appears tantamount to collapse.230
The eighteenth century appears as a ‘dark age’ and historians search for the
causes of ‘decline’. If, however, we see Mughal authority as resting upon the
incorporation of a wide range of groups, not only servicemen but also local
powerholders (zamindars, holders of madad-i ma‘ash grants, etc) of varying
antiquity or juvenescence, then we can read the eighteenth century rather
differently. It was not primarily institutional maldesign or malfunction, and
any resultant class conflict or factionalism at court, that caused the Mughal
Empire’s change of fortune. Neither was it due to any failings on the part of
imperial personalities. Aurangzeb is usually mentioned in this regard, accused
of spurring communal conflict by virtue of his zealotry and religious policies,
though this has thankfully been given serious reconsideration in recent years.
Nor was it due to the impotence of those numerous puppets or weaklings
sitting on the Mughal throne after 1707 and the machinations of those pulling
the strings, such as the Sayyid brothers.231 None of these was a sufficient ‘push’,
though each has been attributed as a factor by some historian or other.
There was the additional fact of local economic growth and prosperity that
created the motives and opportunity –that ‘pulled’, in other words –local elites
into those conflicts with the centre that precipitated its fragmentation. They
were inclined by virtue of their personalities and aspirations to realising polit-
ical voice or even authority on their own account and, in turn, conflicted with
the centre as rights and responsibilities were renegotiated or wholly redrawn.232
How this played out depended deeply on context, as Muzaffar Alam shows in
a comparative study of Awadh and Punjab worth dwelling on for the riches it
reveals about the process and dynamics of the supposed fall of the Mughal
Empire and ascendance of the so-called ‘successor states’.
Proximate to the imperial capital, Punjab and Awadh were closely integrated
into the empire around the turn of the century, and were important economic
zones in their own right but also gateways –bastions, too –to the eastern and
western flanks of the empire and the trade and enemies that lay beyond. In
the first phase, the subadars of these provinces arrogated for themselves and
their followers the overlapping imperial offices (e.g., the subadari, faujdari,
diwani), whose holders previously reported directly to the emperor and were
appointed by him.233 In effect, the governors centralised control in their own
229 Sood, Islamic Heartlands, 6, for citation.

230 On the trope of the ‘dark age’ and subsequent revisionism, see: Bayly, Rulers, 43–46; Alavi,
‘Introduction’, 1–21.
231 See, for instance: Chandra, Parties and Politics.
232 Alam, Crisis, 40–41, 100–04, 140–44. See, also: Alam, ‘Trade’.
233 Alam, Crisis, 70–71, 89.
The State 317
Map 7A The Marathas and other Mughal ‘Successor States’, c. 1760

318 The State
hands, bringing greater political stability but also amassing greater political
power. In this, we can see the collapse of the old imperial structure, the alien-
ation of control away from the emperor and his wazir, and the beginnings of
regional centralisation. This was aided by the breakdown of communications
between the centre and the provinces.234 At the same time, enrichment led to
greater assertiveness on the part of zamindars, pitching them in conflict with
the Mughal centre and its local representatives, as well as holders of madad-i
ma‘ash grants, the latter holding pretensions of transferring their holdings into
zamindaris proper, thus causing them to clash with the existing landlords.235
Since each groups’ aims remained parochial and their leadership narrow, they
failed to gather a broad enough following and momentum, but caused con-
siderable turbulence nonetheless (though not necessarily to the detriment of
the economy and commerce). All this further weakened the imperial centre,
with the further effect of emboldening local jagirdars to resist transfers to new
jagirs.236
As bad as things were in Awadh, they were worse in Punjab, where the activ-
ities of the Sikhs under Banda Bahadur affronted or were injurious to cer-
tain zamindars and other local potentates (§2.4.4, §6.3.2), not to mention the
imperial centre, thereby adding another layer of difficulty for all those involved
in these contests –and success for no one. In this difference, Alam has located
the path to the development of a successor state in Awadh and the absence of
such a path or outcome in Punjab. Indeed, continued zamindari risings and
the Sikhs’ raids and other forms of hostile and violent opposition, combined
with the effects of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah’s campaigns into north India,
and a quite possible economic stagnation in parts (or all) of Punjab, created
near-constant disturbance.237 Against this background, and given the conflict
among Mughal officeholders in Punjab, there was little scope for regional cen-
tralisation, while Delhi’s grip over the province practically slipped away.238
By contrast, the governors of Awadh –Burhan-ul-Mulk and his successor,
Safdar Jang –were in a strong enough position to take on the difficult task of
renegotiating rights and obligations with the zamindars and holders of madad-
i ma‘ash grants. In this task, they naturally met with opposition, but were able
to prevail, resulting in the creation of the Awadh nawabi in the years after
1722.239 The suba became ‘the suba-i mulki (home province) and the subadari
much more than a mere administrative assigmment conferred by the emperor’,
instead becoming ‘practically self-earned and permanent (bil-istiqlal),’ and
nearly hereditary, ‘even though the governor was theoretically still a Mughal
subadar.’240
234 Ibid, 91.

235 Ibid, 105–10, 117–22.
236 Ibid, 132–33.
237 Ibid, especially 177–85, 294–95.
239 Ibid, 204–24, 240–42.
240 Ibid, 243.
The State 319
Much like the regional centralisation seen in Ottoman Baghdad under

Hasan Pasha –who likewise amalgamated the fiscal, military, and judicial
powers, controlled revenue streams, and exercised a personal sovereignty while
continuing to nod to Istanbul –a similar process and outcome is observable as
Mughal provinces were turned into principalities.241 This was the product of
the charisma, leadership, and opportunism on the part of the founders of these
new principalities, usually erstwhile subadars (e.g., in Awadh and Hyderabad),
though the Bengal nawabi was founded by the former Mughal diwan.242 For its
part, the imperial centre lamented the mufsid and zortalab (mutinous or rebel-
lious) provinces, with the sources also speaking of fitna (or fitva, in Maratha
sources), a concept with varying and often conflicting uses in the documen-
tary record that André Wink thankfully clarifies and expounds. From the per-
spective of an entity like the mature, eighteenth-century Mughal state, fitna
involved the rebellion or sedition by zamindars and gentry expected to be
subservient to the centre.243 Fitna –as the forging, breaking, and switching
of political alliances –had been just as vital to the expansionism of the early
Mughal state, however; the same was true of the Mughals’ rivals aspiring for
a greater share of political power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
While the emperor sought to deny fitna, therefore, his ‘right to the land was
merely one of the concurrent rights in the shifting structure of sovereignty.’244
We shall return to Wink’s thesis, but one larger implication of his and
Alam’s contributions is that political competition between central and local
powerholders was neither the effect nor the cause of economic stagnation
and decline. On the contrary, it was precisely because of sustained prosperity,
even growth, that actors pursued the contest over rights and the sphere of
authority.245 These ideas may now seem uncontroversial, but they represent the
fruits of a radical revisionism undertaken from the late 1970s.246 Until then, the
view ready-made and received from Mughal court historians, as well as those
attached to the early colonial state, painted the eighteenth century as a time of
disturbance, internecine conflict, or chaos; such characterisation was variously
self-serving and endured for well over two centuries.247
241 Sood, Islamic Heartlands, 7.

242 Alam, Crisis, 58; Faruqui, ‘Hyderabad’.
243 Wink, Land and Sovereignty, 28.
244 Ibid, 154.
245 See, for instance: Alam, ‘Eastern India’; Alam, Crisis, 247–55.
246 Alavi, ed., Eighteenth-Century; Marshall, ed., Eighteenth Century, both offer excellent guides
to the changing historiography.
247 Writers in each group peddled this line for their own reasons, to justify the colonial takeover,
it turns out in the latter case; see: Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, for a rich guide
to Mughal historiography.
The successor state system described in this section was recognised as competitive, but the
revisionists tried to highlight the containment of ‘internecine conflict’. See, for a sense of pol-
itical relations between Awadh and its local and regional rivals, as but one example: Alam,
Crisis, 262–78.
320 The State
Alam, Wink, C.A. Bayly, and countless others in their wake paint a more
optimistic picture. To do so, they make two manoeuvres. First: shifting
their attention away from the Mughal centre and instead closely exam-
ining the political economy of particular eighteenth-century Indian states.
Second: pinpointing pockets of localised prosperity and episodes of growth –
linked to ongoing commercialisation, the spread of the cash nexus, and trade at
various scales, as well as developments in revenue administration –rather than
widespread and protracted economic malaise. By the same turn, however, their
work highlights that patchiness and a lack of consistency were also character-
istic of the late- (or post-) Mughal economy. Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1739
and Ahmad Shah Durrani’s successive campaigns interrupted economic life,
for instance, but the worst effects were felt largely in Punjab and Hindustan,
and even there recovery was quick.248 Punjab might have been caught in the
cross-fire between the Mughals, Afghans, and Sikhs, but the establishment of
Afghan rule in the western part of the province seems to have contributed to
a stabilisation and even expansion of commercial activity from about the mid-
century.249 Bengal and Rajasthan seem to have enjoyed a period of growth in
the first-half of the eighteenth century, but this belies the shifting distribution
of economic activity in response to such factors as environmental change (e.g.,
the movement of riverbeds) or the expansion or collapse of local states and
systems of patronage, resulting in the migration of field labourers and eco-
nomic specialists (e.g., bankers, merchants, artisans) from less to more pros-
perous centres within these same regions.250
Mughal sovereignty did not deny so much as shade the sovereignty of lesser
kings under the umbrella of its ‘paramountcy’ (to borrow a term from the pol-
itical lexicon of colonial India).251 Those dynasts whose homelands had been
designated as watan jagirs by the Mughal padshahs hence did not carve out
new states –as in Bengal, Awadh, or Hyderabad –but simply reasserted their
autonomy, renegotiated their obligations, and redirected their loyalties vis-à-
vis the imperial centre. Major Rajput kingdoms of long-standing –such as
Marwar, Mewar, and Amber –belong in this category, but so, too, do several
newer principalities. As military contractors and servicemen were rewarded with
jagirs or else ‘ploughed back the proceeds of imperial service and temporary
jagirdari holdings into their home territories, acquiring zamindari holding by
grant, conquest, or colonisation of waste’, so ‘the Bhumihars of Banaras, the
Bais of central Awadh, and the Rohillas in Kutheir and Farrukhabad’ created
or extended their own compact principalities and centres of more or less inde-
pendent political authority.252 As in the Ottoman Empire, where arriviste
248 Marshall, ed., Eighteenth Century, here 14, and 13–19, for a useful overview of regional eco-
nomic trends.
250 See, for instance: Sethia, Rajput Polity; Rao, Rural Economy.
251 See, also: Sood, ‘Mughal Paramountcy’.
252 Bayly, ‘Epilogue’, 168, for citation. See, also: Gommans, Indo-Afghan, 104–59.
The State 321
rulers modelled themselves after the large Ottoman households and were
comparatively more deferential to the centre, these Indian states mimicked
the mansabdari-jagirdari military-fiscal apparatus of the seventeenth-century
Mughal Empire, while also adapting its court rituals, symbols, and artistic and
architectural styles (§9.3).253 A number of these states and their rulers had deep
local roots, whether in terms of landowning or other sources of lordship –such
as being lineage heads –as well as shared ethnic ties with the wider commu-
nity.254 Some were elevated to the imperial nobility (like the al-ʿAẓm family in
Ottoman Syria), but the old imperial centres failed to incorporate others to
their detriment, the Marathas being a stand-out example.255
Aurangzeb’s failure to bring Shivaji into the fold notwithstanding, Wink
identifies three continuities between the Maratha polity and its Mughal prede-
cessor. These demonstrate how the ‘Marathas and other gentry groups’ (e.g.,
the Bundelas, Bhumihars, Jats, Rajputs, and Sikhs), ‘seem to have benefitted
from an enduring Mughal overlordship in a variety of ways, rising to prosperity
with it and gathering strength from it so as to be able to eventually create rival
foci of autonomous power with close links to agrarian society.’256 The second
was in the appropriation of political and administrative terminology and
practices; the usurpers, in other words, could erect their authority upon effect-
ively functioning institutions honed by a succession of Indo-Muslim states.257
Having moved into the space vacated by the Deccan Sultanates, and with the
founder’s origins in Deccani state service, the early Maratha polity was a nat-
ural part of the Indo-Islamicate world and the repertoire of techniques and
institutions available to its rulers, even if Hindu nationalist writers have taken
great pains to present Maratha rule as Hindu and ‘indigenous’ (whatever that
means).258 Maratha expansion into the former Mughal domains of Khandesh,
Gujarat, and Malwa, likewise, led not to a wholesale change in administrative
forms, for Stewart Gordon reminds us that ‘the terms of reference remained
severely Mughal’, with the Marathas even retaining Mughal fiscal practices
and precedents (e.g., charging Hindu traders double their Muslim counterparts
or never making a revenue demand of cultivators more than twice what the
Mughals had asked).259 The Marathas directly contested Mughal authority,
but nonetheless appropriated aspects of the Mughal state apparatus –all the
way down to the operation of courts and rural and urban policing, in fact.
The Sikhs, likewise, developed their own community institutions and opposed
Mughal authority even as they continued to use Mughal administrative
253 Khoury, ‘Ottoman Centre’.

255 Gordon, Marathas, 70–72, 77–79.
256 Ibid, 7, for citation, and 57–66, for a detailed account of this process.
257 Ibid, 7.
258 See: Gordon, Marathas, especially 80–81 and 178–81, for explicit statements of how (not)
to characterise the Maratha state in light of much work that tries to paint them as ‘proto-
nationalist’ or as an ‘indigenous empire’, as well as other, older clichés in the historiography.
259 Gordon, Marathas, 143–44.
322 The State
structures, practices, and technologies –including the dispensation of sharia

justice or the use of Persian.260
Third and finally, and despite their opposition to the Mughals, the Marathas
posed ‘as the servants of the Mughal emperor’.261 They commonly described
their other rivals’ actions as fitva, some of whom were (nominal) Mughal
mansabdars, to the effect that the Marathas were calling out disloyalty and sedi-
tion where they saw it (and where it was expedient for them to do so).262 This is
because sovereignty was built upon political allegiances, not merely effected by
an army or reflected in territorial possession, to the extent that Maratha sov-
ereignty was interlocked with that of the Mughals as well as countless other
major and minor potentates.263 Quite late into its existence, the rulers of the
Maratha state continued to co-operate with Delhi and accepted the protective
cover and symbolic windfall of a position under the carapace of Mughal sov-
ereignty.264 ‘Maratha fitna’, Wink argues, ‘thus left intact the fiction of Mughal
plenitude of power.’265 If part of what happened in the eighteenth century
was an involution of the Mughal state and the irruption of new powerholders
(e.g., the Marathas, Sikhs, and Afghans), then it helps to recognise the intrinsic
connection of both processes, for ‘what is called the “decline” of the Mughal
Empire is merely the other side of this process’ of fitna in the sense of securing
concessions and forming new alliances leading to the establishment of new
political centres.266 In this way, we can explain how the Mughal centre rapidly
gave way to alternate political centres over the eighteenth century yet survived
intact, albeit diminished in territorial extent and power.
Alternately, we might describe the later Mughal period as a time of
‘regional centralisation’, as Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have
it, or borrow from Ottoman history and characterise it as a time of ‘centripetal
decentralisation’, which usefully captures the continued relevance –some-
times even the political and ideological magnetism –of the historic imperial
centre.267 True, this lasting appeal of the Mughal throne was generally born of
many of the new regional rulers’ failure to emerge ‘strong enough to be able
to win the allegiance of others and then replace the imperial power.’268 True,
any centripetal pull weakened through the century, not least on account of the
destabilising effect and dent to imperial prestige caused by Nadir Shah’s inva-
sion and its aftermath. Around then, the rulers of Awadh and Hyderabad felt
260 Marshall, ed., Eighteenth Century, 6.

261 Wink, Land and Sovereignty, 33, for citation, and 34–51, for a detailed discussion of this
thesis.
262 Ibid, 33.
263 On the ‘king’s co-sharers’, as he terms the various local or minor holders of revenue rights
with whom Maratha sovereignty was interlocked: Wink, Land and Sovereignty, 157–292.
264 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 57–68.
265 Wink, Land and Sovereignty, 39.
266 Ibid, 154–55, for a summary of his thesis.
267 See: Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, 31, for discussion and references.
268 Alam, Crisis, 16, for citation, and also 53–55.
The State 323
it was time to sever some of their shows of fealty to the centre by ceasing to pay
tribute, this decision standing as a powerful indication of their confidence and
political independence.269 A similar change had taken place by this time else-
where, too: ‘Alivardi Khan in Bengal, the [Sikh] misl leadership in Punjab, Ali
Muhammad Khan in Rohilkhand, and the Peshwa Baji Rao in his Maratha
territory were all busy consolidating their holdings’, to the extent that a shift in
relations with the centre was palpable.270 Yet, despite all this, relations were not
severed entirely. For instance, Hyderabad’s rulers lost little from maintaining
a link to the centre, gained by remaining part of a prestigious cultural milieu,
and were distant enough that hardly anything was expected in return, while
Awadh’s rulers benefitted from the opportunities for alliance making.271 The
Mughal centre had been the safest bet when they needed to legitimise their
spoils –but, long after that, it remained intact and not supplanted so much as
slightly marginalised.
Many of the new polities arising from the dereliction of the Mughal
imperium can thus be called ‘successor states’. The value of this concept
becomes clearer when considering the Durrani Empire –an eighteenth-
century state formed by ‘outsiders’ to the Mughal system (Pashtun tribesmen),
located beyond the imperial core (in the Safavid-Mughal borderlands), and
whose leader (Ahmad Shah) even sacked the imperial capital and extracted
the Mughal centre’s acceptance of his suzerainty in 1757. At its height, the
Durrani imperium extended from eastern Iran, across Afghanistan, and over
Punjab and Sindh. Its ruler espoused a universalism that imitated Mughal
imperial ideology of the seventeenth century (§7.4), but direct control was,
in reality, combined with tributary relations to yield a fairly lumpy topog-
raphy of power, much like sixteenth-century Kotte and numerous other early
modern ‘empires’.272 Its origins have been linked to tribal breakout (§1.3.3),
which involved the uprising by Afghans of the Hotaki tribe who toppled the
Safavid centre and ruled ineffectively for some years until Nadir Shah was able
to seize power, install a Safavid descendant as a puppet, and form an alliance
with the Pashtun tribal leader, Ahmad Shah –whose own grouping were the
regional rivals of the Hotakis –to snuff out the last vestiges of the threat
from the Iranian frontier, before advancing into north India in 1739. In fact,
Ahmad Shah Durrani’s political career after Nadir Shah Afshar’s death has
been called a ‘second tribal breakout’, because it was predicated on a major
alliance of Pashtun tribes struck in 1747, and has been arranged alongside the
Afsharids (Nadir Shah’s short-lived dynasty) and the Zands as tribal confeder-
acies reflecting a final kind of eighteenth-century regime in Islamicate Asia.273
269 Faruqui, ‘Hyderabad’, 18, which spells out how and why this process unfolded differently in
these satrapies, and passim, for analysis.
270 Alavi, ‘Introduction’, 21–22.
271 Abbott, ‘Mulk’, 485, which neatly summarises ideas posited by Munis Faruqui and
Muzaffar Alam.
272 Biedermann et al, Global Gifts, 90.
273 See: Sood, Islamic Heartlands, 10–11, for the comparative angle.
324 The State
Yet, this characterisation is flawed in two respects.274 In the first place, it

ignores the deep embeddedness of the Durrani enterprise within north India,
for Ahmad Shah’s nativity was in Punjab and thus he had familial connections
to the area around Multan, not to mention with those Afghan pastoralists,
mercenaries, and merchants who plied the networks of caravan trade between
north India, Afghanistan, central Asia, and the frontiers of the Romanov and
Qing empires. In addition, he had the support of Indian magnates and Mughal
political elites, who effectively invited him to challenge Mughal authority,
much as Punjab’s elites had invited Babur to contest Lodi rule over two cen-
turies prior. Its origins may have lain at the tribal frontier, yet, secondly, the
outcome was very much a state resembling its Mughal predecessor, not least
in terms of the patronage of literary, legal, and religious specialists as part of
the creation of an Indo-Islamicate polity. Unlike the Wahhabiya, a roughly
contemporaneous regime in central Arabia ‘based on tribal solidarity and reli-
gious fervour,’ and ‘aggressively opposed to the Ottoman empire and its dyn-
asty’, the Durranis portrayed their campaigns as a jihad in the sense of morally
reviving what had been lost by the corruption or ruination apparent in the late
Mughal state, but were not anti-Mughal as such (§6.3.1).275
7.5 Conclusion
To conclude, it is worth teasing out one of the threads woven through the pre-
sent and previous chapters on the sources and exercise of temporal power, not
least because of its bearing on the exploration of kingship that follows. Through
each of these chapters, we can see the shadow cast by Turko-Mongolic empire,
whether in the form of institutional precedent, a shared heritage or ‘imperial
repertoire’, or the more exclusive preserve of a dynastic connection to Chinggis
Khan and Timur.276 But how was ‘Turko-Mongol’ understood by contem-
poraries and what valence did it hold for them? Ali Anooshahr examines
these issues by focusing on sources penned by sixteenth-century Persian(ate)
litterateurs, some in the service of newly-established imperial patrons and each
in pursuit of an agenda.277 ‘Persian historical narratives’, he stresses, funda-
mentally ‘reified and attempted to construct stable categories such as “kings,”
“dynasties,” and the “foundation of a state” out of chaotic military-political
events’, thereby refashioning ghazis and warrior bands into ‘founders’ and
‘warrior kings’.278
274 The discussion here draws on: Lally, ‘Beyond “Tribal Breakout” ’.
275 Sood, Islamic Heartlands, 11, for citation. Ahmad Shah Durrani’s official history presented
the Mughal ‘saltanat’s “traditions, institutes, and regulations” (aʾin wa qawaʾid wa qawanin),
established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by “the great emperors” (badshahan-i
ʿumda),’ as having ‘now “gone to ruin” (barham khwurda)’, necessitating Durrani salvation –
Abbott, ‘Mulk’, 479.
276 The phrase ‘imperial repertoire’ owes to Burbank and Cooper, Empires, 3.
277 Anooshahr, Turkestan.
278 Ibid, 3.
The State 325
An examination of Mughal as well as Ottoman and Safavid works, and

even those produced for Shibanid and Mongol rulers within central Asia,
‘shows how Turko-Mongol origins had to be constructed or modified even
in Turkestan, the alleged Urheimat of these war bands-cum-dynasties.’279 At
stake is not whether Turko-Mongolic institutions actually formed a precedent
drawn upon by imperial dynasts –for their forms were doubtless influential –
but the fact that the explicit expression of Turko-Mongolic or Turkic heritage,
and connection to Turkestan and central Asia, were among a range of literary
tropes placed in the service of ‘aristocratic lineages in need of a proper family
tree, cultural significance, and overall legitimation for their newfound power.’280
This process arguably reached back to Timur’s reign, for he balanced ruling in
the name of Chinggis’ descendants, thereby accessing the lineage’s legitimacy
and charismatic authority, with the steady ‘Persianisation’ of royal authority, a
move intended to counter the charge that the Chinggisids were infidels who –
failing to convert to Islam –had allowed Buddhism, Christianity, and sha-
manism to flourish.281
The Ottomans sometimes drew deeper connection with their Turkic heritage,
often during times of political precarity, as we shall see in the next chapter, at
other times drawing glory and grandeur from connection to non-Turkic empires
ruling over Asia Minor.282 The Shibanids, meanwhile, possessed Chingissid
descent and had defeated the Timurids to lay claim over Transoxiana around
1500. Yet, they were eager to disassociate themselves from their image as unciv-
ilised barbarians and their realm as devoid of good government –that is, to
shed those negative qualities associated with their ‘pagan’ Turko-Mongol heri-
tage. To do so, the jurist and historian, Fazl Allah b. Ruzbihan Khunji Isfahani,
authored the Mihmannamah-i Bukhara (‘The Bukharan Guestbook’), in which
he transferred all these qualities onto the Shibanids’ Kazakh neighbours and
rivals. At the same time, he made explicit the Shibanids’ royal and Islamic
credentials to win the favour of their new (Muslim) subjects and painted the
Shibanid domains as a paradise of plenty, civility, and good government.283
Another key text was the work of a prince ejected from Inner Asia and forced
to restore his dignity in India –the Tarikh-i Rashidi of Mirza Haydar Dughlat.
Here, too, Anooshahr finds that Turko-Mongolic origin and identity ‘always
deferred to another place, to another people, or to another time’, because it
could be at once ‘a source of pride and nostalgia as well as horror and embar-
rassment’, both in central Asia and somewhere like India.284
All this points not only to the inherent instability and pliability of Turko-
Mongol and Turkestan as concepts, but also to a critically important process
279 Ibid, 2.
280 Ibid, 2.
281 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 25–26.
282 Anooshahr, Turkestan, 28–50.
283 Ibid, 86, and 85–109 for the supporting analysis.
284 Ibid, citations respectively on 114 and 135.
326 The State
of reinventing identities and origins toward the more appealing or persuasive

expression of political authority, whether in the phase of establishing, con-
solidating, or shoring up –and even to contest –the power of a ruling regime.
In a way, this returns us to where we started our examination of power: Ibn
Khaldun’s cyclical theory of rough-edged conquistadores and their inevitable
self-refashioning in the mould of urban royalty.285 Taking a broader horizon,
we may even be tempted to see the sequence of states from the Delhi Sultanates
and the Vijayanagara Empire, through their successors to the eventual engulfing
by the Mughal Empire, and the latter’s own shattering into successor states, as
a repeated playing out of the Ibn Khaldunian political cycle, particularly once
we overlay the distinct ecological zones –the arid and wet –onto the pared
back world of rural civilisation versus the sophisticated complexity of urban
civilisation at the heart of his synthesis.286
Cyclical theories seem even more plausible in light of Victor Lieberman’s
grand comparison of a sequence of roughly synchronous political cycles or
phases over mainland southeast Asia, France, Russia, and Japan in the millen-
nium from c. 800.287 Each cycle was characterised not by a repeat of what came
before, but by a strengthening of the state, so that a plethora of small and fairly
loose entities gave way to successively larger, more centralised, and better-
integrated states, while the period of transition between cycles shortened from
one to the next. Episodes of climatic change (both warming and cooling), the
introduction of new crops and cultivars as well as overall agrarian expansion
and its side-effects (e.g., environmental degradation), commercialisation linked
to trade, and the unequal advantage accruing to those able to harness new mili-
tary technologies all feature in Lieberman’s explanation of these cycles, much
as they have in the present and previous chapters.288
Whether these ideas can help better understand Indian states and empires in
the longue durée, and their implications for early modernity as a useful concept
(or not), deserve more careful attention.289 Among the draws of Lieberman’s
285 Cyclical theories of various sorts were prevalent in the medieval Islamic world as thinkers
sought to explain dynastic change; see: Anooshahr, Ghazi Sultans, 100–17.
286 C.f. Fischel in Local States, who emphasises that the early modern south followed ‘the
opposite historical trajectories in comparison with north India’ (239) when it came to the
evolution of the state, preferring the idea of the mirror image to the prospect that the political
cycle might have been out of sync.
287 These polities were in the so-called ‘protected zone’, whereas India and China belong in what
Lieberman calls the ‘exposed zone’ (exposed, it should be noted, to frontier warriors), such
that the character of cycles in the latter regions differ somewhat from the former. India was
precocious (like China, and relative to the ‘protected zone’), in the sense that state-formation
advanced more quickly, but less stable. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii.
288 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, e.g., 248–58, but see also the references throughout
Chapters 4–6 of this book. Lieberman is also attentive to cultural consolidation in the making
of successively stronger states, evidence of which is examined in Chapter 9 of this book.
289 Lieberman turns his attention to south Asia in Strange Parallels, vol. ii. Lieberman’s thesis has
been applauded and critiqued in almost equal measure; for the pitfalls identified by a historian
of early modern India: Sreenivasan, ‘Response’.
The State 327
empirical synthesis is that each cycle is not merely a reversion or re-enactment;

rather, states become more culturally, socially, and economically integrated,
more administratively centralised, and yet much larger in extent in each phase.
Application of Ibn Khaldun’s thesis, however, has the tendency to reduce polit-
ical change to an inevitable ‘rise’, ‘fall’, and repeat.290 One problem is the notion
of ‘decline’, which has been especially unpalatable to modern historians of the
Mughal and other Asian empires for reeking of Orientalism and the allied
notions of Muslim dynastic states as Oriental despotisms, their supposed moral
and political corruption, and their ultimate stagnation.291 Knowledgeable of
Ibn Khaldun’s thesis, Ottoman and Mughal dynasts and their writers –wary
of imperial decline being seen as inevitable –in fact modulated his ideas as they
presented their own histories.292
Yet, it may be productive to read his thesis and later Muslim historians’
engagements with it not primarily as an empirical work, but as a form of rhet-
oric, for this reveals the value of cyclical theories and rise and fall narratives
to imperial dynasts as they attempted to write themselves into the historical
record and legitimise their authority. Thus, we find portrayal of conquest as a
crusade for righteousness or jihad, or of the conqueror as a ghazi or saviour
of the people from the moral corruption of existing rulers, but also discourses
of civilisation brought by imperial rule in its maturity.293 None of these
formulations were unique to the Muslim world: the last, for instance, finds a
parallel in Hinduised notions of universal monarchy that speak of erstwhile
barbarians becoming civilised (by their Sankritisation), whose imprint can be
traced well beyond India to southeast Asia.294
Our understanding of the Mughal state has gradually been enriched by
innovations in how power is conceptualised. Older works remain valuable even
if the consensus has shifted. Although foundational to the modern study of the
Mughal Empire, a chief problem of Marxist economic analyses derives from
their structural-functionalist character. The proponents of such approaches
felt it necessary to first build up a portrait of the state and its institutions
(e.g., the mansabdari-jagirdari system), often by using the words of some of
the state’s own architects as well as ideologues at the Mughal centre, before
confronting the supposedly inevitable deviation from this ideal type. The result
was to overdetermine ‘crisis’, whether by relying on imperial sources or by those
penned by outsiders with their own axes to grind or preconceptions to offload,
290 Relatedly, see: Alavi, ‘Introduction’, 7, for an assessment of J.C. Heesterman’s ideas about
cycles.
291 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’.
292 Wink, ‘Post-Nomadic Empires’.
293 On the civilising process, we have Gomman’s thesis, inspired by Norbert Elias, whereby ghazis
were transformed into mirzas in Mughal literary production, as described in the previous
chapter. But see, also: Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 56 and n.3, for the grains of an idea about
the civilising influence of the ‘Timurid cultural renaissance’ and contemporaries’ awareness of
it. Babur’s sense of his rule, as a Timurid, as a gift to Hindustan comes to mind.
294 Scott, Art, 99, 111–13.
328 The State
something revisionist historians of the Ottoman post-classical age have also

perceived and to which they have drawn our attention as part of the reframing
of the long Ottoman ‘decline’.295 The approach taken by Marxist-structuralist
historians also gives credence to a rise-and-decline model of empire, for periods
of expansion and institutional development and consolidation reach a climax
or turning point ahead of inevitable collapse. Such an approach has, in hind-
sight, also been too narrow, overlooking the social and cultural history of the
institutions under the spotlight (e.g., the bureaucracy), or else marginalised
the importance of what might be classified not as institutions in the sense of
structures so much as practices (e.g., peripateticism, rituals of incorporation).
Against the image of the Mughal state as a leviathan, more recent work has
seen Mughal sovereignty as layered and stacked, political authority as spa-
tially lumpy, and power as both diffuse yet fissiparous.296 The padshah did not
eradicate lesser kings, but merely presided over them, while also permitting –
sometimes by virtue of being powerless to stop –the steady subinfeudation of
the realm and the creation of new zamindaris. The centre was not always able
to impose its will, but instead bargained and negotiated with actors, some of
whom held the power to contest its authority. Its presence was not only met
in the person of the mansabdar or at the end of his sword, but, more often, in
the writ of the law and the office of the qazi. All this meant that the existence
of a large and growing number of powerholders ready to renegotiate rights
or contest central control but, equally, equipped to stand up for their king,
as Shahjahanabadis did in 1739. At the same time, it provided arriviste rulers
and more established powers with a set of royal, military, and bureaucratic
institutions, practices, and vocabularies through which to build their own
successor states. In fact, long after the Mughal state and its successors had
been swept away by the British, the appeal of the Mughal idiom of royalty
remained strong, and so it is to kingship that the next chapter turns.
295 Hathaway, ‘Problems’.

296 Aside from vertical stacking, Zoltàn Biedermann’s study of Iberian and south Asian regimes
has yielded the ‘Matrioshka principle’, which may prove useful to Indian historians thinking
about the relationship of the Mughal centre to other ‘imperial’ polities –such as the Maratha
and Company states –in the eighteenth century: (Dis)Connected Empires, especially 28–
30, 89–90.
8 Kingship
Upon founding India’s state-owned international carrier in the 1950s, the gov-
ernment went on the lookout for a logo that would capture the essence of India.
In the end, they chose not the chakra (wheel) emblazoned on the national flag,
or an iconic beast such as the tiger or sacred cow, but a moustachioed, tur-
baned king performing his salaam. In one sense, this was deeply ironic, for
India’s kings had been pensioned off between 1947 and 1949, and at odds with
the egalitarian spirit that impelled the absorption of the erstwhile ‘princely
states’ –many of them post-Mughal successor states –into the secular and
socialist new Republic. It also made perfect sense, however: Air India was to
be the airline ‘that treats you like a maharaja’, and the maharaja had become a
recognisable part of the image of India overseas.1
Some might be tempted to link kings and kingship with India’s ancient
past, turning for support to the Mahabharata and Ramayana, India’s greatest
literary epics. Scions of India’s erstwhile royal houses have, for their part,
presented their kingdoms and much of their court culture as both antique and
very much a product of their locality, not least because of the growing appetite
for heritage tourism in the present day. That is often a deliberate conceit, how-
ever.2 For much of what is recognisable as Indian royal tradition –the arche-
typal (or stereotypical?) moustachioed maharaja included –is the product of
an amalgam of influences, local yet also ‘global’, and often forged only a few
centuries prior. How, we might thus ask, did Indian kingly presentation evolve
in the early modern period?
Akbar’s reign was almost exactly coterminous with the Tudor monarch,
Elizabeth I. His predecessors on the world stage included the Holy Roman
Emperor, Charles V (r. 1519– 56), and the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman ‘the
Magnificent’ (r. 1520–66). The Mughal classical age overlapped with the Safavid
efflorescence during Shah Abbas I’s four decades on the throne (r. 1588–1629),
1 Copland, Princes, 1.
2 To reveal this conceit necessitates studying courts and courtliness, which, Emma Flatt argues,
was consciously neglected until recently: Living Well, 10–15, and passim for a study rooted in the
Deccan sultanates.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-8
330 Kingship
the transition from Ming to Qing rule over China, and the reign of Louis XIV
in France (r. 1643–1715). This cursory sketch of the broader canvas of kingly
authority in the early modern world is a reminder that an analysis of Indian
kingship ought telescope between its local and global contexts, for the world –
and thus its political centres –were in increasing contact with one another, with
significant implications for how monarchs sought to project their power. At the
same time, the presentation of each of these monarchs was also historically-
reflexive, looking back to create something new and powerful in the present, while
roving between the realm of the temporal prince and the divine or otherworldly.
Take, for example, Louis XIV. Born after his mother suffered a sequence of
stillbirths in 1638, Le Roi Soleil (the Sun King) was considered divine, his very
birth a miracle. By the time of his death, Louis’ kingship had been performed
through court ritual and portrayed largely in majesty or at war in painting,
public sculpture, theatre, dance, and music in which he was variously cast –if
not in his own human form –as the Sun or Apollo, as Alexander the Great or
Hercules, prompting the statement that his reign had been a grande spectacle. ‘A
centralised state’, Peter Burke writes in his now-seminal study of the Sun King,
‘needs a symbol of centrality’. And therein lay the importance of presenting the
king and his court as a ‘sacred or “exemplary” centre for the rest of the state.’3
The result was that the king and his courtiers carefully ‘fabricated’ the ‘sym-
bolic construction of royal authority’ supporting the wider political projects
of Louis’ reign, namely, the growth and centralisation of royal power. We need
not doubt that the king and his contemporaries believed in this fabrication;
most of his subjects, after all, held him to be a sacred figure, his very touch
thought capable of healing sufferers of skin diseases.4 Although he was widely
held to be a charismatic figure, his charisma nevertheless ‘required constant
renewal’; this ‘was the essential aim of the presentation of Louis, on his stage
at Versailles, as it was the aim of the re-presentation of the king in the media
of representation.’5 Yet, for all those who found in this image of royal power
something compelling, or else obeyed their princes, ‘there were the observers,
moralists and satirists who viewed the glorification of the king as essentially a
trick played on the public by cynical and time-serving flatterers’ who sought to
distract the king’s subjects from politics.6
This chapter is about kingship in these senses of the symbolic construction
of sovereign authority, the (re)presentation of royalty, and thus the ideology
and image of monarchy. These concerns have steadily developed in the Mughal
historiography thanks to the work of art historians, those attentive to material
remains, and those expert in numerous languages capable of reading not only
court chronicles, but also the writings of Sanskrit intellectuals and treatises by
or about Sufi mystics, for instance. Burke’s examination of the fabrication of
3 Burke, Fabrication, 11.

4 Ibid, 11.
5 Ibid, 11.
6 Ibid, 6.
Kingship 331
Louis XIV’s royal power pinpoints and defines a set of issues, a few of which
have been addressed directly in the growing body of work on Mughal kingship,
others more implicitly.7 How –that is, through what media, means, and with
reference to which ideas or concepts –was the king’s authority fabricated? Who
constituted the ‘public’ or audience to kingly (re)presentations, whose opinion
was being moulded or manipulated? How were such opinions reinforced over
the course of the king’s reign, in which his glory was inevitably punctured by
episodic defeat or failure? How were they reconstituted or transformed during
transfers of power from one monarch to his successor? How was criticism of
kingly authority voiced, by whom, and for what purposes?
Timur’s larger legacy included a new, performative kind of kingship that
his successors and their rivals readily engaged with, so it was fairly natural
that the Mughal dynasty would not only make use of their lineage, but also
(re-)affirm their charisma and articulate their kingly legitimacy through those
modes given greater significance by their ancestor himself. Their genealogy
was a potential goldmine, therefore, but also a burden and a noose, and so
the first section of this chapter scrutinises how, when, and for whom looking
back to the Mughals’ prodigious descent from world conquerors served as a
source of legitimacy and charisma. The second section shifts focus to the Indic
context, looking at how Mughal kingship was fabricated from ideas, motifs,
traditions, and rituals from within India or the larger Perso-Islamicate world
of which it was part, whether the patronage of ‘Indian’ Sufi lineages or engage-
ment with Hindu ideas of veneration, for instance. The result –whether new
forms of architecture or portraiture, or new court rituals –was something
identifiable in existing traditions yet novel in its concoction. The third section
looks not to the past, but to the future, linking eschatological currents to the
construction of sacred kingship and developing concepts of universal sover-
eignty. By considering the globe –as object and metaphor –in Tudor and
Mughal painting, the fourth section pans out to consider the (re)presentation
of Mughal universalism in the global arena.
8.1 Sahib Qiran-i Sani (Second Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction):

The Timuird Inheritance
Victorious over the Lodi forces at Panipat on April 20, 1526, Babur proceeded
to Delhi where he first paid ‘homage at the tombs, gardens, walled suburbs,
and mosques of Delhi’s important kings,’ essentially ‘retracing his ancestor
Timur’s steps after the conquest of Delhi in 1398.’8 Babur was, lest we forget,
a Chaghatai-Turkic prince, being an agnate of Timur and of cognatic descent
7 Taking similar inspiration from Burke’s approach is a recent history of Selim’s kingly image as
created (mostly posthumously) by later Ottoman writers; see: Çipa, Making of Selim, especially
111–250.
8 Asher and Talbot, India, 118–19. See, also: Koch, Collected Essays, 164–82, on the Mughals’
visits to Delhi from Babur’s tour de ville to the construction of Shahjahanabad.
332 Kingship
Humayun Feasting in a Garden Pavilion (watercolour and gold; Mughal

Fig. 8A
artists; c. 1550s with later additions)
CPA Media Pte Ltd /Alamy Stock Photo
from Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. Babur and his comrades were traumatised by
their forced exile from their native Tranosoxiana, Lisa Balabanlilar argues, and
thus set about reifying Timurid courtly identity in north India to counter their
sense of loss.9 To commemorate his victory over the Lodis, Babur ordered the
construction of the Kabuli Bagh Mosque at Panipat, built 1527–28. A mosque
closer in style to those in Timurid Samarkand than those of north India –and
9 Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity, 18–70 being especially relevant to the present discussion.
Kingship 333
completed with a chahar-bagh, among the first of many the Mughals and their
nobles would lay out –this project also announced his Timurid credentials.10
Much as Versailles and its gardens were a stage for Louis XIV’s kingship,
so Persianate chahar-baghs served a similar role for Timur and his successors.
These were gardens of fruit trees, sweet-smelling flowers, and herbs, often
divided into four quadrants separated by water channels.11 They grew in popu-
larity in the Timurid heartlands in Iran and central Asia, where they served not
only as spaces for sensuality and courtly pleasure, but also as the backdrop for
the performance of Timurid kingship. It was in such surrounds that Timur held
social gatherings (majalis) and granted audience to figures like Ruy Gonzales
de Clavijo, the Portuguese ambassador.12 It was in such surrounds that Babur
and his descendants would likewise perform their kingly selves. Babur, in fact,
ordered Persianate chahar-baghs to be laid out in Agra and Dholpur not long
after his conquest.13 His son and successor, Humayun, can be seen feasting in
a garden pavilion surrounded by courtiers and his own successors –Akbar,
Jahangir, Shah Jahan. The incorporation of these figures into the painting
(Fig. 8A) long after its initial production also testifies to the power of visual
representations of genealogy (described, below).
As the primary heirs of the Timurid legacy in Eurasia at large, and with
their legitimacy being partly derived from Timurid referents, the Mughals
inaugurated a Timurid renaissance on the Indian subcontinent.14 To appre-
ciate the magnetism of association with Timur is to reckon with the power of
those concepts that steadily encrusted upon the image and discourse about
the world-conquering king. When constructing his own charismatic authority,
Timur melded ‘Turko-Mongolian conceptions of authority based on charisma
(qul) and Perso-Islamic notions of royal glory (farr), good fortune (daulat,
baxt), and manifest destiny (maqdur)’.15 The great conjunction of Jupiter with
other planets was already observed and granted cosmic significance in pre-
Islamic Iran, gradually becoming associated with the Persian heroes of popular
literary tales before Timur’s lifetime, who were described as the sahib qiran or
Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction. Timur appropriated such folkloric asso-
ciations but also cultivated a direct astrological claim to the title, for his birth

11 The Timruid-style or Persianate garden ought not be reduced to the chahar-bagh alone, how-
ever, for this ignores the relationship of the four-quadrant space to other gardened landscapes
as well as variants on the strict four-quadrant model itself. Nor ought the chahar-bagh be
conflated with the mythical ‘Islamic garden’ or ‘Paradise garden’, for a wide range of layouts
and designs abounded across the Islamicate world. See: Petruccioli, ed., Gardens, for such cri-
tique that also valuably sets Mughal gardens in a larger context. It also contains a translation
of a rare Mughal gardening manual.
12 Balabanlilar, ‘Lords’, 31; Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity, 75–84.
13 Maurya, ‘Srinagar’, 375–77. On the influence of Safavid and Mughal gardens upon those laid
out by sub-imperial officers, in turn, see: Rehman, ‘Garden of Nobility’.
14 Dale, ‘Legacy’.
15 Chann, ‘Auspicious Conjunction’, 98.
334 Kingship
date was commonly divined to have coincided with the conjunction of Jupiter
and Mars.16 After his death, use of the title grew –and not only among his
heirs, for the Timurid imperial project had defined kingship across Islamicate
Eurasia –even as a different conjunction began to hold especial power.17
Especially momentous was the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, the two
most distant planets visible to the naked eye; it was calculated to occur only
every 960 years. Though an astrological divination, it became a marker of
historical time for some Muslims because of its gradual association with the
supposed waning of Islam toward the end of its first millennium. The figure
of the sahib qiran thus dovetailed with the mahdi (messiah) and mujaddid
(renewer) as a saviour, someone who would transform the global temporal-
political order, and thus someone whose appearance was perpetually awaited
by Muslims (§3.3.5). A saviour could come in any number of guises: the title
could be claimed by any individual, bestowed upon a fortunate military man
or king, and contested by rivals (and their theologians).18 In this cosmically
and politically charged context, the Mughal dynasts and their courtiers did not
hold back as they drew upon Timurid imperialism and connection to Timur.
With the passing of the millennium and eschatological expectations crackling
out, the messianic current in Mughal kingly presentation was steadily dropped
(a subject to which we shall return), much as in the Ottoman case, too.19 What
remained, however, was the wider Timurid repertoire of kingly authority. Thus,
Timur’s ceremonial title –sahib qiran –was transferred to the incumbent of the
Mughal throne and used ever more widely, either by obsequious flatterers or the
emperors themselves. A courtier named Maktub Khan called Jahangir a second
Timur in a chronogram to mark his accession in 1605, for instance, an expres-
sion that delighted the new emperor, while Shah Jahan inscribed all his coinage
with sahib qiran-i sani (Second Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction) upon his
accession in 1627, thereby fixing a link to Timurid charisma.20
All this suggests a steady and subtly changing engagement with Timurid
concepts and Timurid ancestry. At the outset of Mughal rule, it bears
remembering, the Timurid inheritance was a double-edged sword: terrifying
to Indians with received memories of Timur’s conquests but awe-inspiring to
others, the source of his apparent supernaturalism or superhumanism.21 In
south India, sheltered from the worst upheaval attending Timur’s invasion,
the Bahmani sultans capitulated to Timur and sought his ‘certification’ of
16 Ibid, here 93–99.

17 Moin, Millennial, 27–55. See, also: Quinn, ‘Timurid Historiographical Legacy’.
18 Moin, Millennial, 29–31, 48–49.
19 See: Menchinger, ‘Dreams’.
20 Balabanlilar, ‘Lords’, 7. Akbar hardly used the title, Jahangir but little, while Shah Jahan made
full use of it: Chann, ‘Auspicious Conjunction’, 105–06.
21 Anooshahr, Ghazi Sultans, 38–57, has lately drawn attention to Babur’s ‘disclaiming’ of the
Timurid inheritance in this context, favouring association with Sunni powers of high prestige,
something also described in the next section of this chapter. See, also: Wink, Indo-Islamic
World, 143–44.
Kingship 335
their rule. Thanks to the patronage of Persian(ised) ghariban like Muhammad

Gawan, furthermore, a Persianate Timurid-style court came wholesale into
being, later replicated by the post-Bahmani successor states.22 In north India,
which had felt the brunt of Timur’s invasion, things were a little different. Only
when the dust had settled on Mughal conquests could the Mughal rulers derive
some of their charisma and prestige from their Timurid pedigree, although it
was never used to justify their rule.23
Aside from making use of Timur’s grand titles, not only sahib qiran but
also giti-sitan (world conqueror), how else did the Mughals inject Timur’s
charisma into their own kingly presentation? The Mughal royal libraries
housed accumulations of manuscripts that were scrutinised by successive
generations of the imperial family and their courtiers, whose annotations
and lifting of parts of the text into other works reveal how closely they
were read. A variety of literary works steadily drew dynastic connections
between the emperor –whether as the text’s author (in the case of memoirs)
or patron (chronicles, biographies, and genealogical scrolls or silsilanamas) –
and his Timurid-Chinggisid ancestry.24 Akbar, for instance, commissioned
the Chingiznama (‘History of Chinggis Khan’), an illustrated account of his
ancestor (Fig. 8B).
Akbar also commissioned the Timurnama (‘History of Timur’), which was
written in c. 1584–86 by an anonymous author and has been almost entirely
overlooked by modern historians (bar for the illustrations in the surviving
manuscript copy).25 Its significance is twofold, however. In the first place, it
linked the Mughals to Timur and helped proclaim their inauguration of a
new millennium upon the creation of a Timurid empire on the Indian sub-
continent.26 Second, it traced Akbar’s superlative lineage to Adam through
such Biblical figures as Noah, Methuselah, and Enoch, before turning to more
proximate ancestors such as Timur. It perhaps served as a prototype for Abu
al-Fazl, a high-ranking noble within Akbar’s court, who drew a similar family
tree in the Akbarnama before poring over Timur’s majesty by iterating his
various ceremonial titles.27 It bears noting that the very use of imperial memoir
as a guise for recording events reaches back to Timur himself, for biography
and genealogy were part of his innovative repertoire of kingly authority, thus
enhancing the power and pedigree of these genres, in turn.28
22 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 59–77; Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, 29–31.

23 Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 415–17.
24 To this can be added mention of more immediate forefathers (e.g., Akbar looms large in
Jahangiri texts) as well as Rajput kin and ancestors, although they are given proportionally little
attention given how much more ‘Rajput’ the dynasty was becoming generation-by-generation,
the fruit of numerous marriage alliances. See: Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 426–29.
25 Melville, ‘Akbar’s History’, for an important, new study of the latter, which is also known as
the Tarikh-i Khandan-i Timuriyya (History of the House of Timur).
26 Balabanlilar, ‘Lords’, 7. See, also: Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 418.
27 C.f. Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 420–21.
28 Lefèvre, ‘Recovering’, 458–59. See, also: Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 409–13.
336 Kingship
Fig. 8B Ancestors of Chingiz Khan at their Court, from the Chingiznama (watercolour
and gold; by the artists Basawan and Bhim; c. 1596)
Kingship 337
Today housed in Windsor Castle, in a rather different royal library from

the one in which it was initially deposited, is the only surviving contemporary
illustrated imperial copy of the Padshahnama (‘Book of the Emperor’). Its
text was written by the court historian Abdul Hamid Lahori (d. 1654), before
the accompanying pictures were produced in the imperial atelier between
1630 and 1657/8.29 Opening the book, the viewer takes in a magnificent fron-
tispiece: a portrait of Timur. On the facing leaf: Shah Jahan, emperor, patron,
and one of the protagonists of the Padshahnama. Timur seems to be passing
a Timurid crown to his descendant, whose hand is outstretched to receive
it.30 The viewer-reader is thus immediately drawn into a direct and almost
mimetic connection of the Mughal incumbent to his great ancestor, before
turning the book’s pages to read a detailed Mughal genealogy from Timur
to Shah Jahan within a work setting out the political and ideological legit-
imacy of Shah Jahan’s monarchy.31 Image here precedes text, signalling the
power of the visual and the place of visuality in the construction of Mughal
authority.32 In fact, pictorial genealogies (Fig. 8C), double-portraits of the
emperor and Timur, and group portraits featuring the scions of the Mughal
house with Timur seated centrally at their head were not uncommon outputs
of the imperial atelier, often produced as loose-leaf pictures.33 In time, the
last of these types of picture formed prototypes for the Mughals’ closest
Rajput allies, the Kacchwaha rulers of Amber, who pictorially presented
their own dynasty in this format, while something similar can even be found
in the Deccan (Fig. 8D).34
Whether in text or image, in the exercise of princely duty or the performance
of kingship, dynastic connection to venerable ancestors was thus powerful.
More than a source of legitimacy, it was the wellspring of the Mughal ruler’s
charisma and authority. Dynastic connections were rather flexible, however.
In the first place, rulers could emphasise particular connections to craft a
particular sort of authority at particular moments in their reign, something
Corinne Lefèvre highlights in her close study of Jahangir’s memoir, which she
29 Beach and Koch, eds., King of the World, 13.

30 ‘Timur’ and ‘Shah Jahan’ (watercolour and gold; unknown Mughal artist; 1650s), Padshahnama,
fol. 2 (verso) and 3 (recto), respectively, Royal Collections Trust, Windsor Castle, RCIN
1005025.d and RCIN 1005025.e, which can be viewed online. Alternately, see: Beach and Koch,
eds., King of the World, 25–27, for reproductions.
31 Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 430–36.
32 For a sense of the power of images among Mughal and Ottoman contemporaries, see, most
recently: Natif, Mughal Occidentalism; Fetvacı, Album.
33 See: Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 422–25.
34 I am indebted to Ursula Weekes for directing my attention to two such pictures from Amber,
one in the Jaipur royal collection, the other sold at auction at Sotheby’s in 2021: ‘Multi-Layered
Identities: The Reception of Mughal Paintings by the Kachhwahas of Amber-Jaipur’, paper
presented at the Royal Asiatic Society, London, 8 October 2022, and also a personal commu-
nication with the author.
338 Kingship
Genealogical Chart of Jahangir (watercolour and gold; Mughal artist,

Fig. 8C
c. 1610s–20s)
© The Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, AKM151
Kingship 339
Fig. 8D The House of Bijapur (watercolour and metallic paints; by the Deccani artists
Chand Muhammad and Kamal Muhammad, c. 1680)
340 Kingship
hails ‘a masterpiece of Late Renaissance imperial propaganda.’35 Both of the

emperor’s great ancestors were world conquerors, and his memoir, the Tuzuk-i
Jahangiri, certainly contains numerous references to Timur either in such role
or else to establish a larger connection with the house of Timur. In the early
and fragile years of his reign when we had no martial successes to speak of,
and later, too, when the shape of his career placed him closer to the scholar
than the warrior, Timur was perhaps not the predecessor with whom Jahangir
wanted to forge a close link, however. Rather, it was to Chinggis Khan that he
turned, for this ancestor was the purported author of a body of law –the tura-i
chingizi –that offered a more fitting precedent to Jahangir’s monarchy and its
concern with ethics, justice, and law.36
If Jahangir sought to foreground his Chinggisid descent for its instrumental
rewards, he simultaneously sought to distance certain figures more proximate
to himself. Despite some ‘references to Babur and Humayun’, these largely ‘per-
tain to the literary, naturalist, or bacchanalian traits of these rulers’ characters
rather than to their statecraft.’37 By contrast, ‘Akbar is often portrayed as
inspiring, assisting, and legitimising Jahangir in his handling of political affairs,’
at once giving gravitas to the latter’s own monarchical career and allowing the
new sovereign to capture part of his father’s aura.38 Beside the role of the good
king as a juridical authority and master of statecraft, Jahangir emphasised pro-
tection of his subjects and securing their prosperity. This moored his overall
vision of kingship in the norms of akhlaq literature, notably the work of Nasir
al-Din Tusi, which he studied alongside his larger interest in the natural world.39
In this presentation of his self to the world, therefore, is evidence of Jahangir’s
mooring his royal authority not so much in martial prowess and supernatural
skill on the battlefield, but in administrative talents and a commitment to schol-
arship, to the dispensation of his accumulated political and moral wisdom, and
thus, ultimately, to the exercise of just and wise kingship.40
A prodigious genealogy was flexible in another respect, for such connections
could be invented, not least by the Mughals’ rivals who had no actual claims
to such descent.41 Timur had defeated and taken captive the Ottoman sultan,
Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402), triggering the Ottoman interregnum that lasted over
35 Lefèvre, ‘Recovering’, 486.

36 Ibid, 466–67.
37 Ibid, 468–89.
38 Ibid, 468–69.
39 Ibid, 475–81.
40 Such a picture is at odds with how others portrayed him; namely, as a drunkard and addict
who had relinquished political control to his wife, Nur Jahan, and her immediate male
relatives in return for a life of sensuous pleasure. For discussion of such historiography: ibid,
453–58.
41 For a comparative analysis of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal literature of the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries broaching genealogy and those other genres, modes, or concepts
from which dynasts derived their legitimacy, see: Quinn, Persian Historiography.
Kingship 341
a decade until 1413. The Ottomans were amply aware not only of their lacking
Timurid-Chinggisid lineage, but also of the potency of the charisma deriving
from Turko-Mongolic ancestry, in general, and Timurid descent, in particular.
Times of precarity, whether in the aftermath of the interregnum or following
the late sixteenth-century reversals against the Ottoman Empire’s European
neighbours and the Safavids, prompted writers of Turkish-language works
to link the Ottoman dynasty to Oghuz Khan, the Turkic ancestor of several
‘Turko-Mongolic’ dynasties, including the Seljuqs, for the legitimacy deriving
therefrom.42 The conquests of the sixteenth century brought the Ottomans
glory and prestige, providing opportunity for writers to make bolder moves on
behalf of their patrons.43
A similar pattern is discernible in the Safavid realm. Though not possessing
Timurid descent, the Safavids from Shah Ismail I’s reign by necessity operated
within the milieu Timur bequeathed subsequent Eurasian rulers, comprising
the ideas of the sahib qiran and saviour.44 The Safavids also made use of their
Aq Qoyunlu heritage, claiming Alid descent and the messianic myth of its
association, and linked themselves to the succession of mythical and historical
great kings of the Shahnama (‘Book of Kings’), the Persian epic poem penned
by Ferdowsi (d. 1020).45 Under the pen name Khatai (The Sinner), Ismail
described himself as the reincarnation of such kings as Faridun, Khusraw,
Jamshid, and Zohak, as well as Alexander the Great; as Jesus, one of the great
Shi‘i martyrs, and as the Hidden Imam; as a master and a guide, but also as a
sinner and a slave.46 Thus, Ismail I drew Timur’s broader legacy together with
his own role as head of the Safavi Sufi order, kingly power as described in
Persian oral and literary tradition with the religious authority deriving from
ideas central to Twelver Shi‘ism.47
42 Anooshahr, Turkestan, 33–34. See, also: Menchinger, ‘Dreams’, 4–7.

43 Some, including the refugee Persian writer of the Hasht Bihisht (‘Eight Paradises’) (1506),
Idris Bitlisi, subtly remodelled what was entailed by the Ottoman dynasty’s Turkic connections,
emphasising how their ancestors had in fact reformed eruptions of uncontrolled violence into
good government, while also taking pains to link the Ottoman Empire to the larger imperial
legacy connected to Istanbul/Constantinople; for ‘Turkestan [however conceived] stood for
violent masculinity, predatory culture, pastoral economy, and dangerous intrusion’, against
which ‘ “Rum,” [Asia Minor, roughly coterminous with the former Byzantine Empire,] […]
stood for agrarian prosperity, gentle governance, mildness, and controlled military activity.’ –
Anooshahr, Turkestan, citation 32, and 28–50 for analysis.
44 As did the Ottomans, see: Flemming, Essays, 203–38.
45 The Aq Qoyunlu or White Sheep Turkmans ruled over western Asia from 1378 until they were
usurped by Shah Ismail I in 1501. They were granted lands in Anatolia by Timur from which
they had expanded by the mid-fifteenth century toward the Iranian Plateau. The maternal
grandmother of Ismail I was an Aq Qoyunlu queen, and the former had taken refuge at the Aq
Qoyunlu court. See: Dale, Muslim, 70; Moin, Millennial, 75.
46 Newman, Safavid Iran, 14, for his verses.
47 See, also: Moin, Millennial, 87–88, 92.
342 Kingship
In the face of numerous challenges, however, there was a drift away from
the constitution of Safavid kingship around Sufi leadership and Shi‘i concepts,
with a corresponding move closer toward Timurid forms of legitimacy from
Shah Abbas I’s reign in the later sixteenth century.48 More audaciously, court
historians began to write about supposed (invented?) meetings between the
world conqueror and Abbas I’s ancestors to convey the notion that Timur had
foreseen the growth of the Sufi order headed by the Safavid family in Ardabil
into an imperium with power reaching across central Eurasia. More auda-
ciously still, documentation of a waqf endowed upon forebears of the Safavid
dynasty by Timur was forged in the Safavid atelier.49 Submission of a copy to
the Mughal court via a letter to Prince Salim (later, Jahangir) at once strived
to draw a connection between the two dynasties while contesting Mughal sov-
ereignty by undermining what made it sui generis. The early shahs had drawn
on Timurid court culture as they transformed their tariqa into an imperium;
attempting to make this explicit connection to Timurid ancestry itself was
entirely novel, however.50
Such artifice does not detract from the truth of Mughal genealogy or
undermine the charisma associated with Timurid-Chinggisid descent. On the
contrary, the efforts made by the Ottoman and Safavid courts at the height
of their respective powers to establish links with Timurid kingship and its
forms of legitimacy, or else lay claim to some comparably brilliant ancestry,
suggests how vital these claims were in the competition with imperial rivals.51
Other rulers actively recognised the centrality of Timurid ancestry to Mughal
authority, referencing Timur as a gambit –‘flattery’ –in diplomatic missions.
Shah Abbas, for example, sought to ease tension over control of the border-
land by dispatching to the Mughal court a ruby originating from the treasury
of Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg, that was inscribed with his, his father’s, and
his grandfather’s names. Jahangir accepted the gift as an auspicious blessing,
then inscribing his own genealogy upon the gem, before presenting it to his
son, Khurram (later, the emperor Shah Jahan).52 There was an even wider
awareness of the centrality of Timurid ancestry to Mughal authority, further-
more, for the Portuguese offered Jahangir a portrait of Timur claimed to have
been painted during the Ottoman interregnum by a Byzantine artist (a claim
Jahangir doubted, incidentally).53 And, finally, the sultans of Aceh were so
impressed by the presentation of Mughal genealogy, that they imitated Mughal
seals proclaiming Timurid descent.54
48 Quinn, ‘Timurid Legitimacy’. See, further: Quinn, Historical Writing, 44–91.

49 Quinn, Historical Writing, 86–89.
51 Şahin, Empire, 62; Chann, ‘Auspicious Conjunction’, here 99–104; Flemming, Essays, 226–38.
52 Balabanlilar, ‘Lords’, 9.
53 Ibid, 9.
54 Lefèvre, ‘Fathers’, 416.
Kingship 343
Such genealogies, it bears emphasising, were not a production unique

to the Islamic world. Genealogy, an interest in history, and referencing
the Classical past was common among Renaissance princes engaging with
the fruits of recently rediscovered knowledge (§11.1). Grand ideas about the
monarch as Diana or Hercules or other mythical and legendary figures, for
instance, valuably succoured royal legitimacy at times of instability.55 The
Tudors remained as concerned with the perception of their dynastic legit-
imacy in Elizabeth I’s reign as they had been in 1485, when her grandfather
violently seized the throne.56 A scroll from 1559 preserved at Hatfield House,
built by one of the queen’s most powerful former ministers, Robert Cecil
(1563–1612), tellingly takes pains in documenting Elizabeth’s descent from
Adam and Eve; other purported relatives include mythic figures, such as
Romulus and Remus, or King Arthur and King Lear (Leir) from British
lore.57 Returning to the Mughals’ imperial core in north India, it bears
remembering that there, too, a local audience and domestic context was
equally important to the production and popular reception of the dynasty’s
prodigious genealogy.
Indeed, so far we have only considered Timurid ideas and descent within
the broader Indo- Islamicate or erstwhile Turko- Mongolic worlds, where
they held great currency, yet the purchase of the Timurid inheritance among
Indians needs to be (carefully) delineated, too. Among those Indian rulers
and bureaucrats absorbed into the Mughal state, the reiteration of Mughal
genealogy possessed a potent –if not terrifying –awesomeness. Timur’s
invasions had been censured to varying degrees with various motivations by
Indo-Persian writers down the ages as a time of carnage, pillage, and enslave-
ment. This rendered the facts of Babur’s ancestry somewhat awkward.58 At the
same time, Babur was not the only Timurid prince on the subcontinent; he had
numerous rivals. Men such as Muhammad Zaman Mirza, ‘a descendant of the
last great Timurid prince, Sultan Husayn Bayqara’, did not see themselves of
inferior lineage to the Mughals, and thus felt bold enough to rebel against their
authority. Meanwhile, others still were busy building Timurid successor states
of their own, not least Babur’s cousin Mirza Haydar Dughlat, who founded a
state in Kashmir, or his relatives ruling over Sindh and southern Afghanistan
in the name of the Arghun dynasty.59
If the Timurid legacy was hardly a wellspring of Mughal political legit-
imacy in the empire’s early years, this certainly changed over time, particu-
larly from Humayun’s reign.60 That said, its valence varied among different
55 See, for instance: Wooding, Tudor England, 312–15, 524.

56 Ibid, 2–4, 66–72.
57 See, also: Yates, Astraea, 50
58 Habib, ‘Timur’.
59 Anooshahr, Turkestan, 140, and citation 156.
60 Ibid, 140–66, especially 156 onward for analysis of the greater role of Timurid genealogy from
Humayun’s reign.
344 Kingship
constituencies On the one hand, were those central Asians and Persians who
had departed from their homelands either with Babur or with Humayun after
the latter’s sojourn in Safavid Iran. There was also a steady stream of central
and west Asian migrants in search of the riches and opportunities brought
by the Pax Mughalica through the long seventeenth century, such groups
being especially susceptive to the charisma deriving from Timurid ancestry.61
On the other hand, the steady expansion of the Mughal state enlarged and
transformed the imperial elite, with the incorporation of local powerholders
from newly conquered territories adding greater diversity to the corps of
mansabdars by Shah Jahan’s reign.62 Mughal kingship could not, therefore,
rest upon such foundations as genealogy and descent alone, the latter’s sig-
nificance ebbing over time and perceived differently among separate con-
stituencies. Moreover, the expression of royal power within the Indian or
Indo-Islamicate political ecumene by necessity required the normative and
symbolic moorings derived from the (evolving) Indic context as well as the
wider world of Islam.
8.2 Zill-i Allah (The Shadow of God): Perso-Islamicate

and Indic Royal Traditions
On his victory tour of Delhi in 1526, Babur not only forged a connection with
Timur by walking in his footsteps; he also visited the tombs of saints, including
Nizam al-din Awliya. Babur recognised Delhi’s place as one of India’s most
important religious centres –not merely as its premier city and centre of pol-
itics –as well as the power deriving from pious acts, the patronage of religious
institutions, and association with important saints and spiritual lineages.63
Babur’s careful cultivation of the wellsprings of spiritual legitimacy was of
longer standing and already of some complexity before 1526, however, as we
have seen (§2.2.2). In a ‘particularly Indic act of expiation’, ahead of a show-
down with the army of the fearsome Rajput warrior Rana Sangha in 1527,
for instance, Babur ordered the digging of a step well beside which a charit-
able building was to be constructed, arguably measures to conciliate his Indian
collaborators.64 That said, the well was to be dug where vessels containing wine
brought from Kabul for royal consumption had been poured onto the ground,
so that the act at once also signified Babur’s adherence to Islamic prescripts.
This decision was complemented by the announcement of other measures
made to keep his Turani (Uzbek) and other Muslim collaborators on side.
Babur was acting on the instruction of an astrologer whose advice bore little
fruit and who was summarily paid off, but the whole episode demonstrates the
61 Subrahmanyam, ‘Iranians’.
64 Moin, Millennial, 67, for citation.
Kingship 345
efforts –at the very beginning of Mughal rule in north India –to forge Mughal
authority in dialogue with both Indic traditions and Islamic piety.65
The Dar al-Islam was constituted of Muslims adhering to diverse customs
and of numerous sects –even if the majority were Sunni –not to mention
the multiplicity of Sufi tariqas. This fact had numerous implications for the
Mughals and the ways they placated ‘the faithful’ (i.e., fellow Muslims). At
the same time, India was a place of tremendous diversity, with religious, cul-
tural, and political traditions varying from region to region, wherein were
also sedimented multiple layers of Perso-Islamicate influence –several cen-
turies deep in some places but thinner in others –and wherein could be found
Muslim societies and the sway of Sufi orders grown on local soil. Already in
Babur’s time, therefore, a coteries of influences were by necessity moulded
into the construction and (re)presentation of kingly authority, not least those
of Indian origin or ‘Indic’ by their development over time, some codified in
text but many others existing as embodied and affective forms of knowledge.
By the reign of Babur’s great-great-grandson, Mughal kingship had become
so embedded within the Indian ecumene as to be emplaced in a comprehen-
sive ‘institutional genealogy of Indian kingship’ –the Tarikh-i Rajaha-yi Dilli
(‘History of the Kings of Delhi’) –written in Persian by the Hindu litterateur
and imperial munshi, Chandar Bhan Brahman, a text that was itself a product
of the continued swirling together of cultural influences.66 Thus, we might
ask, what Indic and Islamicate concepts went into the fabrication of Mughal
kingship and kingly presentation?
By the sixteenth century, India was home to numerous Sufi holy men and
its own distinctive Sufi orders or lineages, whose succour and the spiritual-
political legitimacy deriving therefrom was perhaps more appropriate and
more useful to the growing Mughal imperium. Much to the consternation of
their Turani nobles –who remained more closely associated with the Ahrari
Naqshbandiya –Humayun lavished his patronage upon an Indian Sufi lineage,
the Shattari Sufi order of Gwalior in northern India, although this change
owed much to his father’s prior recalculation of the most suitable spiritual
alliance for the dynasty.67 From Humayun’s perspective, the Shattariya not only
had a large following in north India, larger than the Naqshbandiya at the time;
the Shattari brothers were ‘immensely popular local saints but also experts in
the Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit learned traditions’, whose appeal stemmed
from their embeddedness within ‘elite intellectual traditions and popular
local knowledges’, within ‘Islamic and Indic idioms.’68 The focus of Mughal
patronage shifted again during Akbar’s reign, this time to the Chishti order,
which had first become a powerful Sufi order through its mutually reinforcing
relationship with the rulers of the Delhi Sultanates. Akbar’s first architectural
65 Ibid, 67–68.
66 Kinra, Writing, 95–99.
67 Moin, Millennial, 68, 74, 79, 98–100.
68 Ibid, 105, for citation. Khafipour, ed., Empires, 384–400, for primary source materials.
346 Kingship
Fig. 8E Humayun’s Tomb and Gardens

commission was the tomb for his father (Fig. 8E), built in a Timurid style with
Islamicate referents but faced in typically Indian materials (red sandstone) –
and, more significantly, located only a stone’s throw away from Nizam al-din
Awliya’s tomb.69 Akbar’s greatest project, however, was the construction of
a new city and palace –Fatehpur Sikri –built in a less Timurid and more
Indic style, and standing as testament to his reverence for Shaikh Salim Chishti
(1478–1572).
Following on the heels of such venerable predecessors as the Tughluq and
Malwa sultans, Akbar made his first pilgrimage to the tomb of Muinuddin
Chishti in Ajmer in 1562.70 The event is recorded in the Akbarnama (‘The Book
of Akbar’) –a work commissioned by Akbar in 1589 as a record of his reign,
penned as an encomium by Abu al-Fazl, with lavish paintings of the most
important scenes made by artists in the imperial atelier in the 1590s. Salim
Chishti predicted that Akbar’s wife would issue an heir, the emperor vowing
to make the pilgrimage from Agra to Ajmer on foot if the prophecy were to
69 Asher, Architecture, 41–47.

70 Currie, Shrine and Cult, 97–102.
Kingship 347
come true. Salim Chishti’s prognostication was correct: Prince Salim –named
in honour of the Sufi –was born in 1569, with a second son born to another
wife in 1570. Akbar thus set off from Agra in 1570, this episode also visu-
ally depicted in Akbarnama, and repeated the pilgrimage annually until 1579,
although walking on these occasions only on the itinerary’s last leg.71 Ostensibly
built to celebrate the conquest of Gujarat, the construction of Fatehpur Sikri
‘more immediately underscored Akbar’s links with the Chishti order’, Asher
and Talbot note.72 Akbar commenced the project in 1571, the site of the new
complex –some thirty-eight kilometres from Agra –chosen because it was the
humble abode of Salim Chishti, with the layout thus incorporating a khanaqah
centrally within the palace complex and entered through the enormous arches
of the fifty-four metre high Buland Darwaza.73
Upon Salim Chishti’s death in 1572, Akbar ordered a white marble tomb
be built in the courtyard of the khanaqah. The significance of this and other
tombs –imperial and non-imperial –is worth stating, for these were not sombre
places for housing the dead, but full of life and used performatively. Their
construction obliged the patron to provide additional support for employing
readers of the Quran and for celebration of the annual urs –the commemor-
ation of the departed, a custom long associated with saints but by the seven-
teenth century also accorded to the Mughals. The celebration of the Prophet
Muhammad’s birth at the Taj Mahal sometime around the mid-seventeenth
century, for instance, cost some six thousand rupees, expended not only on
reciters of the Quran and the services of more heterodox mystical figures, but
also on trays of snacks and entrées, perfume, betel leaf, and the other requisites
for making gay such a festivity. Any unspent funds were disbursed among
the assembly of learned specialists as well as the poor and needy.74 All these
costs –for salaries, for upkeep, for festivities –necessitated the endowment
of a charitable trust (waqf) to the recipient, the trust’s income generated from
revenue-yielding territories that would otherwise have gone to the imperial
treasury, thus underscoring the gravity of these decisions.75 At the tombs and
palaces of the Mughals themselves, these festivities afforded opportunities
for the everyday performance of Mughal kingship: they were, Rajeev Kinra
reminds us, ‘occasions for interaction with the local population –whether
71 ‘Akbar’s Pilgrimage to Ajmer’ (watercolour and gold; Basawan and Nand Gwaliari; c. 1590–
95) from the Akbarnama, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS.2:77–1896, which can be
viewed online.
73 Ibid, 160–62. See, also: Asher, Architecture, 47–67.
74 Kinra, Writing, 57–58.
75 Asher and Talbot, India, 242–43. McChesney’s ground-breaking portrait of Mazar-i Sharif
in Balkh –from its foundation and initial endowment in later Timurid times, through to the
modern era –remains an important and lively study of the ‘life and times’ of one of the most
important shrines in Eurasia, as well as its changing governance, the legal-cum-commercial
institutions supporting it, and the window onto the changing world around that it
provides: McChesney, Waqf.
348 Kingship
purely as entertaining spectacle or as opportunities for people to avail them-

selves of Mughal officials’ generosity.’76
Ironically, construction of Shaikh Salim Chishti’s tomb at Fatehpur Sikri
was completed in 1580–81, around the time Akbar began to distance him-
self from saintly figures (§3.3.2–§3.3.4). To make sense of what underlay this
decision, we must move into the rarefied space of the imperial court. Abu al-
Fazl’s service at court began in 1575 and soon after he began to cast Akbar as
a supernatural and light-filled being, as the insan-i kamil (perfect man), and
thus as a moral exemplar for his courtiers and subjects. He drew upon the
illuminationist (ishraqi) philosophy of the twelfth-century Persian esoteric
thinker, Shabab al-Din Suhrawardi (d. 1191). His ideas about the emperor’s
luminescence found their way into such texts as the Akbarnama, in which the
metaphors of light and dark abound, and which portray Akbar’s powers as
a seer endowed with the grace of God and his absolute command over the
human and animal realms. They are also evident in the visual record of Akbar’s
reign: Mughal artists placed him centrally in the action of a scene, depicted
him proportionally larger than other figures, portrayed him as tranquil, even
when others around him are enraged, and used colour to convey his radiance.77
The emperor could be uncontrollably angry, of course, which only underscores
the fabrication at work in the illustrations accompanying the Akbarnama.78
Akbar was the Sun King long before Louis XIV.
Another set of influences underpinning Abu al- Fazl’s ideas about the
emperor’s divine light stemmed from Hindu and Jain concepts of darshan or
auspicious sight (not least of sacred idols during worship), and of solar worship,
additionally from Zoroastrian fire veneration, which came to shape the daily
routine of the court.79 ‘Worship of the sun and moon with its images of light
was easily compatible,’ John Richards noted, ‘with the myths of origin and des-
cent central to the ethos of his Rajput nobles.’80 Akbar was known to worship
the sun by a set of rituals he invented, facing east four times daily and pros-
trating himself in front of a sacred fire, at this time also abstaining from exces-
sive meat consumption, drinking alcohol, and sexual intercourse.81 Ideas about
darshan lent importance to the jharokha or viewing-window as a feature of
imperial architecture, with Mughal palaces incorporating a jharokha-i darshan
at which the patriarch of the Mughal household appeared before assembled
subjects of the Mughal kingdom. At Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar presented him-
self at sunrise at such a window constructed in the southwestern end of the
76 Kinra, Writing, 58.

77 Asher, ‘Sun’, 161–75, for what has been described here.
78 Talbot, ‘Anger and Atonement’.
79 For an account of Akbar’s honouring the sun several times a day, penned by a Jain Sanskrit
specialist at the Mughal court: Truschke, Culture, 41–42. For insight into how these influences
came to have an effect on Mughal kingship: Truschke, ‘Solar Cosmologies’.
80 Richards, Mughal, 47.
81 Ibid, 47.
Kingship 349
palace complex. At the Agra Fort, which Shah Jahan extensively remodelled, a
jharokha-i darshan was constructed for the emperor’s daily appearance before
his petitioners and worshippers in the early morning.82 According to court
historians, the timing did not merely coincide with sunrise; it was like the rising
sun itself.83 Artists turned the spectacle into a topos of imperial portraiture,
thereby re-presenting the emperor’s sacred being for veneration by the viewer
of such pictures.84
Although he orchestrated Abu al- Fazl’s death in 1602 to eliminate a
voice opposing his succession to the Mughal throne, Prince Salim neverthe-
less continued to use Abu al-Fazl’s imagery of light and illumination and to
conceive of himself as a light-filled being. Crowned the emperor Jahangir in
1605, he also revived the connection with the Chishtiya, making pilgrimage
to the shrine in Ajmer five times and even relocating the imperial capital to
that city from 1615 to 1618.85 A stunning double-facing portrait of Jahangir
and Muinuddin Chishti threads a link between the two men: conscious not to
show the emperor in submission to the latter, the viewer instead sees the saint
presenting the Mughal king with a Timurid crown and the key to the conquest
of the temporal world in the left-hand picture, and Jahangir unlocking a globe
held in his palm with this key in the right-hand picture.86 Among the devices
borrowed from European art, is the halo or nimbus, seen in this and many
other portraits of Jahangir and every picture of Shah Jahan (see, e.g., Fig. 8F),
often painted in gold to literally reflect the emperor’s sanctity and radiance.87
Jahangir’s fine clothes, jewels, and the dagger tucked in his sash signal his
unique position as a temporal king and spiritual leader.88 Mughal kingship
did not depend upon a greater and more supernatural power of holy men, the
double portrait of Muinuddin Chishti and Jahangir seems to say; if Mughal
kings were guided by such men, it was only because saints and theologians
entrusted them with the princely duty that rightfully fell from the heavens onto
their shoulders.
Scholarly attention once fixed on the emperor’s patronage of the arts and
architecture, but Catherine B. Asher’s work on Raja Man Singh’s patronage
at Vrindavan and Rohtas (§9.3.1) shows how an imperial serviceman ‘simul-
taneously served his own interests and those of the emperor’.89 The raja’s new
82 Asher, ‘Sun’, 176–78. Chandar Bhan Brahman –whose degree of access to the emperor was vir-
tually unrivalled among litterateurs –offered in his Chahar Chaman a fascinating and detailed
description of a ‘day in the life’ of Shah Jahan, a rich discussion of which (accompanied by
many excerpts from the text) can be found in: Kinra, Writing, 102–27.
84 Koch, ‘Mughal Padshahs’, 208.
85 Currie, Shrine and Cult, 106–10, which notes the largesse made by Shah Jahan and other
members of the imperial family to support the construction of new structures in and around
the shrine.
86 Moin, Millennial, 189–93.
87 Asher, ‘Sun’, 182.
88 See, Lally, ‘Fashion’, especially 606–16.
89 Asher, ‘Architecture’, 183.
350 Kingship
palace complex at Rohtas proclaimed Mughal authority, but inscriptions in

Persian and Sanskrit indicate that Man Singh was navigating between his
role as the emperor’s servant (declared in the Persian text) and his personal
authority as a Kachhwaha raja, protector of his people, and patron of the
arts in his own right (in the Sanskrit).90 Royal authority was neither entirely
the outward projection of a construct produced by the Mughal centre, nor
was it based solely on the fealty and deference of the nobility toward the
emperor, therefore. Rather, it inhered within the very bond between the
emperor and his elite; the familial bond of a father to his extended house-
hold, as Stephen Blake characterises it (§7.2).91 That bond was reaffirmed
through ritual prestation: a serviceman’s offer of nazr (tribute or gifts)
and his receipt of khilat and other gifts of equal or greater worth from the
emperor. These gifts might include expensively caparisoned horses (Fig. 8F)
or elephants: recorded in the Padshahnama, for instance, is the gift of an
Iraqi horse from the jagirdar of Ellichpur that became the Padshah Pasand
(Choice of the Emperor).92
Representation was also made by foreign courts or institutions (e.g., the
Ottoman or Elizabethan courts as well as other courts from within India, the
Jesuit mission and the European trading organisations). A double-page spread
in the Akbarnama, for example, records the embassy of Sayyid Beg, sent by the
Safavid shah in 1652. The left-hand picture depicts the meeting of the two men,
while the right-hand picture shows the preparation of an ostentatious array of
gifts. At the Bourbon court in 1715, by way of comparison, Louis XIV received
Mohammad Reza Beg, the Safavid envoy, who was subsequently depicted in
an engraving at the head of a procession carrying gifts of priceless stones and
bullion to the Sun King.93 What does this tell us? In the first place, foreign
delegates’ participation in nazr-khilat rituals helped project Mughal kingship
into the global domain. This shaped and/or was shaped by broadly similar
practices of gift exchange across the globe. Take, for example, the exchange of
fully-caparisoned horses gifted between the Ottoman and Mantua courts that
also doubled as a means of improving bloodstock, thus supporting the latter’s
involvement in horse breeding and trading. This shares much in common with
the submission of horses by the Ottomans and Safavids to the Mughals.94 For
too long assumed to be of European invention, the culture of the (occidental)
diplomatic gift may well have been shaped by encounters with the tastes and
preferences, rituals and customs of Afro-Asian courts, therefore.95 The greater
90 Ibid, 191.
91 Blake, ‘Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire’.
92 Thackston, ed., Jahangirnama, 197; Begley and Desai, eds., Shah Jahan Nama, 370.
93 Biedermann et al, ‘Introduction’, 2–6, for these examples and associated observations, as well
as reproductions of these pictures.
94 Cevizli, ‘Portraits’, especially 38–42. ‘Connoisseurship’ of horses –by Indian kings, not least –
was inextricably linked to science, trade, and the production of violence on the Indian subcon-
tinent, too; see: Lally, ‘Equines’.
95 Biedermann et al, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10–11 and passim.
Kingship 351
Fig. 8F Equestrian Portrait of Shah Jahan (watercolour and gold; by the Mughal artist
Payag, c. 1630)
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 55.121.10.21
352 Kingship
connectedness of royal courts, near and far, spurred mimesis and rivalry –the
‘competitive kingship’ of early-modern monarchs –to paraphrase a recent
contribution by Jeremy Adelman.96
It was not only foreign delegates’ presentation at the Mughal court, but
also through their re-presentation in paintings that Mughal universalism and
kingly identity was fabricated for the present and posterity.97 Other pictures in
masterworks such as the Padshahnama include the emperor being weighed on
a scale in 1632 on his forty-second lunar birthday, the event coinciding with
the presentation of khilat to the Persian ambassador.98 The Mughal ruler and
princes were weighed on either or both of their two birthdays –according to
the (Muslim) lunar and (Hindu) solar calendars –with the corresponding mass
in coin or treasure disbursed among the public. Such generosity was part of an
established discourse of imperialism, with sobriquets like zar-afshan (he who
strews gold) and the notion of the king who ‘rains down treasures’ (ganj-bar)
current in Delhi Sultanate times.99 These were accompanied by much celebra-
tion, making them as lively as the festivities for Eid, Nowruz (Persian New
Year), Holi, and Dussehra.100
Some of the innovations in kingly presentation fabricated during his
predecessors’ reigns seem not to figure in Shah Jahan’s own self-fashioning. Shah
Jahan’s court nevertheless became more –not less –cosmopolitan, grandiose,
ritualised, and hierarchical.101 In the diwan-i amm (hall of public audience) at the
Agra Fort, a space intended to evoke the audience hall at Persepolis, the emperor
sat on a large marble throne. It was surrounded by inlaid panels of Italian crafts-
manship featuring flora, fauna, and the figure of Orpheus taming wild animals
from Classical lore, the latter a metaphor for justice, itself the prerequisite for
harmony. Overall, the throne and its setting recalled the Islamic understanding
of the throne of the Jewish king, Solomon –the seat of the ideal and just ruler,
an image threaded through Shah Jahan’s portraits and thus his self-presentation,
much as also found in that of the Henry VIII or the Ottoman sultan, Suleyman.102
96 Adelman, ‘Mimesis’.
97 For their part, European recipients of khilat also re-presented their receipt of such honour in
pictures of themselves in their robes, surrounded by their gifts. For discussion, drawing on the
pictures of receipt of Ottoman khilat: Karl, ‘Objects’, 127–28.
98 ‘The Weighing of Shah-Jahan on his 42nd Lunar Birthday’ (watercolour and metallic paints;
painted by Bhola, c. 1640) from the Padshahnama, fol. 71r, Royal Collections Trust, Windsor
Castle, RCIN 10005025.n, which can be viewed online.
99 Anooshahr, ‘Imperial Discourse’, 165.
100 On the relationship of goddess worship to kingship in Bengal, and the patronage of the annual
Durga puja and of new temples by the Mughals, their representatives, and sub-imperial elites,
as well as the impact of this upon the popularity and changing character of local devotion, in
turn, see: Chatterjee, ‘Goddess Encounters’, especially 1445–49, 1463–86.
101 Kinra, Writing, 102–27. The importance of hierarchy in Shah Jahani painting is examined in
Beach and Koch, eds., King of the World.
102 Koch, ‘Solomon’, on the purchase and place of Orpheus/Solomon in the connected Mughal
and European contexts; Kołodziejczyk, ‘Khan’, 190, describes the Solomonic concept in
Kingship 353
In fact, Solomonic motifs and symbolism naturally had even wider purchase, and
it was a contemporary of Suleyman and even closer contemporary of Akbar –the
Spanish Habsburg king and emperor, Philip II (r. 1556–98) –who was celebrated
by his flatterers as the new Solomon. It was Philip’s new monastery and royal
palace on the outskirts of Madrid, the Escorial, that was reputedly designed as
‘the new temple of Solomon’ and completed in 1584 with frescos and statues that
made the link amply clear.103
8.3 Murshid-i Kamil (The Perfect Guide): The Saint, The Messiah, and
the King
The notion of the king and his court as the axis mundi or pole (qutb) around
which all else moved was not unique to Timurid Eurasia, for the Qianlong
emperor also constructed his moral authority over all cultures by drawing
on the Indic concept of the chakravartin (wheel-turning king), and becoming
the Pole Star –the central locus around which all else moves ‘and by its own
immobility gives meaning to all movement’.104 Nor did it reflect a monarchy
confined to the palace. Like other Eurasian dynasts, Babur and Humayun
spent considerable time on the move, consolidating the empire by creating
alliances –and their kingly identities –through hunting and feasting on the
kill, whether in the travelling camp or in those chahar-baghs laid out and
planted around their palaces.105 Hunting expeditions were especially laden
with opportunities: moving into choice countryside where good game was
to be found and martial skill could be finessed, or a chance for the emperor
to commune with wandering hermits and ascetics (see: Fig. 2A), visit the
habitations of highly-esteemed holy men, and get the measure of his nobles
while supervising the goings-on in his realm so that he might finetune, say,
agrarian policy.106 More broadly, the emperor’s peripateticism was integral to
the maintenance of loyalty between the emperor and his nobles as well as the
centre’s swift suppression of uprisings by pretenders or grass-roots rebellions
by peasants (§7.2.1). Much like Ottoman processions, the royal progresses
of the Tudor monarchs, or the Field of Cloth of Gold pitched in 1520 by
Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France (r. 151–47), furthermore, the
the presentation of Suleyman as a ruler of Muslims, Jews, and Christians; Wooding, Tudor
England, 181–82, 186, on Henry VIII as Solomon.
103 Rady, Habsburgs, 85–86. Solomon’s Temple remained an important architectural aspiration
for builders of Christian architecture (churches, monasteries, etc).
104 Crossley, Manchus, 116. See, also: Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 154.
105 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 69.
106 O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom’, 902; Allsen, Royal Hunt, especially 119–40, 186–232. The seventeenth-
century state secretary and poet, Chandar Bhan Brahman, made the link between the
emperor’s peripateticism and his eye on policy: Kinra, Writing, 126. See, also: Balabanlilar,
Imperial Identity, 84–89, who views the hunt as a re-enactment and memorialisation of the
Mughals’ semi-nomadic, Turko-Persianate heritage.
354 Kingship
Mughal emperor’s moving court and camp was itself a grande spectacle, a
performance of the king’s majesty.107
Of all Muslim pilgrimages, the Hajj is unrivalled in importance. What the
Ottoman sultan lacked in Timurid ancestry, he compensated for –following the
conquest of the Hejaz in 1517 –by deriving spiritual authority as caliph and
servant or protector of the Holy Cities (khadim al-haremeyn).108 While the Great
Mosque in Mecca was being restored, for example, Murad IV (r. 1623–40) rou-
tinely distributed khilat in ceremonies that helped connect the renovations to
the imperial centre.109 Being geographically distant from Istanbul, the Ottoman
sultans never performed the Hajj to Mecca. But they did patronise two official
annual pilgrimage caravans –from Cairo and from Damascus –to convey the
sultan’s role as supreme leader of the Muslim world as widely as possible.110
Unable to seize control of the Hejaz, the Mughals could nevertheless patronise
the annual Hajj pilgrimage from India and could make gifts of their largesse to
the sharif of Mecca (the descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and steward
of the Holy Cities), in this way weakening one of the central pillars of Ottoman
universalism.111 That said, Mughal pilgrim ships –which could carry hundreds
of souls at a time –fell into abeyance from Akbar’s reign until that of Shah
Jahan due to such factors as the insecurity of the sea routes and the hostility
directed toward Indian pilgrims by the Ottoman authorities.112
Other holy places and pilgrimages also had great significance, perhaps even
more so when Muslims were unable to travel easily from India to Arabia. Here
lies an additional significance of Akbar and Jahangir’s pilgrimages to the
Chishti shrine at Ajmer and the largesse made by members of the imperial
family, who could not realistically support the Hajj pilgrimage because of the
danger to pilgrims.113 Here, too, we find a striking similarity with their con-
temporary, Shah Abbas I, who made thirteen pilgrimages to the family shrine
in Ardabil to affirm his connection to the Sufi tariqa of his ancestor, Shaikh
Safi al-Din, and commenced the same number to the shrine of the eighth Shi‘i
imam in Mashhad. The aim of maintaining ‘a close and public association’
with the departed Shi‘i imams was to demonstrate ‘their backing for Safavid
rule’; hence, Abbas I went so far as to travel to Mashad on foot in 1601.114
Abbas’ devotions were not unprecedented, only more frequent than either his
predecessors’ or ancestors’ pilgrimages. Again, it was Safavid-Ottoman rivalry
and the closure of the Hejaz to Iranian pilgrims that made the state’s patronage
107 Kinra, Writing, 130, for a description of such a parade; Kaicker, The King, 54–56, for a discus-
sion of a procession made by Farrukhsiyar in 1718/19; Wooding, Tudor England, 48, 455–57.
108 Casale, Ottoman, 7, 13. 82.
109 Faroqhi, Pilgrims, 118.
110 Ibid, 32–73, for continuity and change under the Ottomans in the caravan traffic.
111 Findly, ‘Capture’, 236.
112 Farooqi, ‘Moguls’.
113 Currie, Shrine and Cult, 97–110.
114 Melville, ‘Pilgrimage’, 196–97 for the enumeration of the pilgrimages, and 193 for citation.
Kingship 355
of nearby holy places much more important as alternates to its sponsorship of

the Hajj caravans.115
The Safavid-Mughal concurrence is also critically important, A. Azfar Moin
reveals, to understanding the relationship of sainthood to sacred kingship in
Mughal India. To make sense of the mystical aspects of Mughal kingship, a
certain amount of context is useful. Oneiric powers were one of the building
blocks of this kind of mystical or saintly leadership. The Bible is full of dreams,
for instance, and although some Protestant reformers derided oneiric powers
as Catholic superstition, dreams played their part in Reformation theology,
nevertheless. The early moderns continued to attach tremendous power and
significance to dreams, portents, and prognostications. These ranged from
the visions of God experienced by the Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci (1552–
1610), before setting out to proselytise in China, to the prophetic dreams of a
solicitor’s daughter named Lucretia de Leon that ‘foresaw’ Spain’s defeat under
Philip II’s feeble leadership, which she shared publicly, an audacious move for
which the Inquisitors exiled her to a convent.116 Timur’s dreams succoured the
notion of the world-conqueror’s exceptionalism, at the same time cementing
accounts of dreams and omens in literary texts produced, therefore, not only
by his heirs, but even by the Ottomans and Safavids.117 Such recounting in
chronicles and biographies of the miracle of a leader’s birth or his foresight all
helped to enhance his charisma and otherworldly power.
With the steady transformation of religious life across the Indo-Islamicate
world, the ‘dominant experience of sacred authority for most people –elite
and common –was concrete and embodied rather than abstract and textual’,
in large part due to the spread and appeal of Sufism with its emphasis on the
pir-murid (master-disciple) relationship and the practice of devotion to her-
editary shaikhs centred on their shrines (§2.2).118 This model of an embodied
form of temporal-political authority intersected with a complementary range
of scriptural notions about ‘human agents who could usher in and maintain
the just religiopolitical order of a particular historical era’: the messiah (mahdi)
and renewer (mujaddid), the perfect individual (insan-i kamil) and sahib qiran.
The end of a thousand-year cycle upon the coming of the new millennium
in c. 1590–91 was hotly anticipated, for such a figure would then make his
appearance, or so it was believed (§3.3.5).119 By the late sixteenth century, there-
fore, the Safavid and Mughal rulers embodied a sacrality that very carefully
and self- consciously amalgamated these influences –sainthood with mes-
sianism and renewal –and which was ‘adduced by astrological calculations
and mystical lore, embodied in court rituals and dress, visualised in painting,
115 Ibid, 215–16.

116 Roper, Martin Luther’s World, here 42.
117 See: Menchinger, ‘Dreams’; Quinn, Historical Writing, 65–
76; Quinn, Persian
Historiography, 62–71.
119 Ibid, 9.
356 Kingship
enshrined in architecture, and institutionalised in cults of devotion and bodily

submission to the monarch as both saint and king.’120
So much for the broader ideas and currents, but how was this kind of kingship
actually fabricated in the Mughal case? Humayun’s engagement with the forms
of sacred kingship emanating from the Timurid world, ‘inspired by emergent
Sufi institutions, enshrined in elite knowledges of astrology and alchemy, and
enlivened by popular memories of saints and heroes’ only gained him a repu-
tation as a ‘vain heretic who dabbled in magic.’121 Humayun’s interests may
have been derided and decried by his critics, but we ought not be so swayed by
such opinions that we overlook how prevalent and popular magical thinking
was in Indian society at large, to say nothing of how closely it was linked to
kingship in south Asia and across the early modern world (§2.5.2). Philip II,
for instance, built a large laboratory of seven or eight rooms with chimneys
and special furnaces for the use of the monks at the Escorial, such was his
interest in alchemy, and so little conflict was there between the exploration of
magical knowledge and his fervent Catholicism.122 Protestant reformers might
have decried the magic of the medieval Church, but the Reformation did little
to stem astrology’s rising tide, which was of great importance to all sections
of English society, from the common man to the Tudor or Stuart monarch.
Cardinal Wolsey even ‘timed the departure of his French embassy in 1527 to
coincide with an astrologically propitious moment.’123
During his exile in Safavid Iran, Humayun swapped his crown for the
turban of the Safavid murid in ritual submission to Shah Tahmasp, whom
courtiers revered as the murshid-i kamil (the perfect guide). This event was
doubly significant: it was occasioned by the very failure of Humayun’s own
imperial project, a fact he had to grapple with, yet it also demonstrated first-
hand the charisma and authority that could be derived from the moulding of
millenarian currents and traditions of sainthood, and their articulation within
the Timurid-Persianate idiom.124 All this shows how Mughal rule was steadily
imbricated within the evolving milieu of sacred kingship in Islamicate Eurasia,
so that Mughal kingship itself came to be inflected with this elision of the
saintly and royal. Akbar, however, brought these developments to their apogee,
turning discipleship (muridi) into an imperial institution. The inauguration
of the din-i ilahi (§3.3.2) deliberately coincided with an astral conjunction to
signal the beginning of a new world order, ushered by Akbar ‘as a Lord of the
Conjunction like his ancestor Timur, as a saviour like the expected heir of Ali,
120 Ibid, 5.
121 Ibid, 131. C.f. Anooshahr, ‘Science’, for a critical modification of Moin’s analysis of
Humayun’s interest in the astral sciences, including the notion that inquiry at the court shaped
Shattari beliefs to a degree, not merely vice versa.
122 Parker, Imprudent King, 110.
123 Thomas, Religion, 289, for citation, 283–322, for an invaluable survey of the astrology and its
role in English society, including discussion of astrology at the royal court, and 367–85, on the
antipathy (or not) of Protestants (especially Puritans) towards astrology.
Kingship 357
as an avatar like Rama, as a messiah like Jesus, and as a Renewer of the Second
Millennium (Mujaddid-i Alfi-i Thani) of Islam’.125
Of the various ritual forms of submission by murids, take, for example,
the greeting ‘allahu akbar’ (God is great) and response ‘jalla jalaluhu’ (May
His glory be ever glorious): these Arabic salutations seem to be in praise of
Allah but, by containing the name of the emperor, Jalal al-Din Akbar, might
be interpreted as ‘Akbar is God’ and ‘May Akbar’s glory be ever glorious’.126
This ritual and performative-embodied endeavour was supported by the lit-
erary productions of the Akbarid court, not least the Akbarnama, which was
modelled on Timur’s Zafarnama and written not by any courtier-historian but
a disciple of the emperor’s din-i ilahi. Histories linking patrons to prior Muslim
kings in India were important productions of the early Mughal period, such
as the Tarikh-i Alfi (‘Millennial History’) or Khwaja Nizam al-Din Ahmad’s
Tabaqat-i Akbari (c. 1592–93), the latter ranging from Ghaznavid times to
Akbar’s reign. Such works were counterparts to a near contemporaneous
chronicle penned by Firishtah in 1607 for Ibrahim Adil Shah II, a king who
also drew on Perso-Islamic languages of kingship, thus also styling himself
sahib qiran.127 However, Akbar’s intention in commissioning the Tarikh-i Alfi
was distinctive –namely, to establish himself as the last in a line of great kings,
his reign coming at the end of Islam’s first thousand year cycle, and thus his
role as the mujaddid of the second millennium.128
This formed Jahangir’s inheritance upon his own accession, the new ruler
keen to draw on the charisma of his father and coming to do so in time.129
A connoisseur of painting, Jahangir commissioned pictures to proclaim his
sacred kingship, including painted portraits for his disciples. In so doing, and
by holding evening dialogues with learned men from different religious com-
munities, he was very much continuing his father’s projects (§3.3.3–§3.3.4).
Among the pictorial innovations of his reign, however, were portrayals of ‘royal
action taking place on a mythical or metaphysical plane’, like the double por-
trait on facing pages of Muinuddin Chishti and Jahangir, discussed above.130
In a number of pictures, the emperor stands centrally upon a globe, his pos-
ition designating his being as the axis mundi (qutb).131 In perhaps the most
famous of such pictures, Jahangir is centrally positioned in an embrace with
Shah Abbas, the two men standing upon a lion and lamb, the company of
these two creatures referencing a Biblical allusion and symbol of messianic
125 Ibid, 171.

126 Ibid, 144.
127 Anooshahr, ‘Memory’, 275–300, for discussion of these works. On the latter point: Fischel,
Local States, 175–78.
129 For a balanced discussion of Jahangir’s supposed embrace of Islamic orthodoxy and seeming
distancing of himself from Akbar’s syncretism, versus his drawing on Akbar’s innovations in
kingly presentation: Moin, Millennial, 171–79.
130 Ibid, citation 193, and analysis 189–92.
131 Ibid, 195–98.
358 Kingship
Fig. 8G ‘Jahangir Embracing Shah Abbas’ (watercolour and metallic paints; painted by
Abu’l Hasan; c. 1618)
CPA Media Pte Ltd /Alamy Stock Photo
peace (Fig. 8G). Jahangir’s supernaturalism and superiority are represented

by his relatively larger size, and by the enormous solar-lunar nimbus that is
being held up by angels and surrounds his head, rendered in precious metals,
his divine light thrown over the Safavid ruler.132 The picture captures a dream
132 See, for analysis: Moin, Millennial, 204–06.

Kingship 359
of the emperor and presents him as a seer, but was –just as significantly, per-
haps –produced after the defeat of Mughal forces by their Safavid rivals in the
imperial borderland.133
This last fact points at once to the power and fragility of millenarian and
sacred sovereignty. Only circulated after Badauni’s death, during the reign of
Jahangir, the Muntakhab al-Tawarikh (‘Selected Histories’) became a bestseller
despite having swiftly been banned by the emperor. Badauni was the trans-
lator into Persian of the Ramayana and Mahabharata and a Persian secretary
at the Mughal court. In the main a conventional chronicle, the Muntakhab
criticises Akbar for ‘trying to mimic the messianic claims of Shah Ismail’, as
well as ‘tales about Akbar that were “unmentionable” (na guftan)’.134 Badauni
related with displeasure the liberty with which Akbar departed from Sunni
orthodoxy, signalling that not all were sold on this new kind of kingship: a
permissive attitude toward that which was haram (proscribed) –including
alcohol, the presence of dogs, and the proximity to (and eating of) swine –
was bad enough, but the emperor’s decree that everyone prostrate in front of
him in performance of the sijda, the ritual submission performed before God,
was especially scandalous in its implication that Akbar considered himself
a divine being.135 Aside from such charges of heresy, millennial fervour was
itself destabilising, for there arose a clamour of rival claims voiced by those
supposing to be the true mujaddid, such as Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi. And, of
course, rival princes were often the focus of transigent Islamic loyalties that
had the effect of moderating the emperor’s sacral claims to kingly authority
(§7.3.1).
How did imperial muridi fare over the seventeenth century, when, from
around the tenth year of Shah Jahan’s reign, the emperor moved toward recon-
ciliation of life within the court and country at large with the demands voiced
by the Sunni ulama?136 There was sufficient room for Shah Jahan to placate the
ulama while continuing to express his sovereignty within established idioms.
On the one hand, the emperor could reinstitute imperial patronage of the Hajj,
implement strictures against the building or repair of non-Muslims’ places
of worship, and transform muridi into the institution of hereditary service
and kinship to the emperor (khanazadgi).137 On the other hand, Shah Jahan
133 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 265–79, for the emperors’ correspondences from this time.
134 Moin, Millennial, citations 136 and 153, respectively. A few years after Badauni and his
collaborators produced the main text, Abu al-Fazl wrote a preface to the Razmnama in which
he accorded the non-Islamic Indian text the power to overturn Islamic theology: Truschke,
Culture, 126–33.
135 Note that Badauni was not averse to the power of saints and messiahs –quite the contrary,
in fact –merely that he objected to the character of Akbar’s claims of sacred kingship: Moin,
Millennial, 155–61.
136 For a reproduction of a picture of the emperor Shah Jahan on a globe, very much in a pic-
torial lineage traceable to the imagery of his father discussed above, see: Asher and Talbot,
India, 236.
360 Kingship
could favour as his heir the intellectually esoteric Dara Shukoh rather than the
more legalistic and sharia-minded (if not quite puritanical) Aurangzeb; order
the building of the Taj Mahal, the whole scheme of which was inspired by
theological and mystical ideas (§9.3.1); draw connection between himself and
Solomon; and style himself sahib qiran-i sani, this title having currency not in
Islamic scripture but in diverse bodies of astrological thought.138
One way of comprehending these divergences is to distinguish the rhetorical
and textual domains of his kingship, which conformed to scriptural Islam,
from the visual and performative, which transgressed it, as Moin highlights in
his work.139 Take, for instance, the emperor’s appearance at the jharoka-i dar-
shan, where he received the supplication of petitioners, embassies from foreign
powers, and marked festivals and auspicious events (including Nowruz, which
was not strictly Islamic but its celebration justified by Islamic scholars, none-
theless). These were especially constructed for Shah Jahan as stages for the
performance of his embodied, sacred kingship, and their precise positioning
was dictated by solar cosmologies.140
8.4
Shahanshah-i Giti-Sitan (King of the World-Conquering Kings):
The Mughals, Universal Sovereignty, and Global Rivalries
Two pictures, produced only a quarter-century yet thousands of miles apart,
are striking in their resemblance. The older, painted around 1592 by Marcus
Gheeraerts the Younger, is the famous ‘Ditchley Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth
I. The queen made powerful use of her portrait, which was painted regularly,
reproduced widely, and was replete with very consciously chosen symbols. For
their part, her nobility displayed an eagerness at acquiring such pictures and
making them a central part of their collections, often hung surrounded by
likenesses of themselves and their family members to visually set forth patri-
monial ties between the royal line and their own dynasties.141 Gloriana stands
upon a globe in life-size in the Ditchley Portrait, for the canvas is almost two-
and-a-half metres tall, the visible portion of that globe showing her English
domains, her ancestors having begun the colonial reconquest of Ireland a few
decades prior. The picture was painted for Sir Henry Lee, whom the queen
had forgiven and brought back into her favour, and possibly commemorates
an elaborate entertainment organised for the monarch either at Lee’s seat at
138 Aurangzeb did, from time to time, use the sacred kingly inheritance of his forebears; Eaton,
Persianate Age, 333–34. For an interrogation of Aurangzeb’s conception of political sover-
eignty, and the shift away from sacral and embodied kingship to the king as a font of the law,
see: Kaicker, The King, 102–07.
140 Ibid, 219–24.
141 See: Strong, Gloriana, with discussion of the Ditchley Portrait on 134–41, and portrait
medallions worn around the neck on 121–24. This last was roughly contemporaneous with
painted cameos of Akbar being worn in the turbans of his disciples: Richards, Mughal, 47–48.
See, also: §3.3.2.
Kingship 361
Ditchley or the nearby palace at Woodstock.142 The message of forgiveness

is communicated in numerous ways: her feet resting on Oxfordshire, Ditchley
being in that county; the allegory of the parting of the storm clouds (on the
right) to reveal bright skies (left); and a number of Latin inscriptions, inter-
pretable as ‘She gives and does not expect’, ‘She can but does not take revenge’,
and ‘In giving back she increases’.143 The subject of the sonnet in the middle-
right of the picture is the sun –a symbol of Elizabeth and other monarchs long
before the birth of the Sun King, Louis XIV.
At twenty-three centimetres in length, scarcely a tenth of the size of the
Ditchley Portrait, is Abu al-Hasan’s famous allegorical representation of a
meeting of Jahangir and Shah Abbas discussed in the previous section. An
obvious difference between the two images can be mentioned outright: whereas
the Ditchley Portrait was commissioned by a high-ranking royal servant,
Jahangir was the patron of the latter picture, perhaps even supervising its pro-
duction in 1618.144 A number of similarities are also obvious, however. First,
that the Mughal and Safavid rulers stand on a globe; the Timurid dynast
upon a lion sprawled out on his ancestral homeland in central Asia, his com-
panion on a lamb curled over the Safavid domains, the riches of Mughal India
stretching out before them toward the bottom margin. Second, that this is also
a commemorative image, except a portent rather than an actual event is its
subject. And third, that themes of forgiveness and submission are also evident,
as is the symbolism of the sun and the use of allegory. Comparison of the two
pictures is tantalising. Could the former have informed the latter?145
Elizabeth I was repeatedly pictured with globes, the visible portion of which
or what was covered by her hand –the Americas, as in the famous ‘Armada
Portrait’ –indicating her expanding domains.146 A steady stream of European
pictures found their way to the Mughal court, injecting miniature painting
with new compositional forms, subjects, and symbols that worked with
Mughal ideas, such as the halo or nimbus (§9.3.2). Globes and atlases were
also gifted by the Europeans to the Mughal emperors (§10.4). Thus, whether
a copy of the Ditchley Portrait or a similar picture served as a prototype, or
whether Mughal artists coincidentally saw in globes the same potential iden-
tified by their counterparts in England, the globe entered Mughal art around
this time, becoming a feature of Jahangir’s and Shah Jahan’s portraits. Just as
Mughal artists’ appropriation of the halo from European art intersected with
the court’s ongoing engagement with various strands of thought about light
142 Yates, Astraea, 89–95, for Lee’s wider implication in Elizabethan imperialism.
143 ‘Queen Elizabeth I’ aka ‘The Ditchley Portrait’ (Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger; c. 1592; oil
on canvas), National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 2561, which can be viewed online via the
collection database.
144 On Jahangir’s interest in art and instruction/supervision of his artists, see: §9.3.2.
145 English paintings were viewed by Mughal artists and perhaps had a great impact because all
European artworks hitherto brought to the atelier were prints: Beach, Imperial Image, 30–31.
146 There are actually three versions of the Armada Portrait: Strong, Gloriana, 130–33.
362 Kingship
and illumination originating in the Indo-Islamicate world, so, too, was Mughal
artists’ appropriation of new cartographic ideas emerging in Europe used in
ways that fit with the court’s claims about its sovereignty. Jahangir was, as his
regnal name suggests, a ‘world-seizer’ –but where or what was that world over
which he was sovereign?147
The mid-seventeenth century Mughal court was among the most cosmo-
politan the world over, receiving representation from across Eurasia, not to
mention reflecting the diversity of the subcontinent itself. Chandar Bhan
Brahman took pains to describe all those who assembled in the Hall of Special
and General Audience. They were masters of the sword and of the pen, from
khans and sultans, to their wazirs, mirs (princes), and mirzas. There were also
‘elite sayyids, great shaikhs, eminent scholars, ingenious doctors and agreeable
courtiers of various classes’, and those merchant princes trying to make their
fortunes in India.148 They hailed from all the major ports and polities around
the Indian Ocean world, from Abyssinia to China; from across continental
Eurasia’s worlds of settled and sown between the Ottoman Mediterranean,
Russia, and Turkestan; not to mention those Europeans also present –offi-
cial representatives of European states, but also of trading companies and
Christian missions. The Indians and Afghans belonged to the great warrior
clans and royal lineages, as well as notable scribal and priestly communities,
the dizzying range of ethno-linguistic, occupational, and caste groups of the
subcontinent listed by Chandar Bhan amidst all the cities and countries from
beyond the Mughal realm that manifested their presence before the Mughal
padshah. When the ‘Great Moghul’ claimed universal sovereignty, therefore, he
staked his claim in front of such an assembly, some of whom even had the priv-
ilege of seeing pictures of the world-conquering king standing atop the globe.
One conception of universal sovereignty consists in a ruler’s command
over an unrestricted domain; they were sovereign of all peoples and places,
and potentially a great king-of-kings in a hierarchic or stacked conception of
lordship and statehood. This idea of universal sovereignty flourished in the
early modern world: having nearly dwindled ‘into a local German concern,’
Anthony Pagden writes, the Holy Roman Empire took on ‘once more some-
thing of its old significance’ under Charles V, whose territorial claims ringed
the globe.149 Sycophantic contemporaries called him dominus mundi or ‘Lord
of the World’, while the conquistador of Mexico, Hernán Cortés, addressed him
duly as ‘king of kings’ and ‘monarch of the Universe’.150 The eventual break-
up of the Habsburg monarchy into two branches (Spanish, central European)
meant this was not politically lasting, yet nor was it merely a ‘phantom revival’
of the ‘universal imperialist hope’. Charles V’s imperialist grandeur ‘endured
147 Ramaswamy, ‘Conceit’, 760, 769.

148 Kinra, ‘Handling Diversity’, 253–54, for this excerpt based on his own translation of the
Chahar Chaman. See, also: §7.2.3.
149 Yates, Astraea, 1.
150 Rady, Habsburgs, 64; Pagden, Lords, especially 29–46.
Kingship 363
and exercised an almost undying influence’, not least because the ‘imperial
theme’ –as Frances Yates put it so pithily –was translated to England and
France’s national monarchies. Elizabeth I, for instance, was often portrayed as
‘Astraea, the just virgin of the golden age’ in poems and plays by Shakespeare
and Spenser and countless others, for hers was an epoch of national expansion
and the Crown’s supremacy over both Church and state consistently linked in
Elizabethan thought to notions of universal and sacred empire.151
Universal sovereignty need not involve a limitless domain: with the con-
quest of the Americas, the Habsburgs really could dream of mastery over a
truly world state for a time, whereas Louis XIV’s ambition for his monarchia
universalis centred on obtaining mastery over Europe.152 Geography was
inextricably linked to universalist thought, but so, too, was history. ‘Ancient
prophesies’ played a vital part in fleshing out the Habsburg’s claims to global
greatness and temporal leadership, much as they gave gravitas to the more
modest claims of English kings to rule over Great Britain.153 Although the uni-
versalist idea had many forms and moorings, it bears remembering that these
were not newly invented in early modern times but of long pedigree, perhaps
best epitomised by the Roman empire-builder, Julius Caesar, as well as the
Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great. Both figures were invoked by
rulers from western Europe to the Islamic world in the articulation of their
own universalist ideologies. For example, Ferdowsi’s Shahnama celebrated
Alexander (Iskander) among other real and legendary kings, so that the medi-
eval Persian epic maintained its currency for centuries in royal courts, with
the Safavid and Mughal rulers both patronising the reproduction and illustra-
tion of the text, meanwhile also referencing Iskander in connection with their
kingship.154
Early modern globalisation led to the intensification of monarchical rival-
ries, borrowings, and reachings into the past. The Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry is
said to have reached a fever pitch by the 1520s, as the two powers competed over
central Europe and the Mediterranean, and as the latter linked the Old World
and the New.155 Thereafter, the performance of kingly power became truly
global in scope with the creation of the Iberian viceroyalties, which enabled the
(Spanish) Habsburg monarch to ‘move’ from the Old World to the New in the
form of his viceroy –quite literally the king’s living image. It was the viceroy’s
role to mirror the king’s celestial court and act as an exemplary centre for the
king’s distant subjects, achieved through various rituals, processions, and pomp
enacted on a ‘stage-set’ of palaces and triumphal arches especially constructed
151 Yates, Astraea, 31, 39, for citations, and 29–87 for analysis.
152 Louis’ critics did not fail to point out how shrunken his hopes were in comparison to other
would-be universal sovereigns: Pagden, Lords, 4.
153 Rady, Habsburgs; Thomas, Religion, 415–22.
154 Brend and Melville, Epic.
155 Adelman, ‘Mimesis’, 82, for citation, and 83. See, also: Pagden, Lords, for the dialogue of
Spanish, French, and British imperial ideology in the Americas.
364 Kingship
in the urban centres of the American colonies.156 Such developments influenced

French and English imperialism, with Elizabethan globalism also influencing
Mughal universalism, as we have seen, not to mention the effects of Mughal
and Ottoman rivalry.157 All this points to the highly complex, imbricated dia-
lectic of competition and convergence in kingly presentation rippling this way
and that across a vast terrain.
At the same time, however, we ought not lose sight of powers already in
fairly close contact, for some were likewise emboldened to make very auda-
cious moves in the enlargement of their authority. Chinese dynasties had
long sought legitimacy with reference to broadly Confucian ideas about the
idealised world with a ruler at the centre of the Middle Kingdom granted the
Mandate of Heaven, and a world of tributary states beyond. These very ideas –
originating from within the Han cultural world –were being appropriated by
the early seventeenth century not only by the Qing conquerors from beyond
the Han-sphere as they sought to claim the Mandate and thus seize China
from the Ming, but also by Korean (Choson) and Japanese (Tokugawa)
dynastic states, hitherto ruled by a figure who was treated as a vassal of the
Chinese emperor. The result was that the Korean and Japanese states pressed
their superiority over the Qing while the latter tried to take China, so that, as
Evelyn Rawski makes clear, the whole order of Chinese universalism was being
upturned at the margins even as it was reinvigorated at the centre.158
And, finally, it would be unwise to overlook the powerful critique of uni-
versal monarchy within the metropole itself.159 The endurance of the imperial
theme and associated notions of universalism in the seventeenth century is
truly remarkable. The possibility of a universal monarch presiding over a uni-
versal empire was increasingly doubted at the very same time it was derided by
the likes of the political philosopher and legal theorist, Hugo Grotius (1583–
1645). It would eventually become, by the nineteenth century, a distasteful relic
(at worst) or romantic ideal (at best).160
The metaphor of the globe in the portraits of Elizabeth I and Jahangir
demonstrates these contradictory currents, one undergirding and the other
undermining universal sovereignty. As knowledge of the terrestrial globe –
geographic and political –was expanded and improved, so the (limited) reach
of a particular king’s rule was placed in perspective. As the circulation of
people both quickened in pace and widened in scale, so kings were more fre-
quently confronted with representatives from other states, near and far. On the
one hand, the globe became –like the Mughal court’s enterprises in transla-
tion and the production of dictionaries and grammars (§3.3.3) –a technology
of power, a means of representing (global) domination. In this aspect, new
156 Cañeque, Living Image.

157 Yates, Astraea, 121–48.
158 Rawksi, ‘Sons’, especially 237, 242–48.
159 Pagden, Lords, 46–62.
160 Bang and Kołodziejczyk, ‘Elephant’, 3–7.
Kingship 365
knowledge of cartography or geography and newfound opportunities for the

receipt of foreign emissaries were enthusiastically put to the task of fabricating
a royal identity based on universalism –a universalism effected either through
conquest and expansion or through the submission of tributaries and vassals.
Herein lies the significance, then, of the rituals of submission and receipt of
honour (nazr and khilat) undertaken not only with Mughal nobles but also
visitors from other lands, and of the proclamation of universal civility or sulh-i
kull (§3.3.4). Herein lies the significance, too, of the global luxuries received
from the universal monarch’s supplicants that are deliberately incorporated
into Mughal pictures; objects such as Italian furniture and drinking vessels,
Chinese porcelain, Venetian glass, and a clockwork statuette of Diana on a
stag from Augsburg depicted in Jahangiri painting, for instance.161
On the other hand, the globe served as a reckoning, for it made manifest the
expanding frontiers of knowledge, including of imperial rivals’ dominions. In
the portrait with Shah Abbas, Jahangir’s placement at the head of the Indian
subcontinent and astride his ancestral lands in Timurid Eurasia reflected
what succoured and what undermined his kingly identity. It conveyed know-
ledge of the geography of the Mughal realm but also a consciousness of the
limits of his temporal power as a king, even one who proclaimed himself the
king-of-kings (shahanshah). It forged a link between the Mughal family and
their famous world-conquering ancestor (Timur) to bolster what was perhaps
a precarious –if not fragile –universalism, while more or less desperately
tempering the claims of rival, royal dynasties. That history might repeat itself
could also be a source of anguish, however. Just as Humayun found refuge
at the court of Shah Tahmasp, where he pledged subservience to the Sufi
murid-cum-king and received Safavid aid in the reconquest of Hindustan, so
Shah Suleiman (r. 1666–94) wrote to Aurangzeb to mock the latter’s inability
to subdue Shivaji, pointedly offering his military assistance to invoke the
memory of the dynasty’s earlier humiliation.162 Just as the Mughals forged a
link to their Timurid ancestry by building Timurid-style buildings and laying
out Timurid-style gardens, feasting and entertaining their guests and nobles
in such spaces, so the Safavids kept alive the memory of Mughal fealty rather
vividly at the audience hall of the Chihil Sultan Palace at Isfahan, where
visitors could look upon a huge mural depicting this prior episode in Safavid-
Mughal relations.163
Overall, then, we can say that the quickening and broadening of global
connection contributed to mimesis and convergence in monarchical presentation
as well as competition, serving at once to puff-up Mughal kingly presentation to
certain audiences and yet to dampen or circumscribe Mughal sovereignty before
161 Koch, ‘Mughal Padshahs’, 201–02.

163 Ibid, 235–37, where it is noted that the mural was one of four, the others showing the foun-
dational Safavid victory over the Uzbeks in Shah Ismail’s time and the later refuge given to
Uzbek rulers at the Safavid court.
366 Kingship
others.164 Here, an instructive comparison can be made with their Ottoman

rivals, who were able to draw upon the symbolic capital and resources of the
Byzantine Empire, following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and of
the guardianship of the Holy Places, after taking the Hejaz in 1517. In their offi-
cial stylings, they employed the Arabic term sultan; this was actually the least
prestigious title, for it could refer to any ruler within or beyond the Ottoman
domains. To distinguish themselves, therefore, Ottoman rulers employed a
range of other titles side-by-side with sultan: the Turko-Mongolic term khan,
used because they conquered the former Chinggisid domains and because of the
appeal of any connection with Chinggis and Timur; Persian terms such as shah
and padshah, as well as kayser (Caesar) and kisra (Cyrus); honorifics drawing
on Alexander the Great (Iskander) or the Byzantine emperor (such as basileus);
and the mantle of khalifa (caliph).165 The Ottoman Chancery only rarely and
unwillingly referred to other rulers as padshahs: the Habsburg emperors were
referred to as the ‘kings of Vienna’ until 1606, although they were not truly
accorded equal status even thereafter, while the Spanish Habsburgs were merely
addressed as the ‘kings of Spain’.166 The Mughals were never accorded the title
of padshah despite employing it in their own correspondence, having grudgingly
conceded the Ottoman ruler’s right to use the term khalifa.167 In all this, the
Ottomans shifted carefully between titles as part of a conscious code-switching,
depending on which constituency within the multi-ethnic and geographically-
extensive empire they were facing, or else as circumstances dictated. Suleyman’s
failure to control Hungary, for example, prevented him from using the title sahib
qiran –with its Timurid associations and prolific use by the Mughal rulers –
until his successes against the Habsburgs signalled that he was –to an Ottoman
audience –the true recipient of that title.168
Similarly, Mughal correspondence provides a window onto the ways com-
petition with rivals forged convergences in kingly presentation. Shah Abbas,
for example, reproached Akbar for not writing to offer congratulations upon
his accession to the Safavid throne in 1587, reminding his Indian counterpart
of the Mughals’ indebtedness to the Safavid house. Akbar took four years
to reply, rebuking Shah Abbas for invoking a debt that had been spent and
reminding him that the Mughal house had, in himself, produced the greater
monarch. This last was achieved not only by outlining recent victories,
but also by offering advice on government; specifically –for these were the
years in which he established the dini-i ilahi and proclaimed sulh-i kull –by
scolding the Safavid king for not being broad church in outlook.169 This set
the tenor of Mughal-Safavid relations in Jahangir’s reign even as the Mughals
164 Bang and Kołodziejczyk, ‘Elephant’, 25–27, for the example of how Ottoman-Habsburg
rivalry dialectically shaped mimesis and convergence in kingly presentation.
165 Kołodziejczyk, ‘Khan’, 177–78, 181–89.
166 Ibid, 178.
167 Ibid, 179–81.
168 Şahin, Empire, 62.
169 Koch, ‘Mughal Padshahs’, 194–95.
Kingship 367
continued to selectively borrow from Persian culture and tradition to fabricate

their kingship.170 In contrast, Akbar had taken a rather different tone in an
earlier letter of 1582 to Philip II. Instead of proclaiming his universal sover-
eignty, he presented himself as an equal to the Iberian king. Philip II had just
become ruler of Portugal and its empire, which extended to Goa –where he
was represented by a viceroy –and was thus a potential ally for the Mughals
against the Ottomans.171 What the Mughals perceived as the Ottoman threat in
the western Indian Ocean was, as far as the Ottoman centre was concerned, the
sultan’s pressing of his universal sovereignty. These claims were notably jurid-
ical in nature, the consequence of the Ottoman encounter with representatives
of the Portuguese monarch in and around the Red Sea, as Giancarlo Casale’s
work valuably brings to light.172
For all this bluster, however, it should be emphasised that two aspects can
be distinguished within Mughal claims to universalism, and here it is useful to
return to Chandar Bhan Brahman’s description of the representation received
at the imperial court.173 First, there was the Mughal realm proper in all its
diversity; those places, peoples, and layers of authority brought under Mughal
control through conquest and accord. In placing Mughal kingship in a global
frame, one must not lose sight of this dimension of Mughal universalism –this
geographically circumscribed yet nonetheless impressive embrace of the diver-
sity of the Indian subcontinent. Second, however, was the whole world beyond
Mughal India, over whose rulers the Mughal padshah made bold yet blurry
claims of supremacy; here is universalism in its grander and more unattain-
able yet more commonly understood form as absolute rule over an unrestricted
domain.
Were these different kinds of universalism and did they lead to discrete
claims about a ruler’s universal sovereignty for distinct audiences? Or were they
somehow linked, as Ali Anooshahr suggests in a study of the Tarikh-i Alfi?
To make sense of this possibility, it bears remembering that the architects of
sulh-i kull were those avant-garde thinkers also at work on Akbar’s ‘Millennial
History’ (§2.5.2). The practice of sulh-i kull and dialogue with various groups
necessarily involved recognising and reifying religious and other communities,
rulers and their territories; one could only extend universal peace to Jains, say,
or to the Safavids/Iranians if one had distinguished them in the first place.
This logic operated in a portion of the Tarikh in which one finds among the
first clear conceptions of ‘Mughal Hindustan’ as a territorialised and thus
delimited entity; likewise, Safavid Iran and the Ottoman realm beyond. What
170 Ibid, passim.

171 Ibid, 196–98.
172 Casale, Ottoman.
173 Here, students may find Pagden’s discussion of the meanings of ‘imperium’ in pre-1800 Europe
in Lords, 12–17, a useful and complementary discussion, for that term could variously be taken
to mean ‘limited and independent or “perfect” rule’, or ‘a territory embracing more than one
political community’, or even ‘the absolute sovereignty of a single individual’ –Lords, 17.
368 Kingship
distinguished the Mughal king as greater –and made him a universal sovereign
even as he ruled over a restricted domain –was that he was the wellspring of
the ‘universal peace’.174
8.5 Conclusion
Let us return to the portraits of Elizabeth I and Jahangir. The former
commemorated an actual event and was commissioned by, and for, a high-
ranking Tudor serviceman. It was large and placed on display in Lee’s home.
It was made to be seen by his contemporaries, a reminder to men of his social
standing of his return to the queen’s favour. The second was produced under
the Mughal emperor’s direction and was intended to remain within the royal
collection. The issue of who would (not) have seen such pictures has been a
vexed one, but a consensus has formed around the following ideas.175 First,
that manuscripts and miniature paintings were small and sometimes expensive
items but were not trifles produced for their own sake. A commission was often
supervised by the emperor or another courtier through to completion, testa-
ment to the importance of words and images combined to kingship. Second,
that although few people would have been shown or given access to these
works, librarians’ marks, the recension of (portions of) texts, and the copying
of imagery all demonstrate that they were inspected by successive emperors, the
imperial family, and members of the nobility, and also consulted by artisans
and litterateurs. A small audience does not entail these works’ insignificance,
especially when one considers that an act of artistic or literary patronage had
a lengthy afterlife, with works seen by successive generations, thus often being
produced with a view to posterity in the first place.176 Thinking about audiences
is important, as is consideration of the means, purposes, and critics of kingly
(re)presentations. By way of conclusion, then, a few tentative responses to
those questions posed at the start of this chapter are in order.
How –that is, through what media, means, and with reference to which
ideas or concepts –was the king’s authority fabricated? Mughal authority lay
atop the power and right of a plethora of horizontally competing and verti-
cally stacked stakeholders spread over a vast and highly heterogeneous area.177
The sequence of Mughal emperors not only had their own distinct identities;
they also faced many different audiences or constituencies, thus shifting points
of emphasis in their self-presentation. The influences on their kingship were
more multitudinous than can be neatly summarised here, save to highlight
that they: were Sunnis yet open to Shi‘i beliefs and practices, as well as those
174 See: Anooshahr, ‘Mughal History’.

175 Asher, ‘Sun’, 175–76.
176 That said, reproduction did not mean (close or careful) reading of a work, as Truschke
notes: Culture, 211–14.
177 Anooshahr, ‘Imperial Discourse’, here 161, and passim, goes some way to finding an essential
consistency in the different elements constitutive of Mughal imperial sovereignty.
Kingship 369
associated with Sufi holy men, including the very idea of muridi; made use of
their Timurid descent, adopting such titles as sahib qiran; emerged from within
the Persianate sphere and acted as patrons of Persian language and culture;
embedded themselves within the Indian ecumene at large (and Rajput trad-
ition, more specifically) in their dress and rituals, not least darshan; and tapped
into those millenarian and messianic currents that rippled across the early
modern world. To this can be added ideas of illumination and the importance
of receiving and (re)presenting the king’s divine light, the significance given to
miraculous events and dreams, and different conceptions of universalism.
This chapter has discussed the role of architecture –imperial palaces and
gardens, as well as more overtly public sites, such as tombs and monuments –as
ceremonial stages for the performance of kingship, as representations of kingly
identity, and as lasting reminders of the exercise of the wise and just rule of
particular kings. Alongside such visual or material productions can be added
manuscripts and miniature paintings in which a ruler’s identity was fabricated
for their self-legitimation, if not also as part of their self-presentation. A range
of texts –works of history, genealogy, and biography, but also religious
texts, lexicons and glossaries, as well as correspondences and the titles they
contained –were the other vehicles for the fabrication and expression of kingly
identity. Texts and images also allow historians to retrieve the world of ritual
and performance through which Mughal kingship was presented, for they con-
tain conscious re-presentations of such events and occurrences. Through such
means and media, it was possible not only to celebrate the Mughal padshahs’
heroic conquests and role as ghazi sultans, but also proclaim their centrality to
the cosmic order and love of peace, their role as patrons and connoisseurs of
culture and learning, and their virtues –magnanimity, mercy, piety.
How was criticism of kingly authority voiced, by whom, and for what
purposes? Much as Louis XIV was accused of divertissement, in the double
sense of putting the populace to sleep or distracting them with spectacular
entertainments, so this chapter has tried to critically reflect on the aims of the
Mughal kings and their critics alike. Mughal kingship drew together recent and
older Turko-Mongolic, Persianate, Islamicate, Indic, and even Hellenic reli-
gious, royal, and intellectual traditions, a fact celebrated by liberal historians.178
Openness to these influences –distinct yet already swirling together in pre-
Mughal times –was always political, however, a fact not sufficiently captured
by the rather benign terminology of ‘syncretism’ and ‘composite cultures’,
‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. On the one hand, were those
empowered by the imperial project, not only high-ranking nobles, such as Raja
Man Singh or Abd al-Rahim Khan-i Khanan, but also those Brahmans and
Jains involved in the translation of Sanskrit knowledge into Persian, some
even penning panegyrics praising the emperor or else writing favourably about
178 For a critique of these etic categories, and an alternative analysis based on more emic
concepts: Anooshahr, ‘Imperial Discourse’.
370 Kingship
the Mughals in their own histories (§3.3.3). On the other hand, there were so
many political rivals, who were disenfranchised by –or even despised the very
notion of –the Mughal imperium, as well as members of the ulama and men
of orthodox Sunni belief like Badauni, who were alienated and profoundly
troubled by what they perceived as the heresies perpetrated by the emperor
and his court. Badauni may not have openly criticised the emperor during his
lifetime, yet others –Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, for instance –tapped into millen-
arian currents and disputed the emperor’s claim of being the mujaddid.179 A less
risky strategy was for learned men to pen a treatise in the genre of advice litera-
ture, as some Mughal and Ottoman writers sought to do by way of critique.180
How was kingship reconstituted or transformed during transfers of power
from one monarch to his successor? The Timurid connection was realised
through performance and commemorative architecture early in Babur’s reign
over Hindustan, but the Mughals were always aware of the limitations of
rooting their legitimacy in Timurid concepts and ancestry at this juncture. Once
the threat posed by their rivals dissipated and Mughal gains were consolidated,
the dynasty more readily cultivated the Timurid connection and harvested its
fruit –in their titles and ceremonial, in literary works and visual culture, for
example. Yet, by Akbar’s reign, it became necessary to break the power of
those central Asian nobles who remained a source of disquiet and outright
rebellion, either because of their egalitarian and independent spirit and their
desire for an equal share of the spoils, which entailed an unwillingness to
submit to an almighty king (§7.1.1), or else because they hailed from aristo-
cratic lineages that looked down on the Mughals.181 At this point, the Mughals
looked to their Rajput servicemen and the swelling Iranian contingent, which
permitted the exploitation of Indic and Persianate kingly traditions in the fab-
rication of Akbar’s kingship, involving a much more hierarchical organisation
of authority, reinforced through ritual and performance.
The Jahangiri and Shah Jahani eras saw the ongoing development of kingly
identity, differing as power was transferred from father to son, but –broadly
speaking –travelling along a trajectory: at once increasingly cosmopolitan,
in reflection of the Mughal realm’s place in the world, yet also speaking to
an alienated Sunni ulama, with whom a rapprochement was needed. This is
not to say that Mughal kingship was the product of circumstances rather
than personalities. Advisors such as Abu al-Fazl played their part, as did the
emperors themselves, whose personal interests shaped the character of their
179 According to Mughal sources, the execution of the fifth Sikh guru, Arjan (d. 1606), was due to
his support for Prince Khusrau, during the latter’s ill-fated coup in 1605 of the Mughal throne
from his father, Jahangir. Richards notes that Jahangir was ‘consistently hostile to popularly
venerated religious figures’, perhaps most acutely around the time of his succession due to
feelings of political insecurity; Richards, Mughal, 97.
180 Alvi, trans., Advice, for a Jahangiri-era mirror for princes text in translation.
181 On the latter point, see: Anooshahr, ‘Mongrels’. Turani readers of the Tarikh-i Alfi, Anooshahr
claims in ‘Mughal History’, were basically being offered a clear vision of the new identity they
would have to assume if they wished to survive.
Kingship 371
kingly identity and the manner of its presentation, not to mention the artists
and writers literally (re)producing the kingly image. Aside from such clichés
as Jahangir the intellectual and connoisseur or Aurangzeb the ghazi-sultan,
furthermore, this chapter has drawn on recent work to highlight the shifting
patronage of different Sufi orders and lineages as part of the imperial centre’s
developing spiritual- intellectual (and political) interests under different
monarchs. In spite of all this, finally, certain aspects of Mughal kingship were
broadly continuous or developed rather gradually: rituals of submission and
investiture or presentation for darshan, for instance.
How were kingly identities and ideology reinforced over the course of the
king’s reign, in which his glory was inevitably punctured by episodic defeat or
failure? Here it is crucial to remember that kingly identity was not defined once
and for all at the start of a monarch’s reign in ways that might have made it
stable and unchanging. Akbar’s monarchy, for example, changed in character
as Bairam Khan’s regency came to an end and continued to develop in his
adult life, as evinced by his cultivation of relations with the Chishtiya, only
then to distance himself from Sufi lineages in the 1570s and the years in which
he formulated the din-i ilahi. A limitation of the present analysis has been
a focus on the Mughal classical age, largely because studies of kingly iden-
tity have focused on the first Mughal emperors. Or, to put it differently, most
scholars have focused on the very period of expanding Mughal hegemony,
when devastating setbacks were few. What is missing from the analysis is how
kingly self-presentation evolved during the eighteenth century in response to
the assertiveness of new powerholders and the retreat of Mughal territorial
control. What is clear, however, is that such a factor as Timurid charisma could
be used to accentuate success but also gloss over defeat, as evident from its
use in Jahangir and Shah Jahan’s reigns. That said, evidence presented in this
chapter also makes plain that monarchs were conscious not to make hollow
claims about their supremacy and made pious or practical undertakings, like
public building works, in periods of relative weakness.
And, finally, who constituted the ‘public’ or audience to kingly
(re)presentations, whose opinion was being moulded or manipulated? The
Mughal centre was peripatetic, the emperor embarking on pilgrimages and on
tours of his realm, which provided opportunities to meet certain nobles and
holy men. The imperial camp and its procession was a moving majesty, giving
ordinary folk a glimpse of monarchy. Such occurrences ought not be under-
stood only in functional terms, nor did all go as courtiers had planned or as
chroniclers subsequently had it: the aim may have been to overawe subjects,
but processions and public events were also opportunities for local elites to
grab some attention, while the disaffected might mount popular resistance to
royalty.182 Sometimes, nevertheless, the Mughal king might have come more
182 Here, I take my cue from Ruiz, King Travels, especially 99–104, 159–92. See, also: Kaicker,
The King.
372 Kingship
directly into contact with the public, when distributing alms on the occasion
of religious festivals or celebrations at palaces and monuments, for instance,
as well as the daily presentation for darshan and the reception of petitioners.
These appearances and performances –in person, otherwise in absentia –
were complemented by the representation made by imperial servicemen, who
projected the imperial image through their own building works, even as they
pursued their own claims to authority via the very same undertakings.
All this lends credence to Kaya Şahin’s observation that the Ottoman,
Safavid, and Mughal rulers all employed elaborate new ceremonies and public
rituals ‘to create ideological and cultural links between sovereigns and subjects’,
so that what has long been seen as part and parcel of Renaissance culture and
the patronage of European monarchies was, in fact, a much broader phenom-
enon.183 At the same time, however, the presentation of Mughal kingship was
aimed at a narrower audience. It most often took place in intimate surroundings
and its audience was largely constituted of the imperial family and imperial
servicemen, whose continued loyalty and service mattered to the integrity of
the empire, and of visitors from other realms, whose recollections transported
the king’s majesty to the courts of their own masters, whether in the nearby
Deccan Sultanates or the abode of the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople. It
was also for the king himself, since it was through his self-presentation and
re-presentation that his monarchical ideology was fabricated –a fact that has
perhaps been overlooked by historians keen to identify the sources of political
‘legitimacy’.
Royalty, noted the historical anthropologist of India, Bernard Cohn, was
essential to the Indian social order –so it is perhaps not entirely surprising that
the mascot of newly-independent India’s national carrier was an Indian maha-
raja (great king).184 As evinced by numerous examples throughout this chapter,
Mughal kingship was highly historically reflexive, drawing on extant or older
royal traditions, political and philosophical treatises, and so forth. In turn,
numerous elements of what became identifiable with Mughal kingship and
ideology were codified into what Bernard Cohn termed the ‘Mughal idiom’
as they were emulated, appropriated, and adapted by (new) rulers fashioning
their own kingdoms and fabricating their own presentation over the eight-
eenth century.185 It was part of the invention of tradition, the Mughal idiom
remaining so palpable –long after the political centre of gravity had shifted
183 Şahin, Empire, 51. See: Ruiz, King Travels, for a rich study focussing on Philip II’s Spain.
184 Cohn, Colonialism, 113–14. To this it may be added the example of Shivaji’s coronation and
debates about caste in an age of adharma (disorder), described in §2.1.2. See, also: Narayana
Rao and Subrahmanyam, ‘Ideologies’, on the cosmic discourses of imperialism in Vijayanagara
and some of its successor states.
185 This was also true within the Mughal world itself, with Mughal architecture continuing to
evolve while remaining historically reflexive, consciously referencing the ‘golden age’ as the
empire retreated in the eighteenth century: Chanchal, Architecture.
Kingship 373
from Shahjahanabad to more radiant courts –as to become part of the pomp
and ritual of British India (§9.3).186
So potent were the languages of Mughal kingship that its forms –if not its
content –inspired the Mughals’ rivals and successors, too: even a ruling house
as hostile to Mughal authority as the Rajput Sisodiyas took to promoting their
genealogy, emphasising their supposed descent from Rama’s solar dynasty, as
a foil to the Mughals’ Timurid connections, to say nothing of the emulation
of Mughal sovereignty at the Sikh courts of the later gurus.187 Indeed, this
emphasis on Mughal kingship and on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
is neither to suggest the regional states of eighteenth century did not witness
new developments in kingly presentation, nor that Indian kingly presentation
outside the Mughal realm (in the Deccan Sultanates and the coastal kingdoms,
for instance) was unchanging in the same period, even if it has not been pos-
sible in this chapter to give them over to scrutiny. It was to the eighteenth
century that C.A. Bayly traced the origins of new patriotisms, often based
around regional identities and locality, which developed through the colonial
period and are still developing today.188 In the new states, kingship therefore
evolved between the push and pull of the global and local, the cosmopolitan
and the vernacular, the so-called Mughal style and the (re)invention of nativist
traditions, to which we turn our attention in the next chapter.189
186 Cohn, ‘Representing’.

187 Asher and Talbot, India, 258–59; Fenech, Darbar
188 Bayly, Origins.
189 In this, various discourses of sovereignty came to the fore, of which Maratha notions of
swarajaya (self-rule) that drew on local ideas of zamindari sovereignty studied by André Wink
is but one example: Land and Sovereignty, 32–51.
9 Vernacularisation
The period between Timur’s invasion and Humayun’s second reign has lately
been described as India’s ‘long fifteenth century’ and reclaimed by scholars as
an important period of study.1 Rather than an interstitial time when little or
nothing happened, Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh regard it as an era of
decentralisation and even ‘democratisation’ in culture and society, as in pol-
itics. It was a time when ‘arriviste patrons could have genealogies and tales
composed; performers could reinvent the epics for a new world; upwardly
mobile chieftains could lay claim to languages and forms from which they were
previously excluded.’2 Political turmoil engendered a great deal of peregrin-
ation, perhaps even kickstarting the greater mobility of early modern times,
whether ‘in search of employment or business opportunities, for pilgrimage,
war, or pleasure.’3 This helped spread local or regional languages and their
respective genres –including poems, stories, and histories, but also diction-
aries, criticism, guidebooks –as well as wider cultural forms or styles, be it in
music or painting, for instance, incorporating unmistakably localist imagery.
Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit continued to operate as translocal and
transregional, ‘classical’ or ‘high’ languages, but were also modulated to suit
new patrons and purposes, at the same time absorbing yet even competing with
vernacular languages. Sustained through the Mughal classical age, this trend
found a new impetus as the imperium began to fragment into the new regional
kingdoms. Like the long fifteenth century, the ‘long eighteenth century’ was
another period of cultural ferment amidst decentralisation. Likewise, it was
similarly dismissed as producing literature and art lacking refinement, making
it unworthy of scholarly attention until a radical change in perspective came
about only a few decades ago.4 Those political cycles examined in Chapter 7
1 Orsini and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 1.

2 Ibid, 2. On the last, see: Sreenivasan, ‘Warrior-Tales at Hinterland Courts’.
3 Orsini and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 2, for citation, and 33–35. Contemporaries were so aware of
this mobility that they theorised it or made it a motif in their work; see: de Bruijn and Bush,
‘Introduction’, 1–4, 7, for examples. See, also: Kapadia, ‘Local Kingdoms’, especially 234–40.
4 Compare, for instance, the world described by Sheikh in Forging –by which pastoralists and
peasants carved out territories for themselves and created courts, in the process shedding
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-9
Vernacularisation 375
clearly matter for cultural production and innovation, and vice versa, of which
a particular sort concerns us here –namely, literature, visual culture, and per-
formance in the vernacular.
‘Vernacularisation’ in south Asia began around the beginning of the second
millennium, spurred by the desire to replace a larger world and translocalism
with new and more local ways of making culture, to paraphrase the work of
Sheldon Pollock.5 It can touch any aspect of cultural production, from lan-
guage and literature, to the arts and architecture, and inflect broader changes
in aesthetics, from dress or fashion to politics (e.g., court rituals and kingly
presentation). It should be noted, however, that much as nations are ‘imagined
communities’, so, too, are local forms not so much immanent as invented or
‘naturalised’.6 In some cases, furthermore, early modern vernacularisation was
actually a step toward the creation of the ‘national’ cultures and identities of
modern times. A final issue touched upon in this chapter concerns the tension
between the local and the universal or between the specific and the standardised
engendered by vernacularisation.
Vertical and horizontal standardisation were, Victor Lieberman argues, cru-
cial to the emergence of successively more well-integrated and, consequently,
more successful states out of each political cycle (§7.5).7 Vernacular or localised
culture flourished, too, however. How was this so? On the one hand, to take
one of Lieberman’s examples, the creation of a network of Buddhist monas-
teries helped ‘standardise’ culture and secured its spread. On the other hand,
Burmese monks often chose to write in vernaculars rather than in Pali as they
sought to embed themselves within local society in mainland southeast Asia.8
This was part of a much broader phenomenon. Generalising early modern
developments in language use in south Asia, but equally true of other aspects
of culture in the period, Sumit Guha observes ‘a tension between hybridisation
tending toward assimilation and distinction tending toward establishing iden-
tity.’9 As relationships were redrawn between local or proto-national versus
translocal or cosmopolitan, and between high versus low registers or forms, so
standardisation often helped to articulate and eventually to sharpen the speci-
ficity of vernacular culture in early modern times, foreshadowing the global-
level process identified by C.A. Bayly as an integral part of the birth of the
modern world after c. 1780.10
local beliefs in favour of legitimation by larger and more orthodox religious groups –to the
processes described in §7.4.
5 See: Guha, ‘Bad Language’, 49.
6 On the process of ‘naturalisation’ and literary vernacularisation in India, see: Pollock,
‘Vernacular Millennium’, especially 41–43.
7 See, especially: Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii.
8 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 134, and passim.
9 Guha, ‘Bad Language’, 55.
10 Bayly, Birth, here especially 64–80. For a valuable critique of ‘cosmopolitanism’, not least
as it is formulated here: Strathern and Biedermann, ‘Introduction’, especially 3– 12. See,
also: O’Hanlon, ‘Cultural Pluralism’.
376 Vernacularisation
To grapple with the vernacularisation of language, we must first make sense

of two important languages –Sanskrit and Persian. As classical languages,
they were variously regionalised, localised, or made ‘fresh’, especially in the
early modern period, as we shall see in the next section. As cosmopolitan
languages, they increasingly faced competition from a range of vernaculars as
the latter became more sophisticated. Their status and significance was even-
tually restructured vis-à-vis these more obviously local tongues, or what we
can call Indic vernaculars, like Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, and Braj,
the development of which is the subject of the second section. The focus of
the third section shifts to other ways of making culture: architecture, painting,
and music. To get a handle on vernacularisation in these vast fields (itself a
limited selection), we must cast our gaze narrowly and examine the develop-
ment of an imperial or ‘high’ Mughal style, and its subsequent localisation in
the eighteenth-century successor states. Overall, vernacularisation was a long-
run process with important early modern phases, even as these had complex
causes and unfolded quite differently in different places and across different
forms of culture; its long-term impact is the subject of the conclusion.
9.1 The Sanskrit and Persian Cosmopolises

Sanskrit ‘denotes (and connotes) the very height of dignity’, for it literally
means ‘perfected’.11 It was widely venerated as devabhasha or devavani –the
language of the gods –being, after all, the language of Vedic, Tantric, and
other texts formative of what we nowadays lump together as Hinduism (§2.1).
Pollock calls this formation the ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, within which Sanskrit
functioned neither merely as a religious language, nor as a regional language,
or even as a pan-Indian language used by the elite for literary and aesthetic
production. Sanskrit pervaded politics and aesthetics, Pollock argues, not
linked to any particular regional identities or polities or aspect of culture and
cosmography, so much as extending across them, thereby forming the basis
of how people engaged with the world –and articulated their place within
it –long before the dawn of the early modern period.12 Sanskrit is a classical
language and was once a cosmopolitan register that served multiple functions.
Sometimes it interacted with regional languages, yet also lay ‘above’ them,
whose place was structured in relation to Sanskrit.
Historically, this world of Sanskrit language and learning extended beyond
the Indian subcontinent, its contours forming in connexion with the spread of
Hinduism and Buddhism and their respective texts and traditions. Inevitably,
some of the active and direct links between Indian Sanskrit(ic) specialists
and their counterparts abroad had more or less withered by early modern
times, in certain cases to be later revived thanks to modern transport and
11 Busch, ‘Anxiety’, 118.

12 Pollock, Language of the Gods, offers a fuller exposition of Sanskrit’s rise from roughly the
beginning of the Common Era.
communications technologies.13 In other cases, Indian Sanskrit(ic) specialists

settled into roles in foreign states without fully indigenising, as remains the
case in Thailand, where Brahman ritualists forming a distinct group in Thai
society continue to perform rites and ceremonies at the royal court and thus
continue to perpetuate Indic knowledge.14 Yet, there were also instances of the
renewal of intellectual links. Under the patronage of the Dalai Lamas in the
later seventeenth century, for instance, Brahmans expert in five forms of know-
ledge important to Buddhist intellectuals (i.e., logic, language, medicine, arts
and crafts, and that relating to Buddhist contemplative praxis) were invited to
Tibet, where they contributed to a burst of new scholarship on these topics,
at the same time looping Tibet into the dynamic networks of early modern
Indian knowledge production.15 In Europe, comparably, the renewal of Latin
(and Greek, to a lesser extent) was part and parcel with both the intellectual
project of Humanism and the Reformation of the Church.16
So much for the changing contours of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, but what
was happening to Sanskrit on the Indian subcontinent? Provocatively, Pollock
has contended that the second millennium witnessed the ‘death of Sanskrit’
in consequence of the emergence and efflorescence of Indic vernaculars and
the rise of a Persian cosmopolis.17 This view has not gone unchallenged, how-
ever. True, Sanskrit came to be used alongside local vernaculars in a single
text or inscription –the former for the sacred or poetic parts, the latter for
the ‘workly’ portions outlining key information –where previously Sanskrit
alone would have prevailed. True, local vernaculars were steadily becoming
more popular (via devotional verse) and, as they developed and were
enriched, also more cosmopolitan (i.e., capable of carrying the workly and
poetic responsibilities of language). Yet, it was not the case that vernaculars
entirely displaced Sanskrit, to the extent that vernacularisation contributed
to the demise of Sanskrit by the early modern period. Society was chan-
ging, and so was Sanskrit; it was hardly fixed in aspic, nor were its users so
universally conservative as to shoot down any modification of forms and
genres.18 Sanskrit was itself being regionalised or localised in the second mil-
lennium, Yigal Bronner and David Shulman make clear. Vernacularisation
thus involved the emergence of Indic vernaculars from local tongues as well
13 Frost, ‘Wider Opportunities’, is useful here, for it locates Buddhist/Sanskritic revival within a
cosmopolitan sphere that nonetheless serviced a ‘nationalist’ awakening, which is pertinent to
the larger themes and implications of the present chapter.
14 Alberts, ‘Translating’, 259. The relationship was not reflexive, for Thai –like Tibetan –did not
influence Sanskrit or other Indic languages, let alone enter into usage; see: Kapstein, Indian
Literary Identity’, especially 747–51.
15 Schaeffer, ‘New Scholarship’.
16 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 29–40.
17 See: Pollock, ‘Death’.
18 Ali, ‘Sanskrit’, on the changing concerns of Sanskrit litterateurs and, resultantly, the new
developments in certain genres.
as the regionalisation of Sanskrit, not to mention the interaction of these

two processes, examined below.19
Still, it might be tempting to see the demise –if not quite the death –of
Sanskrit as the outcome of the rise of the Persian cosmopolis in conjunction with
the spread of Indo-Muslim power on the subcontinent. As a language, Persian’s
fortunes had waxed sufficiently by the fifteenth century to make it a classical lan-
guage in its own right, not to mention a ‘language of governance and learning’
from the Balkans to Bengal, reaching its zenith as a lingua franca between the
sixteenth and eighteenth centuries under the aegis of multi-ethnic and multi-
religious states, the Mughal Empire being a prime example.20 As this suggests,
Persian was more than just a literary language, so that Persian’s spread also
carried ideas and ideals communicated in texts written in Persian or through the
actions of Persian speakers, some of them Iranian but most from elsewhere, some
Muslim but a great proportion of non-Muslims, too. As more people became
familiar with Persian, so it became a language-in-common to an even larger and
more widespread group, constitutive of what has been called a Persophone or
Persianate world (§1.3.1).21
A great deal of scholarship has focused on the formation and changing
contours of this world, as well as Persian’s many uses, with more recent work even
questioning the geographical and social frontiers of the Persianate world ‘to iden-
tify the limits –indeed, the breaking points –of Persian’s usefulness as a medium
of information, understanding, and affinity.’22 Ultimately, Persian functioned as
Latin did in Europe, creating a pluralistic or cosmopolitan space ‘generated by
shared knowledge of religiosity, statecraft, diplomacy, trade, sociability, or sub-
jectivity’, Nile Green states, ‘that was accessed and circulated through the common
use of written Persian across interconnected nodal points of Eurasia.’23 Such was
its importance, in fact, that Sunil Sharma coins the term ‘lingua persica’, for-
cing us to grapple with the Eurotropism of such terms as ‘lingua franca’ and the
Eurocentricity of comparing Persian to Latin (rather than vice versa).24
Precisely because the effects of Persian-usage were so far reaching, some
scholars have been inclined to speak of a Persian cosmopolis in counterpart to
the Sanskrit or Arabic cosmopolises. Persian language and (material) culture
created a broadly encompassing ‘aesthetic and literary sensibility’ that shaped
the intellectual, cultural, and visual environment of places like south Asia for
centuries.25 Circulation –of language, forms, ideas, and people –was vital to
19 Bronner and Shulman, ‘Sanskrit’.

20 Green, ‘Introduction’, 1.
21 Ibid, for a valuable, critical survey of the historiography and such concepts as ‘Persianate’ and
‘Persophone’, as well as a rich historical overview of Persian’s rise.
22 Ibid, 1, for citation, and the volume from which it is drawn as a representative study of the
latter endeavour.
23 Ibid, 10.
24 Sharma, Mughal Arcadia, 1.
25 Eaton, ‘Persian Cosmopolis’, here 63. Ricci, in Islam Translated, proposes an early modern
‘Arabic cosmopolis’ as a space constituted by the circulation and translation of Arabic-Islamic
the spread and sedimentation of the Persian cosmopolis; the growth of Persian-
usage made travel easier, and the high-point of the Persian cosmopolis is concur-
rent with the uptick in mobility definitive of early modernity. Command of the
Persian language may have resulted from birth and residency in Persia or cen-
tral Asia, but others were aided by the spread of the Persian cosmopolis and the
opportunities it afforded individuals or groups across a large terrain. Compelled
by Persian’s eventual hegemony, many aspirational early moderns soughtto
become familiar with Persian language and Persianate cultural forms (i.e., archi-
tecture, literature, painting, music, dress, deportment, manners, morals). The
Persianate sphere extended from the Ottoman domains to the Malay world and
Siam, the latter being outside the Islamicate world. This reminds us that, des-
pite much overlap, the Persianate world was not exactly coterminous with the
Islamicate or Indo-Islamicate world.26 In any case, India’s pivotal place within
early modern Indian Ocean trade networks meant it played an important role in
the spread of Persianate literary and cultural forms through to southeast Asia
and, hence, of the expanding horizons of the Persian cosmopolis.27
Returning to pre-modern India, were the Sanskrit and Persian cosmopolises
incompatible or even mutually exclusive? In short: no. In the first place, there
were overlaps and similarities in intellectual production across the divide;
Richard M. Eaton and Philip B. Wagoner give the examples of ethical-
legal treatises and historical works focusing on the lives of sovereigns being
common in both the Sanskrit and Persian cosmopolises at the start of our
period.28 Persian might have been an alien tongue, but Persianate intellectuals
were asking similar questions or producing commensurable answers to par-
ticular problems, therefore, as material in Chapter 10 makes clear. There is also
evidence of the fusion of certain aspects of the Persian cosmopolis with the
Sanskrit, as in Vijayanagara, as well as the absorption of ideas from Sanskrit
political and cosmological wisdom into the Persianate tradition, as in Bijapur
and Golkonda.29
The Mughals –from Akbar’s reign –likewise sought to translate Sanskrit
works into Persian (§3.3.3). This enterprise drew on wide-ranging networks of
Sanskrit experts: Jains, mostly from Gujarat, and Brahmans, who hailed from
across north India and as far south as the Deccan.30 They read a version of
the Sanskrit text, uttering it aloud in the common language of north India,
texts into vernaculars (e.g., Tamil, Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Buginese). See, also: Bahl,
‘Transoceanic Arabic Historiography’, which looks at the Indian Ocean- centred Arabic
cosmopolis from an Indian standpoint.
26 Eaton, ‘Persian Cosmopolis’, 83, where it is also noted that the Sanskrit cosmopolis was also
more ‘elite’ and thus less wide-reaching than the Persian.
27 See: Subrahmanyam, Tagus to the Ganges, 45–79.
29 Ibid, 31.
30 Truschke, Culture, 28, and 45–54 for comparison of their changing fortunes, with Jains losing
favour from Jahangir’s reign while Brahmans maintained an important role through the seven-
teenth century.
Hindavi, which was heard by Persianate litterateurs, such as Abdul Qadir

Badauni (1540–1605), who authored the finished work in Persian.31 Involving
collaboration and a chain of translation and translators, the final output could
hardly be a literal translation, to say nothing of how certain ideas or themes
were reworked to fit the Indo-Persianate, Indo-Islamicate context, which is
itself significant. Thinking of the worlds of Sanskrit and Persian as mutually
exclusive hence ignores their encounter, how each was changed in consequence,
and how something new was synthesised into being.
Synthesis and hybridity were not the only outcomes of the Sanskrit-Persian
encounter. Indo-Muslim rulers also employed Sanskrit litterateurs to compose
entirely new works in established Indic genres. The ruler of mid-fifteenth-century
Kashmir, for instance, sought to commemorate the region’s first gunpowder
cannons by commissioning his court poet, Srivara, to compose a Sanskrit
praise poem (prashasti).32 This was no lifeline thrown to a class desperate for
patronage; Sanskrit retained its prestige and importance, and herein lay the
Kashmir sultan’s motivation. Brahman and Jain specialists penned panegyrics
in honour of Sultanate or Mughal dynasts, either having been summoned to
do so by local rulers (imperial vassals) anxious for appeasement, or else of
their own accord, in pursuit of the fruits of imperial favour.33 Imperial service
helped sustain many of these specialists and other members of their households
(§10.3), so that the elaboration of those Indo-Muslim bureaucracies respon-
sible for the entrenchment of the Persian cosmopolis was also vitally linked to
the sustenance of Sanskrit intellectual life. How was this so?
Persianisation in south Asia began under the aegis of the Delhi sultans. This
fact has often been taken for granted, but we ought consciously consider the
rationale and conditions under which this language –rather than, say, Turkish
or Hindavi –was given primacy. Turkish was somewhat on the ascendant in
the fifteenth century and was the mother tongue of the first Mughal emperor,
Babur. Turkish was replaced at court by Persian, however, for the political
conditions of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries made Persian(ate) writers a
powerful resource in the hands of arriviste princes.34 By 1582, when Persian
was made the official language of the Mughal state, Akbar was taking greater
interest in Indic cultures and began patronising literary production in north
Indian languages, raising the question of why he continued to favour Persian
(over Hindavi). Part of the reason was linked to the migration of Persian
specialists or knowledgeable experts and associated changes in education
(§10.1). Persian was the tongue of an elite cadre within the bureaucracy, there-
fore, but also had the advantage –for Muslims –of being one of the languages
31 To this may be added the choice of particular versions of the Sanskrit epic that accorded best
with Indo-Persianate literary interests, the addition of Persian poetry, and so forth: Truschke,
Culture, 104–11.
32 Obrock, ‘Situating Sanskrit’, 3; Eaton, Persianate Age, 116.
33 Prakash, ‘Rudra Kavi’; Vose, ‘Jain Memory’; Truschke, ‘Setting the Record Wrong’.
34 Anooshahr, Turkestan, especially 139–70, provides valuable analysis of this development.
of Islam, while ‘for educated non-Muslims, it represented a language with

minimal sectarian implications.’35 Persian was additionally relatively stable,
whereas Hindavi varied greatly across space, such that the former was prefer-
able for record-keeping. The variation in Hindavi was partly lexical and dia-
lectical, for Hindavi or Hindi was –at the start of our period –an umbrella
term in Persian sources for what would be called Braj Bhasha, Awadhi or
Avadhi, Bhojpuri, and Khari Boli once each of these became fully fledged
vernaculars.36 To this can be added Hindavi’s various renderings in different
scripts, including the Arabo-Persian; kaithi, used by Kayasthas and deriving its
name from its connection with this scribal community; and devanagari, which
had long been used for writing Sanskrit.
Persian-language usage then percolated by stages from court centres to local
society via a bureaucratic machinery whose operative language was Persian.
This bureaucracy made use of paper and pen (kaghaz and qalam) –the former
a technology associated with Islamicate culture, and readily taken up in south
Asia, as elsewhere.37 The intellectual, political, and cultural significance of
paper was such, for instance, that it was readily and very consciously adopted
in the Malay world following the advent of Islamisation (§3.1.1), which is all
the more significant given that paper had to be imported from India, China, or
Europe.38 As the state expanded and its bureaucratic reach deepened in south
Asia, so usage of paper and of Persian widened. The result was not Sanskrit
becoming a ‘dead language’ known only to a limited elite or in liturgy, for
the ruling elite’s interest in Sanskrit and regional languages intensified, rather
than weakened. Sanskrit specialists meanwhile obtained a new prestige and
material comfort –yet also a set of thorny ideological problems arising from
their service to a ritually ‘unclean’ master –through their connection to royalty
that ultimately gave a new lease of life to their intellectual production.39 The
adoption of paper in place of palm leaf, ivory, and other materials, moreover,
is said to have ‘promoted a boom in Sanskrit manuscript culture’ as much as
‘the further development of vernacular languages for literary as well as mun-
dane administrative and legal purposes’ at the lower administrative reaches of
states.40
Although hardly a new language on the Indian scene at the dawn of the early
modern period, the scope and extent of Persian usage greatly enlarged and
deepened from about the sixteenth century.41 Persian was not only a Eurasian
lingua franca; a simplified form was widely spoken in south Asia. The Sikh
gurus were among this community of speakers, whereas the fact of certain
35 Asher and Talbot, India, 164. On the last point, see: Pellò, ‘Persian’.
37 Eaton, Persianate Age, 136–37.
38 Gallop, ‘Malay Manuscript Art’, 167.
39 Truschke, Culture, 3–4, 7–10, 15; Guha, ‘Serving the Barbarian’.
40 Minkowsi et al, ‘Social History’, 3
41 Anooshahr, Turkestan, 139–70.
Pastho-speaking Afghan amirs’ poor command of Persian being commented

upon by contemporaries underscores its important –and growing –use in
oral communication from the very start of our period.42 At the same time,
much like Sanskrit, it was evolving and thus changing in character and com-
plexity: Persian did not merely influence the evolution of regional languages,
but underwent a process of what can be called its becoming vernacularised,
indigenised, or provincialised. To grasp this, we might conceive of the Persian
cosmopolis not as a homogenous entity, but rather –as Stefano Pellò urges –as
a vast ‘fragmented, polycentric space, in which the cosmopolitan was continu-
ously (re-)localised and vice versa.’43 Thus, for instance, Persian scholarship
in the fifteenth-century regional sultanates started to take account of local
material, facilitating Persian’s provincialisation.44
Some were unwelcoming of this acculturation of the language to its local
context, their quarrel with the ‘moderns’ sharing something with those
disputes erupting in early modern Europe as new national-vernaculars were
gaining prominence. Critics (the ‘ancients’) derided it as a degenerate ‘Indian
style’ (sabk-i hindi), though this term was only used by later generations.
Others, like Akbar, strived for its purification via the preparation of a
lexicon devoid of non-Persian words and expressions, to take one example
of a trend.45 Others still, however, embraced change and the opportunities
afforded by hybridity and the drift from classical Persian lexicon and literary
forms.46 Poetry acquired a freshness –what contemporaries celebrated as
‘fresh speak’ (taza-gu’i).47 In this, Indo-Persian users were not alone, for their
counterparts in Iran were also striving to add freshness (tazagi) to literary
language and were as appreciative of Indian savants as Ottoman Turkish
writers likewise seeking inspiration and novelty. Faizi, Sa’ib, Bidil and other
avant-garde Indo-Persian writers who broke free from classical norms (viz.,
diction but also ‘rhymes, metres, prosody, and conventional poetic tropology’)
from the late sixteenth century were thus part of a transregional domain for
a new kind of Persian, as Rajiv Kinra so valuably brings to our attention.48
Finally, if the spread of the Persian cosmopolis impacted Sanskrit literary
and intellectual production in numerous ways, we might also pause to con-
ceive, Audrey Truschke proposes, how Indo- Muslims’ engagement with
Sanskrit gave shape to the taza-gu’i.49
42 Orsini and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 8, 14.

43 Pellò, ‘Local Lexis’, 167–68, for citation. See, also: ‘Pellò, ‘Persian’, especially 37–42.
44 See, also: Karomat, ‘Turki and Hindavi’.
45 Alam, ‘Pursuit’, 336, for citation, and 341.
46 Dudney, in ‘Sabk-e Hendi’, argues that criticism revolved not around the ‘indigenisation’ of
Persian per se, but a ‘crisis of authority’ resulting from contemporaries lacking the tools with
which to judge the merits of innovative works that departed from the classical cannon. On the
long gestation of sabk-i Hindi, see: Alam, ‘Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’.
47 Alam, ‘Pursuit’, 338–40.
48 Kinra, ‘Fresh Words’. See, also: Sharma, Mughal Arcadia, 16–62.
49 Truschke, Culture, 204, and passim.
All this suggests that Sanskrit and Persian were neither set in stone and
unchanging, nor was the former displaced by the latter, for we find numerous
‘Sanskrit interlopers in a Persian age’.50 Rather, both were vitally transformed
through their encounter, especially in the early modern period. Another implica-
tion of this discussion concerns vernacularisation, for localised or regionalised
variants of Sanskrit and Persian were coming into being. The relationship of
Sanskrit and Persian to vernacularisation was more complex still, however.
These classical languages not only provided the scripts and orthographic sta-
bility required by local tongues as the latter took their place in the world, but
also faced competition as Indic vernaculars became more cosmopolitan, as we
shall see in what follows.
9.2 Language and Literary Culture in the Vernacular

Often, but not always, Indic vernaculars emerged via the rendering of languages
spoken in the region or locality into textual ones (‘literisation’), before using
them to communicate ideas –artistic and literary, historical, religious, and pol-
itical, or scientific –in inscriptions and texts.51 To do so, vernaculars often had
to supplement or supplant what had become ‘the transethnic, transregional,
and (according to its own self-understanding) transhistorical language’ of
much of India and the eastern Indian Ocean world by the middle of the first
millennium –namely, Sanskrit. This renegotiation of the status and significance
of Indic vernaculars vis-à-vis Sanskrit unfolded from the second millennium.
Sanskrit was a cosmopolitan register and thus lay above vernacular
languages. The latter were literised via Sanskrit (i.e., its script, grammar,
orthography, etc), and were used in a restricted way at first, generally at the
lower levels of administration (e.g., to record land grants).52 Yet, as Pollock
shows, cosmopolitan literariness gradually became localised, while vernacular
literary production also became ‘a central concern to royal courts.’53 The result
was to expand the scope of vernacular language usage, steadily elevating
vernaculars to the higher register of, say, political or literary communica-
tion. Take, as an example, Kannada. It was literised in the fifth century but
subordinated to Sanskrit until about the eighth century, whereafter its use very
gradually spread from the documentary portion of inscriptions, for which a
lower register was deemed amply suitable, to the dynastic portions as well as
eulogies, previously expressed in the higher register of Sanskrit; this had taken
50 Obrock, ‘Situating Sanskrit’, 4.

51 That said, some so-called vernaculars, like Kannada, might already have operated fairly
trans-regionally prior to their development in the ways described in what follows. Thus, we
should be cautious about the shorthand of vernaculars as local/regional, which is really a
relative statement arising from comparison of such languages (at particular points in time)
to a language like Sanskrit or Arabic or Persian or Latin. See, here: Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan
Vernaculars’, 7–8.
52 Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan Vernaculars’, 10–11.
53 Pollock, ‘Vernacular Millennium’, 49.
place by the thirteenth century. Kannada seems to have been used as a lit-
erary language in the ninth century in a limited way, but then developed under
courtly patronage as it absorbed or localised the universalism of Sanskrit and
served as a way of expressing local identity; much the same can be said of
Tamil.54 Similar processes were afoot elsewhere in the Sanskrit world around
this time, such as ninth-to eleventh-century Java and Sri Lanka, fourteenth-
century Siam, and fifteenth-century Vietnam.55
9.2.1 The Dynamics of Literary Vernacularisation
As in later medieval Europe, literary vernacularisation probably proceeded

by distinct and definable stages, rather than seamlessly over several centuries
without impediment.56 Marathi is a good example. Attested from at least the
eighth century as a language, Marathi experienced a florescence coinciding
with the rise of the Yadava dynasty at the end of the twelfth century, not
leading to its displacing Sanskrit but certainly helping it to become a ‘noble’
tongue.57 A second stage was well underway by the seventeenth century, thanks
to mobile groups like soldiers and administrators who used their mother
tongue –Marathi –long after dispersing across the Deccan.58 It thus became
a language of a trans-regional elite, serving as an administrative register by at
least the early sixteenth century, and was patronised by the Deccan sultans and
their Mughal rivals.59 In time, it also became a language of historiographical
production, as demonstrated by the major history of the first ruler of the new
Maratha state, the Sabhasad Bakhar (c. 1696-97), and thus as the language of
the Maratha swarajya.60
As this case study suggests, there were important variations in the character
and dynamics of vernacularisation in south Asia, both over time and across
space. It began earlier in the south and under distinct circumstances. Some
impetus came from the spread of Bhakti and Sant movements, which were often
highly regionalised, their leaders often striving to speak not to elite Brahmans
so much as ordinary folk (§2.1.1; §2.4.1), much as Tyndale’s translation of the
New Testament radically used an English that was ‘lively and idiomatic’ by
virtue of mirroring ‘the familiar patterns and cadences of English as it was
spoken by his contemporaries.’61 Although capable of transcending the many
54 Ibid, 49–52; Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan Vernaculars’, 19–28, for more detailed analysis.
55 Pollock, ‘Vernacular Millennium’, 47–48, 52–53.
56 For a cursory comparison of European and Indian developments: ibid, 61–65.
58 Ibid, 50.
59 Ibid, 53.
60 Ibid, 50–51. For more on the relationship of Sanskrit to Marathi, see, recently: Gomez,
’Sanskrit’.
61 C.f. Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan Vernaculars’, 29–31, where it is argued that the emphasis placed on
religious developments as a motor of vernacularisation derives from scholars working in such
fields as religious studies and thus not taking into account literary production at large. That
tongues that divided India, Sanskrit was a high register, and one associated with
Brahmans; hence, it was eschewed in favour of regional vernaculars by Bhakti
poets. Bhakti movements –and the poems penned by their leaders and sung
by their followers –were critical to the defining and distinguishing of India’s
regional vernaculars (e.g., Marathi, Kannada) from the medieval era onwards.62
As Bhakti continued to spread geographically and grow in influence, so
this development entered a new phase in the early modern period. Take, for
instance, Tukaram (b. 1608). Born in the western Deccan into a non-Brahman
mercantile caste, he was denied a Sanskrit-language education available only to
Brahmans, and yet was not illiterate, as his compositions in Marathi stand to
demonstrate. He was a devotee of Vithoba, an incarnation of Vishnu popular
among adherents of Varkari devotionalism, a form of Bhakti that held sway
among non-Brahmans in the region. His verse spoke of reform of the social
order, respecting Brahmans yet empowering non-Brahmans by espousing the
irrelevance of caste to the attainment of spiritual goals. His cult status and
the popularity of his verse vitalised and was imbricated within longer-term
developments: the Varkari pilgrimage tradition, bureaucratic and judicial
networks ‘that brought Marathi-speakers in increasing touch with one another,’
and the rise of vernacular poetry. These, in turn, gave rise to the creation of a
new state –one uniting non-Brahman, Marathi-speakers as ‘Marathas’.63
By contrast, vernacularisation was spurred –perhaps even inaugurated –by
Muslim intellectuals in the Indo-Muslim kingdoms of the north, such as the
Delhi Sultanates, from Mas’ud Sa’d Salman’s contribution to the development
of Hindavi in early twelfth-century Lahore to Maulana Daiud’s role in the his-
tory of Avadhi in Jaunpur at the end of the fourteenth century.64 Let us focus
on Chishti Sufis, who began composing prema-kahanis or pem-kathas (lit.,
‘love stories’) from the fourteenth century onwards. These works had a hero,
who was a yogi and who attained his divine heroine –always portrayed as a
beautiful Indian woman –‘after an arduous ascetic quest’, thereafter bringing
‘her to live with a hostile wife who represents the world.’65 Thus, such works
drew on ‘the local language of ascetic practice’, and equated ‘human love and
love for a divine being.’66 As literary productions, they soon became fairly for-
mulaic, but the genre was itself an innovation of the period. It expressed Sufi
messages through lyrics (ghazals) and narrative (masnavi), both deriving from
Persianate tradition, and also drew on Sanskrit aesthetic treatises concerning
the rasas (lit. ‘juice’, and more broadly the flavour or essence of an artistic
may be, but it does not discount the role of religious actors of various confessions: Hawley,
Storm, 312. Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 131, for citation.
63 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 154, for citation, and 129–54, for examination of Tukaram’s life,
context, and impact.
64 Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan Vernaculars’, 29. See, also: Busch, ‘Brajbhasha Poets’, 273.
65 Behl, ‘Hindavi Sufi Romance’, 180, for citations.
66 Ibid, 180.
work), as well as the literary conventions of the region, discovered via poetic
recitations and performances of music and dance.67
A work by Qutban of c. 1503, the Mirigavati, is the second surviving
example of this genre, probably penned at the court of the Jaunpur sultan.68
More broadly, these works were written and performed in Delhi, Jaunpur, and
Bihar, and hence written in Avadhi (or eastern Hindavi), thus developing it as
a literary language.69 To the west, local Sufi shaikhs produced these and other
works in Sindhi, likewise spurring its development as a literary language.70
Vernacularisation and the displacement of Sanskrit took off in non-Muslim
courts in the north not long after this process had begun, so that Gujarati was
used as a literary vernacular from the twelfth century, Assamese from the late
fourteenth, and Oriya and Malayalam from the fifteenth century –this last
occurring around the same time Braj was adopted as a language of state by the
Tomar dynasty of Gwalior.71 If the political transitions after Timur’s departure
from India gave a major impetus to vernacularisation, another would come in
the wake of Mughal decentralisation.
9.2.2 Vernaculars as Elite Interlopers: Dakhni
Vernaculars might be regional, the written form of common local tongues

(deshabhasha), but things were not always so straightforward, the Gurmukhi
script and Gujarati and Dakhni languages being cases in point. Gujarati might
readily be described as the language of Gujarat, but this belies the subsumption
of a range of key subregional dialects –‘ranging from Surati in the south to
Kacchi (Cutchy) in the west’ –under the umbrella of Gujarati, not to mention
the language’s relation to the cosmopolitan languages of Sanskrit and Persian,
at one level, and to ‘the speech forms of nomadic pastoral peoples such as
the Bhil or other kinds of communities’ like the ‘Parsi, Bohra, Khoja, Kathi,
Caran, and Dubala’, who ranged more widely than the confines of premodern
or present-day Gujarat, at another.72 Gujarati, therefore, is today a regional
language that evolved from many transregional ones.73 Gurmukhi (lit. ‘from
the guru’s mouth’) evolved from the business shorthand known as Landa or
Mahajani used by Guru Nanak during the years of his training for a mer-
cantile career typical for a male of his caste.74 Nanak’s verses were in Punjabi
but were penned in the Adi Granth in the Gurmukhi script, even as they
67 Ibid, 181.
68 Ibid, 184, and passim, for analysis.
69 Sufi interest in Hindavi poetry and lyrics persisted and deepened; see: Orsini, ‘Krishna is the
Truth of Man’.
70 Asani, ‘Sindhi Literary Culture’, here especially 616–20 and 629–37, and also 626–29, on the
relation of the vernacular to the cosmopolitan (Persian).
71 Pollock, ‘Vernacular Millennium’, 53–54.
72 Yashachandra, ‘Gujarati Literary Culture’, 569.
73 Ibid, for a rich and incisive analysis.
74 Asani, ‘Sindhi Literary Culture’, 622–24.
drew extensively upon diction and poetic expression from dialects and local
languages as well as sacred registers, including: Khari Boli/Hindavi, Saraiki
(the language of southern Punjab), Persian (as both a lingua franca and a lit-
erary language), Braj, as well as Arabic and Sanskrit (in which the Quran and
the Vedas, respectively, are written).75 Being a new script for writing Nanak’s
revelation derived from that of a north Indian mercantile vernacular, and used
for religious and liturgical texts, Gurmukhi now occupies a status on par with
Arabic or Sanskrit. By contrast, Dakhni was penned in the existing Perso-
Arabic script (like Urdu/Rektah, in the north). Used largely by urbanised
elites in the south before striking roots among the local Muslim population,
its origins lay in the common tongue of the lands their predecessors had left
behind in the north during Tughluq times.76
Hindavi (aka. Hindvi, Hindustani, Hindui, Hindi), the common language of
north India, grew dialectical offshoots like Khari Boli and Avadhi and developed
in Persianised form as Dakhni and Urdu (aka. Rektah before c. 1800).77 Persian
classical models and texts exerted a great influence on the development of the
Dakhni cannon in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Deccani courts, for many
Persian works were translated into the vernacular, although the ties loosened as
Dakhni came into its own.78 Besides its relation to Hindavi and Persian, Dakhni
also contained a considerable Punjabi vocabulary. Being associated with migrants
from Punjab and Hindustan from the time of the Delhi Sultanates and thus widely
known as ‘Hindvi’ at first, authors had begun to refer to Dakhni as Dakhni by the
seventeenth century –‘a term reflecting the new point of geographical reference,
and the new spirit of cultural independence, of the language’s native speakers –
the Deccani class.’79 Indeed, though speakers of Urdu ‘only overcame the literary
tyranny of Persian and began composing in their own vernacular’ in the eight-
eenth century, ‘such inhibitions did not obtain among Deccani Muslims, who
had become much more estranged from Persian culture’ than their north Indian
counterparts.80
Dakhni flourished in the Deccan Sultanates, although the Deccani courts
varied in the nature and extent of their patronage of vernaculars. Thus,
the westerly Nizam Shahi court seems not to have encouraged any, while
Bijapur –in the central plateau –patronised Dakhni literature but not that
in Kanada or Marathi, whereas the Qutb Shahi rulers in the eastern Deccan
were so prolific in their support of Telugu literature that one authority was
75 Singh, First Sikh, 4. Asani, ‘Devotional Songs’, fruitfully compares Khoja Ismaili and Sikh
hymns (the former known as ginans) and their transmission –not in a register like Sanskrit,
Arabic, or Persian, but –in Khojaki and Gurmukhi, respectively.
77 On the history of Urdu as a language and label/concept, and its relationship to Hindi: Faruqi,
‘Long History’.
78 See: Sharma, ‘Forging’.
80 Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 139.
moved to note that they ‘virtually became Telugu Sultans.’81 Royal support
for Dakhni took two forms. The first and more widespread was the patronage
of poets like Nusrati Bijapuri (d. 1674) by the sultan and his courtiers, the
result of which was literature produced for aesthetic pleasure. The second,
and more remarkable, was via the authorship of Dakhni-language works by
the sultans themselves, of which Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II’s Kitab al-Nauras –
an essay on Indic aesthetics set to musical ragas (§9.3.3) – is the most out-
standing example.82
Religious institutions –not least Sufi dargahs –provided another locus for
Dakhni literary production, which tended to be on devotional subjects. On
the one hand, it was written in the Perso-Arabic script, reaching fewer people
than Maratha or Kannada. On the other, it ‘came easier’ than the high or
elite register of Persian, a fact remarked by contemporaries; this engendered
for Dakhni a fairly large sphere of influence.83 Much as Sufi literary pro-
duction contributed to the development of Avadhi in the north, therefore,
so shaikhs in the south who wrote in Dakhni supported its growing influ-
ence. The Chishti Sufis of Bijapur, for instance, composed songs in Dakhni
of the sort typically sung by village women: chakki-namas, charka-namas,
shadi-namas, and suhagan-namas (i.e., songs sung while grinding meal or
spinning thread, at weddings, or by brides), as well as lori-namas (lullabies)
and suhailas (eulogies). These conveyed ideas about love and devotion to
God and, in simplified forms or via analogy, more complex Sufi theological
ideas, too.84 The place of particular languages in the Deccan prior to the
Mughal conquest can be neatly summarised thanks to work by Richard
Eaton: state authority was communicated on coins and inscriptions in Arabic
and Persian; court literati wrote texts in Telugu, Dakhni, and Persian; the
documentation produced by revenue and judicial administrators was penned
in Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, and Persian; while Maratha and Dakhni (and
probably other vernaculars, too) were the tongues of popular devotional
songs, stories, and texts by bhaktas and shaikhs.85
Persian, it should be noted, did not disappear because of the rise of Dakhni
in the pre-Mughal era. Following the Mughal conquest, however, Dakhni was
by and large replaced by Urdu. Following the Maratha conquest of swathes of
the Deccan, in turn, sponsorship of other local languages resumed (Marathi
and Telugu, for instance).86
81 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 142, for details and the original citation.
82 Ibid, 144.
83 Ibid, 143; Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 141.
84 Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 157–64. A useful summary of other gendered or gender-related aspects
of Sufism are described in: Chenoy, ‘Shahjahanabad’, 169.
86 On Dakhni and Marathi interactions and competition, see: Guha, ‘Transitions and
Translations’.
9.2.3 Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Languages: Interactions
Viewed from the perspective of specialists of prestige or classical languages

(e.g., Sanskrit), vernaculars were corrupted registers almost by definition,
worthy only of low status and seldom meriting their own names (often simply
called bhasha or language).87 This might have held in the early Middle Ages,
but the situation had vastly changed by the late medieval –and certainly
by the early modern –period. This development resulted from the transla-
tion and transcreation of Sanskrit texts (e.g., the puranas, or epics such
as the Mahabharata), not only in India but also further afield, as in Java.88
Treatises on astrology, aesthetics, or the erotic arts –formerly penned only in
Sanskrit –also made their appearance in the vernacular, as did new literary
works in vernaculars based on Sanskrit exemplars, structures, or forms (e.g.,
ritigranths). ‘In many fields in north India,’ Imre Banghe observes, therefore,
‘the achievements of Sanskrit were being vernacularised.’89 In terms of manu-
script production, this process seems to have accelerated after c. 1600 –or, to
put it differently, there are relatively few manuscripts in Hindi prior to this
period, compared to the great numbers in Persian, Arabic, or Sanskrit, but also
to the later abundance of Hindi manuscripts.90
Vernaculars, as Sumit Guha notes, often had origins in the languages of
the populi, yet could also serve as a register of esoteric or secret knowledge
within an elite community (especially when enciphered). Sanskrit was, by con-
trast, a high or prestige register utilised by specialists, yet also functioned as
a universal language, cutting across cultural-regional divides much like Latin,
Arabic, or Persian.91 As vernaculars developed, so the boundaries between ver-
nacular and cosmopolitan languages were eroded somewhat, or else became
even fuzzier than on Guha’s stylised presentation of their differences, in ways
and with implications that give us pause. A good starting point is to examine
vernaculars like Braj. As one of the major dialects of Hindi, its experience is
important within its own right, but it also exemplifies wider trends. The devel-
opment of riti literature (i.e., high-style or according to classical method) in
Braj from the late sixteenth century, for instance, was characteristic of the ver-
nacular becoming cosmopolitan.
Braj or Brajbhasha literally means ‘language of Braj’, linking the language
to a particular area of north India celebrated as the centre of Krishna lore
through the compositions of Bhakti poets like Mira Bai. Kabir and the Sants
also composed in Braj, as did many of the early Sikh writers. The Dasam Granth
may have been written in the Gurmukhi script and its author might have been
addressing a primarily Sikh audience (§2.4.4), but one of its languages was

88 Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan Vernaculars’, 28–29.
89 Bangha, ‘Writing Devotion’, 140.
90 Ibid, 140–41 and passim.
Braj, to the extent that it is probably the biggest single work in Braj.92 This was
far from the only Sikh text that made use of Braj, as forthcoming work by Julie
Vig endeavours to show. The choice of Braj over other languages was guided by
the audience, for it was a widely used dialect, even as it developed higher/elite
or courtly and lower/common registers. Those devotional poets who composed
in Braj have been praised for spurring a larger process of vernacularisation
that has, in turn, been painted as tantamount to ‘liberation’ from Sanskrit and
part of a process by which ‘the homely dialects of everyday people fought for
representation in the literary field.’93 For very similar reasons, those Muslims
known as Ismailis –found spread across Punjab, Sindh, and Gujarat –adopted
a vernacular known as Khojki.94
The popularity of Braj and its choice by such a range of writers was also
linked to the language’s changing status. ‘In vernacular literary circles’ around
the later sixteenth century, Allison Busch noted, ‘the dialect of Brajbhasha
began to supersede that of Avadhi.’95 It thus became the form of Hindi/
Hindavi with which the Mughals were most familiar as they naturalised to
the Indian context, a familiarity reinforced by their imperial officers’ interest
in Vaishnava communities in and around the capital at Agra, which was not
far from the Braj cultural centres of Vrindavan and Mathura.96 Akbar and
Jahangir thus patronised Braj, which developed as a courtly language, and this
support continued during the reigns of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, thanks to
both the emperors and imperial princes.97
No longer merely a representation of either a common tongue or of devo-
tional verse, Braj steadily came into use as a cosmopolitan or transregional
language, challenging Sanskrit’s long-held monopoly in this regard within the
Indic domain. It consequently functioned alongside Sanskrit –not merely below
it, and sometimes even in place of it –a prestige of which contemporaries were
aware. In fact, its relation to Sanskrit had been thoroughly renegotiated and
Braj writers were no longer ‘dismissed as inarguably inferior to their Sanskrit
counterparts’, but actually sought after, some achieving spectacular recogni-
tion.98 Braj was more than a local language, for Braj savants were patronised
92 Rinehart, Dasam Granth, 12–13, 16. This fact has largely been overlooked, Rinehart argues,
because Braj scholars have focussed on texts in the Devanagari script, whereas scholars con-
versant in Punjabi and Gurmukhi have largely focussed on elements related to Sikhism rather
than to language. This lacuna is addressed in forthcoming work by Julie Vig, which examines
the use of Braj in a wide number of early modern Sikh works, including gurbilas (lit. ‘pastimes
of the guru’).
93 Busch, ‘Anxiety’, 122, which is her paraphrase of widespread interpretations of Braj-language
bhakti compositions (as opposed to those in the elite register, described below).
94 Further details, and other parallels between Khojki and Gurmukhi, can be found in: Eaton,
Islamic Traditions, 298–303.
95 Busch, ‘Brajbhasha Poets’, 273.
96 Ibid, 273–74.
97 Ibid, 277–300. A fuller treatment of this subject can be found in: Busch, Poetry of Kings,
130–65.
in the Mughal and Rajput kingdoms and as far afield as Punjab, the Deccan,
and the Maratha courts, not to mention across confessional communities, as
we have seen.99 By the end of our period, the ruler of Kutch had founded the
Bhuj Brajbhasha Pathshala (Braj Language School in Bhuj), which remains
preeminent as a centre for Braj learning and archive of Braj works.100
This geographic expansion was predicated on the expansion of Braj’s
expressive potential, indicative of which is the genre of Braj ritigranths studied
by Allison Busch. These works straddled two different genres. On the one
hand, there was the traditional system of literary science (alankarashastra),
long dominated by Sanskrit intellectuals; hence, Braj ritigranths closely follow
Sanskrit exemplars in their content and the style of classification of literary
works. On the other hand, they are collections of poetry; hence, definitions
of topics of Sanskrit poetics are followed by verses –in Braj –exemplifying
variations on those topics.101 The hundreds of Braj ritigranths produced in the
last two pre-colonial centuries formed ‘a fertile site for the development of a
new form of vernacular poetics and poetry’ as their respective authors ‘under-
took the wholesale systematisation of both vernacular poetics and poetry’.102
Their readers included Indo-Muslims fluent in Persian but not Sanskrit who,
therefore, were finally able to enter a world previously off limits to them. They
could consume such works as a means of education but they could also –if
they aspired to becoming poets –try and compose their own ritigranth as a
means of deepening their knowledge and appreciation.103 As for the patrons of
the riti poets, finally, their motives might be both intellectual and aesthetic, as
was the case at Rajput courts.
The riti poets flourished under courtly patronage and used a relatively
high vernacular register, unlike the simple naturalism of Bhakti bards, while
the very contents and concerns of the ritigranth genre were derived from the
elite world of Sanskrit literature.104 Yet, none of this automatically means
that their works were stiff, mannerist, or stuck in the past. Such a view fails
to recognise how much ‘Braj writers relished the new literary possibilities
of vernacular poetry’ as they ‘began to encroach upon some of the intellec-
tual terrain that had earlier been inhabited exclusively by Sanskrit writers.’105
They might have disguised this at times, purporting Sanskrit’s primacy over
vernaculars, yet the texts often speak for themselves. Hence, for example,
the Radhamadhavavilasacampu (‘Love-Play of Radha and Krishna’) by the
seventeenth-century Maharashtrian, Jayarama Pindye. Though he composed
99 Ibid, 119.
100 See: Mallison, ‘Teaching of Braj’. See, also: Busch, Poetry of Kings, 166–201, for a rich exam-
ination of Rajput patronage of Braj riti literature.
102 Ibid, citations 115, 117.
103 Ibid, 133.
104 Ibid, 123. For a broader survey, see: Busch, ‘Poetry in Motion’.
ten of the eleven cantos in Sanskrit and alleged that verses in deshabhashas
had no place amidst Sanskrit, for the maintenance of linguistic hierarchies
supposedly mattered, the final chapter containing the vernacular verses is
the longest, most playful, and innovative. Hyper-conventionalised Sanskrit
forms –found in the previous ten c hapters –are largely abandoned and the
poet’s originality finally shines through, as Busch demonstrated.106
Historians of Hindi describe the period 1650 to 1850 as ritikal or period of
method or high-style –neoclassicism, in other words –so central were ritigranths
(books of method) at this time. Here, then, we find a point of connection
with linguistic developments elsewhere. For, as Busch observed: ‘Romance
languages developed both out of opposition to and in imitation of Latin’.
Early modern French, to take one example, was ‘both a simple language of
common speak and a vulgaire illustre, a highly refined literary language’, the
latter achieved by ‘appropriating the very features that made Latin elevated’
and thereby imparting French ‘with dignity, with majesty, with reason.’107 The
comparison is valuable when one considers how the riti poets and scholars such
as Keshavdas (fl. 1600) and those who followed him have long been sidelined
for being decadent and overly mannered or unnaturalistic, whereas European
neoclassical writers (e.g., the English poet, John Milton, 1608–74) hold an
important place in their respective literary cannons.108
What other conclusions may be drawn from this survey? Having originated
in the Middle Ages in many cases (Dakhni and Braj standing as notable
exceptions), Indic vernaculars continued to develop through the early modern
period, yet often in bursts rather than an even or sustained manner. One factor
influencing the spread of literised vernaculars was where and how they were
employed in the first instances. ‘It makes a great deal of difference’, Eaton
observes, whether a text is ‘a stone inscription rich in factual information, an
expository treatise read by a tiny circle of courtly elites, or a religious tract
intended for wide consumption.’109 Each of these has a different velocity of cir-
culation –‘that is, the number of hands through which it passes’ –which both
indicates the existence of, and can help shape, a ‘self-aware, integrated speech
community.’110
Paper did not necessarily have a greater velocity of circulation and reach than,
say, stone inscriptions; rarely handled illumined and illustrated manuscripts
probably had a lesser impact than a text chiselled in large letters into the monu-
mental gateway to a busy marketplace or mosque.111 Paper documentation,
106 Ibid, 120.

107 Ibid, 129.
108 Busch, Poetry of Kings, 1–15, lays out the historiographical and conceptual terrain that
explains these very different treatments of neoclassical writers, while 23–
64 focuses on
Keshavdas.
109 Eaton, ‘Rise’, 111–12.
110 Ibid, 112.
111 See, for instance: Sheikh, ‘Bilingual Inscriptions’.
however, was a crucial vehicle for the spread of Persian, as we have seen. But
revenue records were only one type; another were judicial records, such as
mahzars (§7.3.3), which were often bilingual and hence attested to the existence
of –but also cemented the place of –vernacular language communities, like
Marathi.112 Eaton has gone so far as to suggest vernacularisation was a gradual
process, starting with the naming of a particular vernacular and its first use by
the state ‘to record some official transaction on a copperplate or stone slab’,
then use in ‘expository prose or creative poetry’, followed by its use ‘to record
face-to-face conflict resolution among members of non-elite groups.’113
Another important factor was the relationship of a language to political
centres and their patronage. Although the Mughals patronised languages like
Braj alongside Persian and even Sanskrit, other Indic vernaculars were nurtured
in those regional kingdoms in which sovereignty and political legitimacy were
vitally linked to a ruling house’s origins and intimacy with the locality. As such
kingdoms were generally most independent before the Mughal classical age
and again in the eighteenth century, it is in these periods that we might expect
to see the greater patronage, elevated status, and wider usage of vernacular
languages, Marathi being an exceptional but not entirely singular case in point.
Vernaculars were neither replaced by Persian in the Mughal period, however,
nor was there a hiatus in vernacularisation between these periods of rapid efflor-
escence. We can see vernacularisation and Persianisation marching together
from the beginning, for Persianisation from above met vernacularisation from
below in bilingual documents from the later Delhi Sultanate, with Persian text
atop and Hindavi at the bottom.114 Yet, the literary sphere was bilingual –
even multilingual –in a more profound sense, for Persian was neither univer-
sally understood, nor was it the language of north Indian literary elites, as
Francesca Orsini makes clear. Rather, ‘vernacular Hindavi oral genres –poems,
songs, tales –circulated widely even among Indo-Persian audiences’.115 Hence,
when we come across ‘the few but significant instances of Hindavi words and
phrases in Persian texts’, and a few rare bilingual texts, like the Rushdnama
(c. 1404) by ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi, we are encountering the ‘traces of a
prevalent linguistic and literary reality.’116 This did not disappear in the next
two centuries, but continued to develop in dialogue with Persian and Sanskrit
as described, above.
Royal courts were not the only contexts in which vernacular languages
developed, even as the courtly mode became a distinct and recognisable part of
vernacular corpuses (e.g., Braj ritigranths). Other agents of vernacularisation
included intellectuals and religious leaders or groups (e.g., bhaktas, Sufis) who
wrote for local followers, and the adaptation of folkloric genres, which Nile
112 Eaton, ‘Rise’, 126–27, for discussion of Marathi examples.

113 Ibid, 128.
114 Orsini and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 9, 18.
115 Orsini, ‘Traces’, 404.
116 Ibid, 404.
Green believes to be representative of Dakhni and Urdu, much as also Turkish

and Malay.117 Of course, as in early fifteenth-century Bengal, courts could
sponsor folkloric literary and artistic production (e.g., mangalkavya –poems
concerning Bengali deities such as Chandi that were composed for benedic-
tion). There, patronage of folk building styles and Bengali literature, as well
as translations into Bengali of the Sanskrit epics and Vaishnava devotional
works, were favoured over reproductions of Sanskrit and Persian texts or
new works within classical Indic or Persianate architectural traditions.118 The
courtly, intellectual, and folkloric ought not be seen as strictly separable modes
of vernacularisation, in other words.119
The court, moreover, was not alone in favouring Bengali: sectarian groups
also sponsored vernacular literary production (e.g., religious texts, hagiog-
raphies of bhakts like Chaitanya).120 To further complicate our understanding
of the courtly and any neat distinction of the local/cosmopolitan, we may also
note the patronage of Bengali language and literature by Indo-Muslim nobles
and merchants, not in Bengal itself, but in the seventeenth-century Buddhist
court and kingdom of Mrauk-U or Arakan in present-day Burma. Working
in such a milieu allowed Bengali poets like Alaol (fl. 1651–71) to unmoor
their use of Bengali from its regional context.121 Finally, not only litterateurs,
but also performers –singers and bards intimately familiar with the Sanskrit
epics, for example –sometimes played a role in literising and ‘translating’
(recited versions of) texts into the vernacular, sometimes even translocating
and localising them.122 We can summarise that vernaculars often cleaved into
higher, elite, or courtly versus lower, popular, and naturalistic registers, there-
fore, but only by recognising how such schema represent a simplification of
reality.
So transformational was vernacularisation, that its impact was felt by
contemporaries, who formulated ways to navigate and even exploit its
possibilities. Sumit Guha pithily describes the tension between hybrid-
isation/assimilation and distinction/ identity inherent within the process.
Knowledgeable of this tension, the responses of erudite contemporaries
varied from making dictionaries to guide the unenlightened, to showing off
one’s virtuosity and flair by employing all the double entendre and puns

118 For a recent, highly nuanced perspective attentive to the influence of the local (and regional)
on the Persianate: Shovelton, ‘Revisiting’.
120 Eaton, ‘Rise’, 112–14. For a guide to the developments in premodern Bengali literature and
literary culture sketched here: Kaviraj, ‘Two Histories’.
121 d’Hubert, ‘Pirates, Poets, and Merchants’.
122 See, here: Bangha, ‘Ramayan of Vishnudas’. The interrelationship of music, performance,
and (the making of) literature has been brilliantly brought to the fore in the essays published
in Orsini and Butler Schofield, eds., Tellings and Texts, the findings of which are richer than
can be summarised here and which also reveal something of the auditory/sonic world of early
modern India.
afforded by this linguistic efflorescence.123 Others consciously switched

between chaste or flamboyant, between heavily Persianised, Sanskritised,
or vernacularised language, as befitted their audience and mood.124 Or, to
put it differently (and perhaps too simplistically), they switched between
local and cosmopolitan registers. Vernacularisation did not represent a
closing-in of the walls, but an opening out and an enriching of the cultural
sphere –an experience shared across the early modern world. Antwerp’s
leading lights might have found it rhetorically and politically productive to
conceive the city as a New Rome in the sixteenth century, for example, yet
for all such talk, ‘the fashion was moving to the local, the immediate: the
Netherlandish.’125 As the shift to vernacular languages was paralleled by a
shift to vernacular identities and art forms, rather than classical models or
universal lingua francas, so it is to other cultural forms that we must turn to
see these developments even more clearly.
9.3 The Arts

Coined by the historical anthropologist, Bernard Cohn, the term ‘Mughal
idiom’ describes two things. First, that aspects of culture associated with the
Timurid dynasty and their court –from dress and deportment to the manner
of kingly presentation, from visual culture to the built environment –took a
form that was recognisably Mughal by the late seventeenth or early eighteenth
century, sometimes as a result of the deliberate codification and/or reworking
of forms from the Mughal classical age. Second, and as a corollary, that this
allowed others –from Mughal subadars and the rulers of regional kingdoms, to
parvenues and even the Company state –to reference Mughal ideas and styles
in their own projects, thereby creating a readily recognisable link between their
own political enterprises and Mughal glory. Such deployment and reworking
of Mughal references became commonplace by the early eighteenth century
and remained important into the high colonial period: one need only look at
the lavish ceremonial of the imperial durbars staged in Delhi by the colonial
government in 1877, 1903, and 1911, or the use of Mughal-style domes, can-
opies, and windows in the formation of the so-called Indo-Saracenic architec-
tural style in the late nineteenth century, to fathom the enduring power of the
Mughal idiom.126
Why is this significant to a discussion of vernacularisation? On the one
hand, the making of that which was recognisably Mughal by the late seven-
teenth or early eighteenth century did not involve some sudden, great burst
of innovation, but was a gradual historical process in which the Indic and
123 Guha, ‘Bad Language’, 55. See, also: Obrock, ‘Situating Sanskrit’, 3–4.
125 Pye, Antwerp, 34, for citation, and 35, for poignant examples.
126 Cohn, ‘Representing Authority’. See, also: Metcalf, Ideologies, here especially 157–99.
the Islamicate or Persianate, the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, the local
and the global were melded together to create hybrid forms or what some
have called ‘palimpsests’.127 On the other hand, those regional cultures that
flourished following the gradual evacuation of Mughal political control did not
represent a kind of nativism or return to indigenous tradition, but were often
consciously inflected or infused with recognisably Mughal elements. The latter
were thoughtfully appropriated, adapted, and hybridised with local styles or
forms. This process often began before the imperial centre weakened vis-à-vis
the provinces and localities, such was the lure of Mughal ‘high’ culture and the
arts, but it became more pronounced and picked-up pace from the late seven-
teenth or early eighteenth century. There are parallels with vernacularisation
in the realm of languages and literature, where the classical or cosmopol-
itan languages (Sanskrit and Persian) were changed by stages through their
encounter with vernaculars, and vice versa. In the cultural arena more broadly,
we might think of an early modern dialogue between an imperial style (itself a
slowly forming hybrid of influences) and myriad local styles. In what follows,
this idea is developed through a necessarily narrow survey, focusing on archi-
tecture, art, and music.
9.3.1 Architecture
Known to contemporaries as the Illumined Tomb (Rauza-i Munawara), the

Taj Mahal is one of the world’s most recognisable buildings –and was actually
conceived to be so from the beginning. The gleaming white mausoleum on its
raised terrace is situated within a larger riverside funerary complex containing
gardens and a mosque, all commissioned by Shah Jahan, himself heavily
involved in its design. The Taj Mahal represents the apotheosis of Mughal
architecture, its constitutive elements –when put together –distinguishing it
from Islamicate architecture elsewhere in the Muslim world, and Indic architec-
ture from other Indian building traditions, even as Mughal architects had
drawn on each of these traditions in the development of the Mughal style, as
we shall see, while also making use of techniques and materials from elsewhere,
including Europe (e.g., Italian pietra dura).128 Among its characteristic elements
are the use of certain materials, chiefly white marble and red sandstone; archi-
tectonic forms such as onion-bulb domes and chhatris (pavilions with parasol-
shaped domes); and the incorporation of a garden divided into quadrants by
waterways. Each of these are perfected from prior Mughal prototypes. Every
part of the complex’s design and decoration is richly symbolic, moreover, as
127 Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, 9, notes that ‘notions of hybridity assume the “purity” of styles, an
ontologically suspect categorisation’, wherein originates the problem with the concept and the
preference for terms like ‘palimpsest’.
128 On architects, construction techniques, materials, craftsmanship, and so forth, see: Koch, Taj
Mahal, 89–94.
Fig. 9A The Taj Mahal, Agra

Ebba Koch brings to our attention, not least in its this-worldly realisation of
the garden of Paradise as described in the Quran.129
How did Mughal architecture build to this crescendo? The early Mughals
could look to the architecture of the Delhi Sultanates, whether by need or by
design, and those knowledgeable and skilled people trained in its underpin-
ning architectonic and building traditions. These were palimpsests of forms
common in the Islamicate world (e.g., domes, arches), more obviously Islamic
elements (e.g., bass relief Arabic inscriptions and Paradisical imagery from
the Quran), and motifs from Iranian traditions, as well as floral designs of
Indic origin (e.g., lotus medallions and budded creeper motifs).130 By fusing
these elements, a new type of mosque came into being under the Lodis ‘that
129 The details here are drawn from: Koch, ‘Taj Mahal’. See, also: Koch, Taj Mahal, for an expan-
sive treatment, including 215–29, on Paradisical allegory and the symbolism of the combin-
ation of red sandstone and white marble (and its pre-Mughal uses).
130 Asher, Architecture, 1–11, here especially 6, and 21–23, for Babur’s dislike of some aspects of
‘Hindustani’ (Indo-Muslim) architecture, although this was not sufficient to stymy its influ-
ence, overall.
ultimately became a major type in Mughal India.’131 The regional sultanates

also offered prototypes and architectonic forms of which the Mughals would
make use, especially from Akbar’s time. The sultans of Gujarat, for example,
built tombs, shrines, and mosques that made use of features derived from the
region’s Hindu temples.132 More importantly still, the early Mughals and their
nobles saw themselves as a vital part of Timur’s legacy, and thus made exten-
sive use of the Timurid Persianate (or ‘Khurasani’) style. This was manifested
by the construction of ‘structures with a large central room surrounded by
smaller chambers and arched entranceways of various sizes’, for instance,
and its situation within a garden of the chahar-bagh form (e.g., Humayun’s
Tomb; §8.2 and Fig. 8E).133 Only gradually did the Khurasani style begin to
spread among non-imperial patrons, however, many of whom favoured Lodi
precedents for a time.134
After the completion of Akbar’s new complex at Fatehpur Sikri, large
imperial projects ceased in the main, so that it fell upon sub-imperial patrons
like Raja Man Singh to propagate the imperial style. At the same time, these
sub-imperial projects did a great deal to aid the continuing development
and refining of the Mughal style. Man Singh was a keen sponsor of Hindu
temple building, most spectacularly at Vrindavan, the place where Krishna is
supposed to have spent his youth. Man Singh’s order to construct the Govind
Deva temple –the largest temple to be put up in north India since the twelfth
century –not only fulfilled his personal piety, and the pledge he made in 1572–
73 following his victory in the Gujarat campaign, but also serviced imperial
interests.135 At the temple, the Rajput patron brought the styles of the centre –
of its mosques, monuments, and palaces –to the construction of a building for
Hindu worship, the result being a composite of Indic and Islamicate styles. His
architects’ created ‘a sense of open space hitherto unprecedented in Akbari
architecture’, making the raja ‘an innovator of Mughal taste, not simply an
imitator.’136 Man Singh’s spearheading of the Mughal aesthetic resulted in
the spread of the imperial presence through the realm: having served in Bihar,
where he constructed a vast palace in the developing Mughal style within
the Rohtas hill fort, he was transferred to Bengal, where he ordered the con-
struction of a small temple, a bridge, and an enormous new mosque, all built
not according to the familiar Bengali tradition, but in the imposing imperial
style.137
131 Ibid, 11, for citation, and 11–14, for wider purview.
132 Ibid, 10, and 56, 65–66.
133 Ibid, 16, for citation, and 19–29, for the importance of Timurid Persianate building and
garden design to Babur.
134 Ibid, 34–38.
135 Asher, ‘Architecture’, 185–87 for discussion of his motivations in building temples.
136 Ibid, 185.
137 Asher, Architecture, 68–74. The raja continued with his plans at Rohtas even after he had been
reassigned to Bengal.
Other patrons also contributed to the simultaneous spread and enrichment

of the Mughal style, whether by engaging with local architectonic traditions or
those –especially in the case of immigrant nobles –from the Persianate world.
Mun‘im Khan’s still-used Shahi Bridge at Jaunpur, for example, brought elem-
ents of Mughal architecture that the nobleman had seen first-hand during
his tenure at Fatehpur Sikri together with ideas about observational sight
(manzar) and the pleasure of taking in a panorama becoming prevalent across
the Persianate world, resulting in a structure capped with Mughal chhatris that
afforded stunning views over the river.138 Continuing to mature under Jahangir
and his nobles’ patronage, regional instantiations of the imperial style also
reflected new elements, sometimes deriving from vernacular traditions. Chief
among these is the bangala, ‘probably modelled on the curved roofs of Bengali
huts,’ Catherine B. Asher noted, and ‘pertinent to the subsequent development
of Mughal architecture’, particularly public viewing chambers in Shah Jahani
palaces.139
It was under Shah Jahan, probably the greatest patron of architecture and
urban building, as we have seen in Chapter 4, that the Mughal style attained
its recognisable form. Chanchal Dadlani has recently drawn attention to the
codification of Shahjahani architecture from the late seventeenth century. This
codification encompassed the spatial layout of buildings, as well as their par-
ticular materiality, forms, and details. Its origins were manifold: Aurangzeb’s
desire to establish highly visible connections to his father, so that he might be
seen as Shah Jahan’s true legacy, not least in the wake of the war of succession
he fought against the favourite for the throne; the apprenticeship and training
of a new generation of architects with masters of the older, Shah Jahani
era; and the promulgation of formal regulations that operated alongside a
developing set of norms regarding visual propriety.140 It provided a historically
reflexive visual lexicon, grammar, and etiquette for builders through the long
eighteenth century, whether for imperial or sub-imperial patrons, for entire
palace-complexes in the environs of the Mughal walled capital and in new
cities such as Najibabad, Farrukhabad, and Faizabad, but also for those put-
ting up single buildings within Shahjahanabad and as far south as the Deccan
(the mausoleum built in Aurangabad for one of Aurangzeb’s wives, known
as the Bibi ka Maqbara, for instance, is a reworking of the Taj Mahal).141 In
Lahore, Aurangzeb (Alamgir) ordered the construction of what is now known
138 Hosseini, ‘Safavid and Mughal Urban Bridges’. See, also: Asher, Architecture, 75–98,
for a survey of other sub-imperial patrons and their commissions across the realm during
Akbar’s reign.
139 Asher, Architecture, 99–168, for a general overview, 165, for citation, 152–65, on regional sub-
styles, and 180–81, 186–87, 194, 205–07, 247–48, for examples of Shah Jahani-era uses of
bangalas both within imperial and sub-imperial commissions.
140 Dadlani, From Stone, 22, 45–53. For a survey of Mughal imperial and sub-imperial architec-
ture in Aurangzeb’s times, see: Asher, Architecture, 252–91.
141 See, also: Michell and Philon, Islamic Architecture, 396–407, for a visual survey of the mauso-
leum; Blake, Shahjahanabad, 70–71, for details of the palace-complexes in these cities.
as the Alamgiri Gate (Fig. 9B). It faces onto the Padshahi Mosque (Fig. 9C),
also built on his orders, and which references the prototype in his father’s cap-
ital at Shahjahanabad (see: Fig. 4E).
This did not mean late Mughal and successor state architecture was stuck
in a time warp: contemporaries held that artistic merit sprang from innova-
tive responses to the aesthetic models of Shahjahani architecture, not in its
overturning in favour of something wholly new, in keeping with the notion of
istiqbal.142 The result at first appears like a double paradox. On the one hand,
it ‘allowed the later Mughals to animate their past, refashion their identity,
and stage authority, even as they experienced political loss.’143 On the other
hand, (critical) engagement with the codes of Mughal historicism by patrons
seeking to assert their independence from, or opposition to, the Mughals actu-
ally vitalised the empire’s past and its very real present. Thus, we see engage-
ment with the Mughal style by patrons ranging from the nawabs of Awadh and
Hyderabad, to the Sikhs in their capital at Lahore and the pilgrimage centre
of Amritsar.144
Significantly, the beneficiaries of imperial disintegration drew strength
from the visual language of Mughal art and architecture. An important early
example is Safdar Jang’s funerary complex, southwest of the walled city of
Shahjahanabad. In the first place, there is its location in Delhi, rather than
in the city of Faizabad or Lucknow in the province of Awadh. Safdar Jang
became governor of Awadh in 1739 –a time when he still owed his allegiance to
the Mughals even though his predecessors had steadily become more autono-
mous from the Mughal centre and gained control over revenues and the army
in their own right. Safdar Jang’s body was briefly laid to rest in Awadh, which
was by then a lively artistic and cultural centre, before it was finally interred
in Delhi. Second, is its scale and form, which was comparable at the time of
its erection only to the funerary complexes of the emperors and their wives
(Humayun’s tomb, the Taj Mahal, Bibi ka Maqbara); nobles had previously
been interred either in much smaller garden tombs or, more usually, in simpler
structures. It thus represented an appropriation of the Mughal funerary com-
plex of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a Mughal noble at a time
when the emperors were themselves no longer being interred in such places.
Finally, there is its plan and appearance, which draws heavily on Mughal
role models and not upon those provided by important Shi‘i sites (the shrine
of ‘Ali in Najaf, of Husayn in Karbala, or Imam Riza in Mashad), or the
architecture of other Indian Shi‘i dynasties (such as the erstwhile Adil Shahis
of Bijapur, Nizam Shahis of Ahmadnagar, or Qutb Shahis of Golkonda and
Hyderabad), or even the very distinctive styles of Awadh itself. This was des-
pite Safdar Jang’s Shi‘i identity. The tomb ‘incorporates Safdar Jang and his
142 Dadlani, From Stone, 23–45.

143 Ibid, 1.
144 Asher, Architecture, 310–29. On the earlier and broader engagement of Sikh patrons with the
Mughal idiom –and artists and writers schooled in it –see: Fenech, Darbar.
Fig. 9B Alamgiri Gate, Lahore Fort

dynasty into the Mughal imperial line, precisely at the moment when the
Awadhis were rising to power’.145 It became a role model for the evolving
Awadhi style, and thereby at once reinscribed yet reformulated the relationship
of the ‘centre’ to the ‘province’, or the imperial to the vernacular.146 In time, at
the end of our period, Lucknow would supersede the cosmopolitan flamboy-
ance of Shahjahanabad, yet remained visually linked to the Mughal capital.147
Thus, as power tilted from the erstwhile centre to the provinces, the regional
capitals became the loci of major architectural patronage that reworked or else
was highly inflected by earlier Mughal prototypes.
To summarise, the Mughal or imperial style of architecture developed via
an engagement with myriad influences (i.e., extant structures, but also commu-
nities of craftsmen, engineers, architects, and so on). These include what can
be called Indic and Indian regional architectural traditions, either seen directly
145 Dadlani, From Stone, 91, for citation, and 73–101, for analysis of the tomb from which the
present discussion is derived.
146 Ibid, 105–08.
147 Asher, Architecture, 318–23.
Fig. 9C Padshahi Masjid, Lahore Fort

or via Sultanate-era and other prototypes. This not only vernacularised the
Khurasani style favoured by the early Mughals, but also led to regionalised
variations of the imperial idiom when it was taken by imperial or sub-imperial
patrons into the provinces. The decline of the Mughal Empire saw not the
abandonment, but the spread of this high style, partly through the codification
of Shah Jahani architecture. Though we have focused here on the architecture
of the Mughal Empire and its northern successors, it bears stating that a very
similar pattern concerning Vijayanagara and its heirs is now becoming clear
thanks to work by scholars like Jennifer Howes.148
Besides the spread of the Mughal high style, two other developments are
noticeable in the late Mughal period. The first was the result of sub-imperial
or regional rulers experimenting anew with Indic traditions to forge a new kind
of built environment. Jaipur, for instance, was laid out in the early eighteenth
century, its plan reflecting an utterly novel amalgam of wisdom contained
in the Vashtu shastra with inspiration taken from the Mughal chahar-bagh
148 Howes, Courts.

(§4.2.1).149 A second development was the resurgence of regional vernaculars,

most acutely exemplified in Bengal. Already, in the early part of Aurangzeb’s
reign, there was a tilt from the imperial to the vernacular, visible in the tomb of
Fateh Khan, a noble associated with Prince Shah Shuja (1616–61). The ‘rect-
angular tomb is surmounted by a deeply sloped bangala roof and appears to be
the first extant example in Bengal of a Mughal structure’, built by the Mughal
elite, Asher observed, ‘that is entirely covered with this roof type, commonly
believed to have originated here.’150 Its form was referenced in later buildings,
such as mosques.151 The regions’ wealthy Hindu elites, too, made use of trad-
itional styles and materials (e.g., terracotta tiles) when constructing temples
from the latter part of the seventeenth century.152 After relocating his capital to
Murshidabad, for he ruled with increasing autonomy from the Mughal centre,
Murshid Quli Khan’s first architectural project was a congregational Friday
mosque. Although its plan is typical of the regional variant of Mughal archi-
tecture, it also incorporates pre-Mughal Bengali elements, to the extent that
the ‘break with the Mughal ornamental style’, Asher remarked, ‘parallels the
patron’s assertion of independence.’153
9.3.2 Painting
More than architecture or other cultural fields, art has received the lion’s share
of scholarly attention. Mughal art predominates over other early modern
Indian traditions (e.g., Deccani art, although the gap has lately been closing),
with the overwhelming focus on the production of the court. This last comes at
the expense of temples, for instance, although Sufi dargahs are well-represented
in scholarship. As for medium or type, the study of drawing, the art of the
book, and especially painting prevails over the plastic arts (perhaps less so if
one looks to the south).154 As we shall see, the wider appreciation of Mughal
painting was contemporaneous and has continued ever since.
149 For an instructive guide to the Manasara (a treatise on architecture and building) and the
wider Vashtu shastra genre, see: Howes, Courts, 8–26.
150 Asher, Architecture, 284.
151 Ibid, 286.
152 Ibid, 288.
153 Ibid, 329.
154 A blockbuster exhibition in 2015 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, helped
Deccani art enter the mainstream in the West; see: Haidar and Sardar, eds., Sultans, for the
excellent accompanying catalogue now freely available online via the museum’s website. There
are a number of useful surveys of the art and architecture of the Deccan from the Bahmani
and Vijayanagara polities, through the Nayaka states and Deccan sultanates, and to Mughal,
Maratha, and Asaf Jahi rule. Michell and Zebrowski, Architecture and Art, provides an illus-
trative and descriptive guide on Deccani arts, extending well beyond painting, while Hutton,
Bijapur, is more analytical, revolving around ‘[cross-]cultural interaction’ and ‘courtly iden-
tity’ as motors of artistic development. See, also: Michell, Southern India; Michell and Philon,
Islamic Architecture; Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate. Note, however, that the coastal states, such as
Calicut/Kozhikode and Cochin, remain outside recent surveys and analyses.
History’s recent cultural, material, and visual turns have all played their
part in refreshing the scholarship, meanwhile also helping to garner new
interest in other pictorial traditions and styles. Cumulatively, these ‘turns’ have
given impetus to the study of cultural themes (over the economy, which long
predominated), or else gave scholars the courage to grapple with material that
was not primarily textual.155 The study of kingship and imperial ideology has
taken new directions thanks to these developments (Chapter 8), which have
also nourished new fields, such as music and performance. Indian visual culture
is consequently no longer the sole preserve of the art historian, and more inter-
disciplinary ways of working are producing some of the best scholarship.156
History’s global turn has also taken scholars in new directions. Images are
especially fruitful objects of study among scholars interested in connections,
exchanges, and circulations, not least of the period from c.1500 as the world
steadily became more globalised. Images, after all, were mobile in a way that
buildings or even building styles were not, and to a greater degree than, say,
musical traditions.157 Indian rulers amassed old pictures, whether as prototypes
or because of the symbolic value of a collection to rulers like Muhammad
Ali Khan, Nawab of Arcot (r.1749–95).158 The court of Awadh had purchased
an illustrated and bound copy of the Padshahnama for some Rs.12,000 (or
£1500 in the currency of the time), the very copy subsequently gifted to King
George III and now housed in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. This
gives some indication of the power deriving from connection to the Mughal
imperium even during its decline as a territorial entity.159 The availability of
Indian pictures increased hugely after the colonial conquests of the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries, when royal collections were sequestered as
‘prize’ and sold on the open market, then often resold at auction houses in
Britain and Europe.160 The fondness for Indian miniatures extended beyond
those European states and imperialisms most closely connected to the subcon-
tinent; Maria Theresa’s decoration of a room at the palace of Schönbrunn with
266 sixteenth –and seventeenth-century Indian pictures –each removed from
their album, cut to shape to be pasted and mounted in gold rococo frames –is
remarkable only because of the extraordinary and excessively lavish way in
which prized pictures were displayed.161
155 Finn, ‘Material Turns’, 6–7.

156 See, for instance, the innovative use of visual sources to open new fields of inquiry taken
in: Orsini and Schofield, eds., Tellings and Texts.
157 That said, the musical traditions of Hindustan and Bengal did ‘travel’ around the Bay
of Bengal arena, and we might usefully try to hear the expansive ‘sonic geography’ or
‘soundworlds’ of particular forms and styles in other traditions. The findings of the group
project, ‘Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean’ (2011–
15), led by Katherine Butler Schofield, will continue to be instrumental in this regard.
158 Eaton, ‘Colonial Despotism’, 68–70.
159 Beach and Koch, eds., Padshahnama, 13.
160 Eaton, ‘Nostalgia’.
161 Eaton, ‘Colonial Despotism’, 68.
The analysis of images has been formative of the fields of global cultural his-
tory and global material culture studies, not to mention critical to positioning
south Asia within the connected early modern world. From the 1580s onwards,
Indian artists’ steady exposure to contemporary European images had a lasting
impact, not being restricted to copying popular prints of Roman heroes, but
even copying and reworking Madonna and Child imagery and other Christian
subjects within the miniature tradition (Fig. 9D).162 This is remarkable, no matter
that the missionary encounter produced similarly hybrid artworks elsewhere in
Asia.163 That said, ‘hybridity’ fails to capture the selective engagement with –
and reworking of –very particular motifs and topoi. Much as Dutch artworks
influenced Japanese visual culture where the former fit within existing traditions,
so Mughal artists readily incorporated those features that converged with extant
or developing pictorial conventions or with the concerns of patrons.164
If a new naturalism is discernible in Mughal painting from the late
Akbari and Jahangiri periods, for example, it arose from the confluence of
Netherlandish innovation with Mughal concerns. Imperial artists could con-
sult copies of Dutch, Flemish, and German pictures made by Antwerp’s great
printing houses, among them prints based on Albrecht Dürer’s pictures, but
also those illustrations contained in the Polygot Bible; these resonated with
Akbar’s interest in religious iconography.165 Mughal artists also saw a new kind
of perspective and landscape painting in these pictures, which influenced their
own work.166 Jahangir’s fascination for the natural world inclined him –as
connoisseur, patron, and investigator of the natural world, in each of these
respects much like his near- contemporary, the Habsburg ruler, Rudolf II
(r. 1576–1612) –to the observation of minute detail then also characteristic
of Netherlandish art.167 Jahangir’s artists were instructed to paint from life,
although they also made use of woodcuts of flora and fauna that had been
made to accompany herbals and books on the natural sciences printed in
Christophe Plantin’s workshop in Antwerp (§10.1).168
162 See: §3.3, for the invitation of the Jesuits to the Mughal court and thus the larger context to
the resulting influx of European images.
163 See: Bailey, ‘Religious Encounters’. See, also: Natif, Mughal Occidentalism, 26–67. For a
Madonna and Child derived from the Polyglot Bible yet placed in Indian setting, see: Guy
and Britschgi, Master Painters, 61.
164 Screech, Tokyo, 125–26. To glimpse European influences on Deccani murals, see: Michell and
Philon, Islamic Architecture, 74–75, 282–83, 316–17.
165 Koch, ‘Being Like Jesus and Mary’, which is an updated and expanded version of her ground-
breaking essay on the Polyglot Bible, now also encompassing the impact of other Antwerp
prints on the Mughals. See, also: Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters, 66, 70, 74, for other
examples.
166 Koch, ‘Netherlandish Naturalism’. See, further: Natif, Mughal Occidentalism, 152–204.
Netherlandish art also reached the Deccani ateliers, unsurprising given south India’s contact
with European trading organisations, where it was enthusiastically incorporated into Deccani
artworks; see: Overton, ‘Introduction’, 10.
167 Koch, ‘Jahangir and Bacon’, here especially 299–305.
168 Ibid, here 307–27 for a rich analysis of how these images were used by Mughal artists.
Fig. 9D Mughal Artists’ Copying and Reworking of European Pictures (watercolour,

ink, and gold; unknown Mughal artist; late sixteenth century)
Mughal artists of the early seventeenth century began to depict Muslim

saints and the emperors with halos or nimbuses, sometimes surrounded by
putti or cherubs, which they also lifted from European pictures, using gold
paint or leaf so that these halos literally reflected divine light as per Indo-
Persianate illuminationist philosophy (§8.2). At the same time, they reworked
the Madonna and Child topos by injecting it with embodiments of Persian and
Arabic literary motifs to lend an erotic charge, thereby producing an uncannily
new image, to take a further example.169 In sum, Indian artists did not merely
imitate European artworks, techniques, or iconography; they highly selectively
appropriated and adapted elements, repurposing and recoding them to create
the distinct Mughal style and topoi by the early to mid-seventeenth century.
Mika Natif describes this as no less than ‘Mughal Occidentalism’ –her coinage
an intentional mirror-image of the Orientalism evident in the work of those
European artists who appropriated and reworked images and imagery from the
near East and Asia.170
Such interest in long- distance and cross- cultural encounters and
exchanges can misleadingly give the impression that major artistic influences
flowed primarily from Occident to Orient in early modern times, with a
return flow of artworks from east to west.171 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the
conceptual framework of exchanges –so key to early modern global cultural
history –soon gave ground to ‘circulation’ and a heightened attention to
the myriad directions in which influences, impacts, and objects themselves
moved. Much as with architecture, the identity, materiality, and conventions
of Mughal (and Deccani) art were rooted in a Persianate tradition –that
of miniature painting on paper. The eagerness of Persian artists to travel to
India made this possible. Thus, for example, an established painter, Farrukh
Beg, left Iran to paint for the Mughal emperors at the court in Kabul and
then Lahore. He spent a time at the Bijapur court, a fairly unsurprising des-
tination for Farrukh Beg and his compatriots, yet also indicating something
of the complex patterns of circulation and the transmission of artistic styles
at the time. He then returned to the Mughal domains and ended his career
in Agra.172
Instead of homogenising the art of Iran, the Mughal north, and the Deccan,
highly distinctive artistic styles developed as a result. This is partly because
169 Natif, Mughal Occidentalism, 1, for this example.

170 Ibid, 7–12, for a critical discussion of terminology, and especially 68–109, for analysis that
centres on artists as the driving-force of the new images coming out of the Mughal atelier.
171 See, however, the excellent catalogue to the Encounters exhibition by Jackson and Jaffer that
examines ‘Asia in Europe’ as well as ‘Europe in Asia’.
172 Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters, 11, 62–67. For a rich survey of the Iran-Deccan circula-
tion of artists, materials, and cultural ideas, see: Overton, ed., Iran. Few artists are thought to
have left the Mughal domains for the Deccan, but at least one highly talented artist is known
to have done so, shaping Deccani art, in turn: Michell and Zebrowski, Architecture and Art,
177–79.
Fig. 9E The Virgin and Child Attended by Angels, in an Indic Style (coloured inks and
gold; attributed to Manohar; c. 1600)
Mughal (and Deccani) patrons and their painters consciously appropriated or

adapted Islamicate and Indic subjects, symbols, and motifs into the framework
of the Persianate tradition.173 Of specifically Indic elements, we might note the
appearance of Indian flora and fauna in the decorative borders of artworks, in
scene pictures (e.g., of hunts), and as subjects in their own right; the painting
of Indian personages and characters (e.g., yogis, bhaktas, Jain ascetics); and
the lavish illustration of Sanskrit epics and literary works, such as the Anwar-i-
Suhaili or ‘Lights of Canopus’ of 1571, which was a fifteenth-century Persian
translation of animal fables contained in the Sanskrit Panchatantra, the
Razmnama/Mahabharata of 1586, the Harivamsa or ‘Genealogy of Vishnu’ of
1586, and the Ramayana of 1587–88 (§3.3.3).174 A good example of a hybrid
product or palimpsest –in the fullest sense, encompassing subject and style –
can be found in illustrated manuscripts of the Tutinama (‘Tales of a Parrot’),
an anthology of folk tales in Persian based on an older Sanskrit work popular
in Sultanate and Mughal India. Parrots were often animated in Indian litera-
ture like the Panchatantra or the Shukasaptati and, in the Tutinama, it is a
parrot who tells one story a night –for fifty-two consecutive nights –to its
mistress. Among the earliest manuscripts attributed to Akbar’s atelier is a
Tutinama, itself a significant example showing the development toward the
Mughal high style.175
The distinctiveness of Mughal painting also owes something to more specif-
ically local influences, and the continuities evident in Mughal art with earlier
or still-extant Sultanate and Rajput painterly traditions also have something
to do with the painters themselves.176 In the first place, we should note that
the art of the Delhi Sultanates was also of the Persianate type and was also
influenced by Indic elements, so that a distinctive Indo-Persianate artistic trad-
ition existed long before the Mughal conquest. Perhaps a conscious choice in
some respects, this also resulted from the employment of artists trained in the
Hindu and Jain traditions within the Sultanate ateliers.177 By the later sixteenth
century, the Persian masters Mir Sayyid ‘Ali and Khwaja ‘Abd al-Samad, who
173 On ‘syncretism’ in the Deccan, see: Michell and Zebrowski, Architecture and Art, 145–225,
268–72.
174 See: Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 29–31, 39–42, for discussion of some the manuscripts
mentioned here, and 84–85, for the reproduction of a double album page depicting various
Indian holy men. For a Jain ascetic: Crill and Jariwala, Indian Portrait, 72–73.
175 Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 21–25.
176 Though flawed by distinguishing Rajput and Mughal as Hindu/indigenous and Muslim/for-
eign, Beach’s Mughal and Rajput Painting, especially 4–39, offers a useful introduction to the
context to, and early phases in the development of, the Mughal style.
177 Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters, 17–25 on these Indian traditions and their development,
which notes their responsiveness –especially in the west –to influences and materials flowing
from overseas over the longue durée, 29–31, for the reproduction and analysis of an example
of a fifteenth-century ‘Jain-style’ Shahnama manuscript.
trained in Shah Tahmasp’s atelier, had been coaxed into Mughal service and
began actively recruiting Indian painters, giving rise to the fusion of styles that
would gradually be tamed (to a degree) into the Mughal style.178 Persianate art
was itself changing, however, with a new direction evident after Humayun’s
return to India. In the hands of artists like Basawan, a Hindu artist who joined
Akbar’s atelier as a young man, the new Persianate style was combined with
new perspectival techniques and a new kind of naturalism taken from exposure
to European pictures to produce something strikingly new.179
Before turning to some of the distinctive and innovative features of the
Mughal high style and its genres and topoi, it is worth saying a little more
about artists. In the pre-Mughal period, little is known of artists’ identities. It
may have been that Indian artists saw themselves as part of a craft tradition, as
many continued to do long into the eighteenth century.180 In this, they were not
alone. The identities of most European artists have been lost to obscurity. Why?
Well into the early modern period, art remained a craft and a profession in
Europe –one tightly controlled by guilds, moreover –and many artists worked
in teams (‘studios’).181 Change was swept in, as Huizinga famously observed,
by those developments nowadays lumped under the rubric of the ‘northern
Renaissance’, including innovation in materials, techniques, and ‘tricks’ in
perspective and optics (this last thanks to new scientific learning). Those who
could master their use might acquire a reputation and rise above the unknown
craftsman, as was the genius of Jan van Eyck (d. 1441).182 Consciousness of
the self, however, was an even more important ‘discovery’ made during the
Renaissance –one, as we shall see, discernible across the early modern world
at large (§10.2). Thus, artists acquired fame as individuals, even when con-
tinuing to work in studios and/or within guilds, and the artist’s self-portrait
was born, either found tucked away in a commission or as a composition in its
own right.183
Importantly, much the same can be said of Indian artists from the late six-
teenth century. Training in a craft was received within the family unit, so that
many of those painters who are known to us by name are also known as the
relative of some other artist: ‘Abid and Abu’l Hasan, Balchand and Payag,
to name imperial artists, or Manaku and Nainsukh from the hills (discussed,
below), or Shivalal and Mohanlal of Mewar, were all brothers; fathers and
sons also abound.184 The imperial artists worked in the Mughal kitabkhana
178 Ibid, 54–57.

179 Ibid, 42–49.
180 Ibid, 10.
181 Chipps Smith, Northern Renaissance, 15– 32, which also broaches the gendering of the
profession.
182 Huizinga, Autumntide, 368–69, 398, for a now-classic analysis; Martens et al, Van Eyck, for the
most up-to-date exploration of the master’s genius, his corpus, its contributions.
183 The reasons for painting such a self-portrait were many and complex, however; see: Chipps
Smith, Northern Renaissance, especially 15–16, 31–32.
184 Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters, 10.
Fig. 9F Chameleon (watercolour and inks; by the Mughal artist Mansur; c. 1612)
Art Heritage /Alamy Stock Photo
(library) alongside calligraphers, bookbinders, and the keepers of those books

and albums they painted, a setup also found in many regional courts that had
their own ateliers. A master (ustad) would organise the division of labour
necessary for a highly complex commission, like the illustration of a narrative
scene accompanying the text of a work like the Akbarnama: one artist drew,
another painted, and sometimes another still might be required to cast the
portraits, for instance.185
Only a fraction of all the hundreds of imperial artists and artisans are
today known to us, perhaps because they were written about at the time
(e.g., those artists named in the Ain-i Akbari), signed their work, and/or
possessed a genius and distinctive personal style discernible by scholars
in other works formative of their artistic corpora. But it is significant that
we know of such painters as Mansur (active late 1580s to c. 1626), whose
masterful paintings of flora and fauna helped him earn the accolade of
185 Stronge, ‘Portraiture’, 27.

being titled Nadir al-Asr (the ‘Wonder of the Age’), and Manohar (active
c. 1582–1620s), the son of Basawan, whose own likeness is captured in two
portraits, the latter painted by one of his contemporaries.186 Many other
Indian painters’ likenesses were captured by their peers, while some, such
as Mir Sayyid ‘Ali, also made self-portraits.187 This represented a break with
Indian convention, reflecting the growing self-consciousness that came with
the move toward realism and psychological depth as much as the supposed
discovery of the self.
Portraits were made as single- leaf pictures or incorporated into larger
compositions. In a radical departure from the Indic convention of depicting
human faces by drawing idealised or stylised features, Mughal draughtsman
and painters made (male) portraits from life that realistically depicted the sitter,
although always in profile in the case of the emperor or his inner circle, and
the less prestigious three-quarter view for others.188 (In fact, as Milo C. Beach
summarises, ‘painting as precise record of specific events, personalities, or objects
is not known among the pre-Mughal Indian traditions’; hence, the illustration
of biographical and historical works was also a departure from convention).189
The snapshot-in-time realism of the ‘observed’ portrait was impressive, but some
master painters would go on to capture portraits with psychological depth that
encapsulated the character and state of mind of the sitter.190 Perhaps the most
singular example is the pitiful ‘Dying Inayat Khan’ attributed to Hashim and
painted c.1618–19.191
Portraiture became an independent genre of Mughal art that left a lasting
impact. As sub-imperial rulers saw the work of imperial artists or sat for their
own portraits, sometimes receiving these as gifts, so they became enchanted
by the potential of such images and commissioned their own artists to make
portraits of themselves and their nobles.192 Aside from such portraits proper,
Mughal artists also incorporated portraiture into hunting and court scenes,
whether in the context of manuscript illustration (e.g., of the Akbarnama) or
186 Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters, 58, 80–85.

187 Stronge, ‘Portraiture’, 24 and n.6.
188 On the thinking behind full and three-quarter profile, see: Koch, ‘Netherlandish Naturalism’,
34. Natif, Mughal Occidentalism, 205–60, more fully examines the development of Mughal
portraiture vis-à-vis European prototypes. Mughal developments took off in the 1590s,
just after Deccani artists began experimenting with the art of portraiture, as evinced by a
portrait of Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II of Bijapur of c.1590 now in the David Collection,
Copenhagen, and reproduced in Crill and Jariwala, Indian Portrait, 110–11. See, also: Beach,
Mughal and Rajput Painting, 35–38. Being confined to the harem, women were not painted
from life; C.f. op. cit., 96.
189 Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 15.
190 Krill and Jariwala, eds., Indian Portrait, provides an excellent overview of the departures made
by Mughal artists, while also describing earlier realism (and abstraction) in Indian portraiture.
191 Reproduced in: Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 110.
192 See: Crill, ‘Portraiture’.
as single-leaf pictures in albums, which also became very popular productions

at the regional courts.193
Working from natural life –as Jahangir commanded his artists to do –not only
led to such works as Mansur’s intimate study of a chameleon (c.1595–1600), but
an entirely new genre –the zoological portrait (Fig. 9F). Within this genre was
an important sub-genre devoted to horses so extensive that we can discern two
compositional types or topoi. The first is the equine portrait, which are life studies
of particular horses, often favourites, prize specimens, or gifts from nobleman
or diplomats. These picture may have origins in sixteenth-century Iran, but the
Mughal pictures are distinctive.194 The second is the equestrian portrait, in which
the emperor is depicted on horseback. They are a wholly and distinctly Mughal
invention, drawing on the sacred and royal symbolism of horses from Islamicate,
Persianate, and Indic traditions, among other sources.195 They were highly
charged images, which gave them tremendous currency among sub- imperial
rulers and parvenus, who imitated but also ‘vernacularised’ them, to use the
term in a way that pre-empts arguments made below.196 But equestrian and other
kinds of portraits also circulated much farther. Because the imperial artists made
copies of important pictures, exemplars soon reached the capitals of European
trading nations. Some landed in Amsterdam via Surat, following a journey on
VOC ships, where they captivated the celebrated Dutch artist, Rembrandt van
Rijn (1606–69), with twenty-five of his ‘creative copies’ of Indian miniatures in
pen and ink surviving today. Artistic motifs certainly flowed from the west to
India, where they were often assimilated, but Rembrandt’s drawings-cum-studies
suggest inspiration and images occasionally flowed back to the Low Countries,
too, even if they were merely reworked rather than incorporated into the kinds of
pictures that had a ready market.197
Though scarcely doing it justice, this brief survey ought signal the trans-
formation ushered by Mughal painting by the mid-seventeenth century, which
was a cosmopolitan and ‘high’ artistic tradition.198 Artists brought in to work
193 For a reappraisal of albums not as careless scrapbooks of images but carefully and con-
sciously crafted products, see: Fetvacı, Album.
194 Canby, ‘Persian Horse Portraits’. Even more distinctive are the otherworldly pictures of ema-
ciated horses made in the Deccan; see: Hutton, Bijapur, 146–54.
195 I have argued as much in Lally, ‘Equines’, but Mughal artists were copying European
prototypes in the early seventeenth century (as shown, e.g., in the reproductions in Schrader,
Rembrandt, 126–27), which might have been the source of the Mughal type of equestrian
portrait.
196 Lally, ‘Equines’.
197 Schrader, ed., Rembrandt, especially the contribution by Yael Rice noting the way early modern
engravers also must have reworked Indian images, and the multifarious ways Indian artists
reworked and mutated European prints beyond mere ‘copying’. On engravers working from
Indian pictures, see also: Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 106–07, 109. Other Europeans
also worked from Mughal pictures, such as Willem Schellinks (1623–78); see: Gommans and
de Hond, ‘Local Milieu’.
198 The present discussion has said relatively little about Shah Jahani- era developments in
painting, but see: Koch, Collected Essays, 130–62. To grasp the steady evolution of Mughal
on big imperial commissions in Akbar’s time were subsequently released,

taking the skills and ideas learnt in the imperial atelier to those sub-imperial
courts where they now found employment, marking the first phase of the
diffusion and vernacularisation of the imperial style, although their output
remained restricted to traditional genres and subjects (e.g., religious texts and
Ragamalas).199 Another phase was in motion from the late seventeenth century,
for artists continued to find employment in the imperial studios and continued
to produce magnificent works, but the opportunities were even greater in the
regional courts. In part, this was due to Aurangzeb’s relative disinterest in the
visual arts when compared to his predecessors, as well as his long spells away
from the north. It was also because sub-imperial rulers, for their part, began
to see the value of art to their sovereignty and kingly self-fashioning. In the
same vein, they also amassed Mughal artworks (by gift, purchase, or plunder),
which they prized and took care to preserve as part of their collections, much
as European rulers did, too, during the Thirty Years’ War and in the course of
other opportunities for the appropriation of prestigious courts’ art and library
collections.200
Artists moved outward from the centre during Aurangzeb’s reign, but
many –whether imperially or regionally trained –also moved between courts
given the capriciousness of the political climate.201 A patron might be looking
for imperial painters’ finesse and their familiarity with discernibly Mughal
types of images, but, equally, he was eager to support local artists, styles,
and themes as he sought to present himself as the authentic leader of the
locality or region. The result was the propagation of Mughal styles, genres,
and topoi, on the one hand, and the revitalisation of regional traditions, on
the other, often simultaneously.202 There was sometimes a tension between
these two forces, depending on how conservative a patron was in the face of
new and outside influences, whether or not local artists had already derived
inspiration from Mughal (or even Deccani) art, and so on, all of which
contributed to the great diversity of eighteenth-century Indian painting.203
Typical of eighteenth- century political and economic trends, powerful
merchants occasionally commissioned artworks in the developing regional
art, and its diversity, even as a distinguishable style and set of genres came into being,
see: Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, which is a good guide despite its flaws and lofty dis-
missal of certain traditions and developments.
199 Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 117–28, 157–63, for a survey of this phase focussing on
the Hindu Rajput states. See, also: Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters, 96–105, for examples
and analysis.
200 The Amber rajas, for instance, even possessed early Mughal pictures; see: Venkateswaran and
Tillotson, eds., Masterpieces, 26–27. There were even important and prized collections of
Mughal images as far south as Arcot: Eaton, ‘Colonial Despotism’, 68–70; Ehrlich, ‘Plunder
and Prestige’, here especially 478–79.
201 For examples of such mobility, see: Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters, 11, 146.
202 See, for a fast-paced, illustrated survey: Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 174–204.
203 For a concise, comparative visual survey, see: Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters, 110–45.
styles as they sought to participate in the cultural scene and thereby pursue
their gentlemanly self-fashioning.204
Perhaps most exquisite of all the regional traditions is that of the small
states in the Himalayan foothills, this locale giving them the name ‘Pahari’.
Though not isolated, with some of its rulers even in imperial service, nature
and the terrain meant it was (culturally) distant from the Mughal centre, so
that whatever art was produced there before the late seventeenth century was
closer to certain Rajput styles.205 The location also made for ‘a wild and dra-
matic setting’ of snow-capped ‘mountains, roaring torrents, and secluded,
fertile valleys’ that ‘certainly inspired local artists to create some of the most
powerful and expressive landscapes in Indian painting.’206 Take, for example,
‘The South Wind Cools Itself in the Snows of the Himalayas’ (c. 1765–70).207
It was produced as one of a series of illustrations of Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, in
this case to illustrate the following Sanskrit verse:
Winds from the sandalwood mountains blow now towards Himalayan peaks,
Longing to plunge in the snows after weeks of writhing in the hot bellies of ground
snakes.
Melodious voices of cuckoos raise their joyful sound
When they spy the buds on tips of smooth mango branches208
The artist, almost proto-Romantic in his celebration of the sublime, interprets

the verse quite literally, which comes at the end of a canto about Radha and
Krishna’s consummation of their marriage, about erotic longing, and, ultim-
ately, about the soft and amorous, cool south wind. More generally, the
incorporation of the landscape of a king’s domains and his monuments, forts,
palaces, and kinsmen was one of the most common ways artists localised
pictures for Indian patrons –from devotional scenes to the kinds of images
drawn from Mughal genres (e.g., hunting scenes, but even portraits). Thus,
for instance, Vrindavan was vernacularised as it was relocated to Rajasthan in
some Krishna paintings for Vaishnava Rajput rulers, yet the Pahari example
just described is quite stunning precisely because of the uniqueness of the
Himalayan environment.209
In smaller states, like those of the Pahari region, family workshops held sway
over court ateliers; this helped create distinctive styles across several generations,
204 Such images are rare, but a portrait dated 1823 of a wealthy merchant, Seth Manekchand,
appropriates the jharokha portrait (an imperial genre that had become a mainstay of Rajput
art), demonstrating the sitter’s aspirations; see: Crill and Jariwala, Indian Portrait, 132–33.
205 Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 168–72.
206 Ibid, 168.
207 This is reproduced in the freely downloadable catalogue, Guy and Britschgi, Master Painters,
on 155, and even more lavishly in Losty, ed., Pahari Paintings, 137–39.
208 Translated and cited in Losty, ed., Pahari Paintings, 137.
209 Aitken, Tradition, 242–52, on the conflation of ruler with deity and the nesting of the kingdom
within Krishna’s world (and vice versa).
although artists did travel to other kingdoms, hungry for patronage (and fresh
inspiration).210 It was through this system that one of the most outstanding
artists of the age, in the hill states or elsewhere, came to his profession: Nainsukh
(active c. 1735– 78). Unlike his father, Pandit Seu, Nainsukh more freely
incorporated elements of the imperial style while maintaining much of what was
distinctive of the Pahari style learnt in the family workshop in Guler. Under the
patronage of Balwant Singh –the ruler of Jasrota, where he arrived c. 1740 –
Nainsukh produced some of his finest work.211 In one darbar portrait of the
ruler, Nainsukh even inserts himself into the scene, for he stands on a hori-
zontal plane behind Balwant Singh (who faces a group of musicians) while the
maharaja inspects a picture the artist has just completed.212 Now in the British
Museum collection is an even more compositionally striking picture: Nainsukh’s
‘Trumpeters’ (Fig. 9G). Purchased by the British artist, Winifred Nicholson
(1893–1981), during her time in India, it is one of several Indian pictures that
influenced her understanding of light and colour, exemplifying how artists took
inspiration from Indian miniatures long after they had been painted.213 Painted
early in his career, c. 1735–40, Nainsukh shows an understated, stylishly offset
group of seven players of the turhi, a Pahari instrument, with each musician
rendered individually, their bodies twisted dynamically in a way that brings the
scene (a celebration of marriage? –or of a birth?) to life.
9.3.3 Music
Today, Indian classical music denotes the north Indian ‘Hindustani’ and south
Indian ‘Karnatak’ traditions. A crucial phase in the process of classicisation
occurred under colonialism and in response to modernity in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, sometimes involving quite new genres assuming
an air of antiquity as they folded into these two traditions. An earlier phase of
classicisation took place in the pre-colonial period, however, which was vitally
important to the distinction of a core set of genres like dhrupad and khayal and
their categorisation as art-music or elite music –or what we today call classical
music. The Mughal court, Katherine Butler Schofield demonstrates, played a
key part in the canonisation and systemisation of certain kinds of music that
was part and parcel of this earlier phase of classicisation.214
Musicological scholarship was in no way a Mughal invention: despite ever-
shifting differences between practice (prayoga) and idealised theory (shastra),
writing on music in Sanskrit had come into being over a millennia prior to –
and remained extant at the time of –the Mughal conquest. Such writings were
known as sangita shastras; they were held as authoritative by contemporary

211 Goswamy, Nainsukh, remains the standard reference on the artist’s life and output.
213 See: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_2019–3004–1 [accessed 22 July 2022]
214 Schofield, ‘Classicization’.
Fig. 9G Trumpeters (watercolour; by Nainsukh in Jasrota; c.1735-40), 2019,3004.1.

© The Trustees of the British Museum
practitioners and patrons. Typical of the exchanges between language-cum-

knowledge ecumenes already described, these ‘had percolated into Persian,
Brajbhasha, and other vernacular languages’ by the seventeenth century.215
In Persian, musicological texts were known as ilm-i musiqi, belonging to a
genre of considerable pedigree in the Arabo-Persian world in its own right.216
Interestingly, the production of Braj musicological treatises was entailed upon
Braj’s emulation of Sanskrit, while the Mughals’ patronage of Braj afforded
such texts a role in the classicisation of Hindustani music, thus closely linking
language or literary classicisation with that in the realm of music.217
The Mughal elite were not pioneers, therefore, nor were they unprecedented,
for the Tomar court at Gwalior had been the preeminent centre of musical
patronage and refinement until its usurpation by the imperial court in the late
sixteenth century.218 Rather, the Mughals worked with established musical
215 Ibid, here 492.

216 See, for further details: ibid, 497–98.
217 See, for instance: Williams, ‘Reflecting’.
218 Williams, ‘Singing’, 181. See, also: Orsini and Butler Schofield, eds., Tellings and Texts, 12–15,
on prior, and parallel developments at other, non-or pre-Mughal courts.
traditions and practitioners –as they did in the arts and architecture –to
make their lasting contribution. Their major role was to patronise Hindustani
music and ‘sponsor, collect, circulate, and in some cases personally write
detailed treatises on its theory and practice.’219 Among their aims was to foster
connoisseurship, for being a good listener at a mehfil or other musical event
was as important as the musicians being good players. On the performers’ part,
the proper rendition of a raga would produce a particular rasa. Indian ragas
or melodies were based on a progression of five to seven notes, each associated
with a particular scale, and each associated with a particular mood.220 Indian
aesthetic theory defined nine rasas or distilled essences: the erotic, experienced
as desire; the tragic =grief; comic =amusement; violent =anger; heroic =deter-
mination; fearful =fear; macabre =revulsion; fantastic =amazement; and
peaceful =tranquillity.221 On the audience’s part, knowledge of the finer or
esoteric points of musical performance were necessary for the rasa to be
‘savoured’. In ‘the transient moment of performance’, therefore, the skilled
musician temporarily produces the rasa to at once be ‘savoured’ by the listening
connoisseur (rasika); the one cannot succeed without the other.222 In paintings
from the Bundi and Kota courts of Rajasthan, the ruler-cum-connoisseur is
the performer, as in the ragamala painting depicted in Fig. 9H.
More influential still than discussion of the rasas found in Sanskrit aes-
thetics, however, was the ragamala tradition of painting, which flourished from
the second half of the fifteenth century. In a ragamala picture, painting was
imbricated with poetry, and perhaps a musical performance, too, if the art-
work was used that way. It brought to life one of the thirty-six melodies, based
on the notion of six male ragas each with five wives (raginis), thus giving rise
to thirty-six permutations each with their respective affective states.223 These
paintings of ‘heroes, heroines, semi-divine beings, and deities in standardised
but vivid and complex emotional scenarios’ served as ‘richly layered icons’.224
They had a huge impact on ‘Mughal understandings of the correct emotional
effect of each raga’, because they allowed for ‘a more expansive range of emo-
tional shades connected with key rasas to be enjoyed through musical listening’
than the nine rasas alone.225 Such complex understandings had another effect;
namely, to incorporate music within Sufi and Greco-Islamicate ideas about
emotions, the mind and body, and health and medicine (§10.2). Mughal
treatises sought to explain which ragas produced which effects and why. Music
held the power ‘to arouse desire, compassion, sorrow, joy, vigour, tranquillity,
219 Schofield, ‘Classicization’, 495, where it was noted that this was a male preserve, exercised via
participation in all-male social spaces.
220 See: Dallapiccola et al, Ragamala Painting, especially 13–22, for a very digestible guide to raga
music and ragamala painting.
221 Schofield, ‘Emotions’, 186, which is the source of this pithy set of taxonomical approximations.
222 Ibid, 186.
223 For a visual and descriptive guide, see: Dallapiccola et al, Ragamala Painting.
224 Schofield, ‘Emotions’, 187.
225 Ibid, 187.
Fig. 9H Shri Raga, from a Ragamala Series (ink and watercolour; unknown artist from
Bundi; mid-seventeenth century)
etc, in the individual listener –or to bring the rain, defeat enemies, light fires,
bestow sovereignty, or calm wild beasts’; listening to the right raga could help
bring the body, the empire, or the universe back into equilibrium and thus into
rude health.226 Writing in 1666, Saif Khan (aka. Faqirullah) declared in his
Persian treatise on Hindustani music that: ‘to arouse tender sympathy in the
heart is music’s entire essence, and its result.’227
At the same time, such treatises were ‘written to correct, canonize,
and preserve a tiny handful of India’s vast array of musical practices and
styles’, Schofield notes, ‘and to protect them from the current unenlight-
ened depredations of their professional practitioners.’228 The kind of music
upon which they fixed were those rooted in the ragas (melodic modes) and
carried by certain talas (rhythmic cycles, akin to metres). These songs and
instrumental forms (on the rudra vina, rabab, sitar, and tabla, for instance)
were performed by hereditary communities of professionals (kalawants,
qawwals).229 Such music and its underpinning concepts were of long-standing,
but practitioners had purportedly lost their knowledge of the science of music
down the generations, causing its perceived degeneration. This necessitated the
realignment of Hindustani practice with Sanskrit discourse or else with per-
formance practice in the south, which was held to be closer to the authentic,
antique, or ‘classical’ tradition as found in texts. Thus, musicological treatises
at once educated while they also standardised and gave form and content to
the musical cannon.
All this had come into being by the mid-seventeenth century, thanks to
imperial patrons like Shah Jahan, who commissioned an anthology of dhrupad
lyrics, the Sahasras, as well as numerous sub-imperial ones, too. Against the
view that Aurangzeb banned music, Schofield highlights the vibrancy of
musical culture, patronage, and performance in the later seventeenth century
and its role in bonding the Mughal elite.230 As the boundaries of the empire
subsequently declined, so –as with other arts –opportunities for musicians
and musicologists were dispersed.231 This was reflected as much in musical per-
formance as in ragamala painting within the regional courts or the transla-
tion of key musicological works into regional vernaculars, although it should
be noted that the origins of vernacular connoisseurship pre-dated Mughal
interventions.232
The early seventeenth- century Sanskrit work by Damodara, the
Sangitadarpana (‘Mirror of Music’), was especially influential. It digested work
of several centuries prior with reference to other musical treatises, making it a
226 Ibid, 188. See, also: Schofield, ‘Hindustani Music’, 177–225.

227 Translated and cited in: Schofield, ‘Emotions’, 183.
228 Schofield, ‘Classicization’, 496.
229 Schofield, ‘Emotions’, 183.
230 Schofield, ‘Hindustani Music’.
231 This is likely to be examined more fully in Schofield’s forthcoming monograph.
232 Dallapiccola et al, Ragamala Painting; Williams, ‘Singing’, 181.
valuable navigational aid; hence, its influence on Faquirullah’s Persian music-

ology. Probably not long after it made its appearance, Damodara’s text was
translated into Braj by Harivallabha, who did not merely render the Sanskrit in
a different language, but reworked it for a Braj audience and their sensibilities.
Harivallabha’s Sangitadarpana exists today in multiple recensions, some with
commentaries, some with ragamala illustrations, some found as far afield as
Bengal and Punjab –and these texts certainly circulated widely –all reflecting
the growing range of audiences and purposes.233 Having said that, the Mughal
centre was rivalled by the cultural production of the Deccani courts, while
intellectuals in different regions seem to have favoured particular texts, placing
limitations on how far texts circulated or created impact.234
What does all this represent? On the one hand, the kind of music played
in Mughal elite or courtly (darbari) settings and theorised in musicological
treatises patronised or penned and circulated by Mughal gentlefolk laid the
foundations for a musical high culture at large –Hindustani classical music.
This high culture was embraced from the late seventeenth century in Punjab
and at the Lahore darbar of the Sikh maharaja, Ranjit Singh, much as it was at
other successor state courts across north India.235 On the other hand, the ideas
regarding the relationship of the classical to the modern and the elevated to
the folk underpinning this classicisation of certain musical styles and practices
were by their very nature exclusivist. According to Sanskrit treatises, marga
(the universal way) lay above desi (the local place), which informed the struc-
turing of Sanskrit above local languages, as we have seen.236 As imperial music-
ology developed over the seventeenth century, marga came to take on multiple
meanings –‘not just divinity and universality’ and that related to Sanskrit, but
also associations ‘with age and antiquity, with authenticity and authority, and
with music aligned with theory.’237 Desi, by contrast, ‘became associated with
the familiar local context of the north, with the current practice of musicians,
and with modernity and newness.’238 Desi meant the vernacular, the new-
fangled, and the degenerate.
But this did not entail that musical high culture was a fortress, inaccess-
ible to outsiders and ever- vigilant of unwanted external influences. One
avenue into a richer understanding of the relationship of courtly Hindustani
music to other venues and styles is to return to the fact that musicology was a
growing field with an ever-wider audience, comprising not only courtiers but
also religious leaders and merchants.239 Take, for instance, Narottama Dasa
233 See, valuably: Williams, ‘Reflecting’.

234 Williams, ‘Singing’, 190. For a Deccani, illustrated ragamala manuscript in Persian,
see: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Miftah al-Sarod (1691), IS 61:1–1977.
235 Kapuria, ‘Music’, here 660.
236 Schofield, ‘Classicization’, 491.
237 Ibid, 500.
238 Ibid, 500.
239 Williams, ‘Reflecting’, 97.
(d. c.1611). He was a Vaishnava devotee of the Gaudiya sampradaya (§2.1.1)

and lived in Vrindavan in the late sixteenth century, where he was exposed
to Hindustani art-music. His contribution, it is said, was to combine musical
poetry or lyrics and local musical tastes with raga-based art-music in ways,
moreover, that aligned it with what was going on in the Mughal heartland.240
Notwithstanding that some of the details come from later hagiographies whose
authors were soaked in musicology and thus apt to use its terminology to
describe Naromatta Dasa’s contributions, while also blurring his endeavours
with those of other Vaishnava devotees engaging with musicological treatises
and ideas, the result was to classicise kirtan (or, should we say, to vernacularise
musical high culture?).241 This was not a wholescale transformation, of course.
There were aspects of bhakti kirtan that were at odds with art-music: standing
(rather than sitting) and its impact on the music, a dynamic and unbridled
emotive energy (rather than its careful control), the playing of instruments not
used in courtly settings, and so forth.242
Nevertheless, as devotees like Naromatta Dasa sought ways of embed-
ding the principles of art-music into religious practice to harness the power
of sound, they critically and innovatively engaged with Sanskrit musicology
around the same time as the Mughals –that is, from around the late six-
teenth century. Among those who later described these developments were
Narahari Chakravarti, a Bengali who settled in Vrindavan in the early eight-
eenth century and who had studied music in Delhi, Mathura, and Vrindavan
under the guidance of both Hindu gurus and Muslim ustads.243 Alongside
his hagiographies, he penned a practical and theoretical guide for singers, a
song anthology in Sanskrit and Bengali, and a compendium of musicological
treatises.244 Across this body of work, his professed aim was, Richard Williams
argues, ‘to be educating singers within the sampradaya community, by distil-
ling useful music theory and embedding it in a vaishnava frame of reference’;
thus, for instance, one of his major works ‘begins with a specifically vaish-
nava explanation of the origins of musical sound (16,000 ragas arising from
Krishna’s playing the flute, and the gopis’ singing)’ before situating Sanskrit
theory within that cosmology.245
How was this possible and why was it significant? Williams reminds us
that ‘musicians and scholars of music developed repertoires, systems of
aesthetics, and performance practices that resonated in both temple and
courtly settings’, for they circulated within the interleaved worlds forged by
Mughal imperial infrastructure and by religious institutions, as Narahari
240 Williams, ‘Singing’, 182.

241 Ibid, 183.
242 Ibid, 183–84, where the distinctiveness of Gaudiya intellectuals –from the wider bhakti field –
in engaging with such non-sectarian musicological works is also outlined.
243 Ibid, 182.
244 Ibid, 186.
245 Ibid, 187.
Chakravarti’s career shows. Williams also notes that religious and royal
settings ‘were drawn into close proximity’, for ‘when vaishnava deities and
their priestly custodians became associated with specific rulers, sacred and
royal ritual practices could converge.’246 Such was the impact of Vaishnava
musicologists in seventeenth-century Odisha, for example, while it should be
noted that Vaishnava temple music and dance had also made their way into
Persianate courts for the purposes of entertainment by the eighteenth cen-
tury.247 Scientific thought at large, as we shall see in the next chapter, likewise
proved difficult to contain within classical languages, courtly settings, and
imperial networks.
9.4 Conclusion
Over the long-term, Brahmanisation and the spread of Bhakti movements
spurred horizontal standardisation, even as they spread notions of caste and
hence the emergence of those caste-based hierarchies that led to greater ver-
tical stratification.248 On the one hand, cultural standardisation worked with
state expansion and administrative centralisation to produce a sequence of
ever more well-integrated states in the millennium to c. 1800. On the other
hand, vernacularisation was a stronger tide and regionalism a greater ten-
dency in south Asia than contemporary Burma, Siam, France, Russia, or
Japan, not to mention China, as Victor Lieberman argues.249 India was
not only multilingual and multi-scriptual, but experienced what has been
described as a ‘hybrid, restless, multilingual ferment’ after Timur left, with a
deepening of vernacular culture sometimes working in opposition to cultural
standardisation and political integration.250 Impressively centralised though
they were, early modern Indian states –even the Mughal state –were less
stable and durable as a result.251
By the early eighteenth century, the Mughal state –the most geographically
expansive state on the Indian subcontinent in several centuries –was giving way
to myriad successor states. But this reversion to polycentrism went hand-in-
hand with something novel: the emergence of what C.A. Bayly termed regional
‘patriotisms’, which he defined not as something primordial, but as describing
246 Ibid, 180.

247 Ibid, 190; Hodgson, Venture, 145.
248 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii, 659–78, where the parallel role of Islam and ‘Perso-
Islamic’ culture is also considered.
250 Orsini and Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, 2, for citation. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, espe-
cially 38–39, 187–97, 292, sets out the tension between localism versus trans-localism and
pluralism, vernacularisation and cosmopolitanism, cultural fissure and what he calls ‘stand-
ardisation’. C.f. Eaton, Persianate Age, 133–38.
251 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii, 631–732, for the analysis of south Asia within the frame-
work of his larger thesis.
‘the sense of loyalty to place and institutions which bound some Indians […]
to their regional homelands.’252 These, he argued, created the Indian ‘public
sphere’ within which the later Indian nationalist movement could take root.253
Another, somewhat contrary effect was typical of the push-and-pull of the
forces making for standardisation or difference, of the tension of the ver-
nacular or local vis-à-vis the cosmopolitan and larger regional or ‘national’
frames. As the patriotisms of the eighteenth century were articulated through
regional languages and cultures, so there came a push for political reorganisa-
tion along linguistic lines that began in the late colonial period and continues
today. Some politicians resisted dividing the newly independent nation into
language areas after 1947. Others, however, viewed the connection of language
with community or place as fundamental to representative democracy. From
the cleavage of a Hindi (dialect)-speaking area from Punjab to form Haryana
in 1966, to the separation of a majority Telugu-speaking area from Andhra
Pradesh to form Telangana in 2014, a series of linguistic states have acquired
their place within India’s federal union.
Thus, if they could be derided as mere patois by Sanskrit intellectuals
before the dawn of early modernity, the same was not the case by the end
of the period, for deshabhashas were firmly established as languages of
intellectual and cultural production and fast becoming vehicles of political
expression. There were many kinds of vernacularisation, of local ways of
making culture: from below, but also in dialogue with elite or cosmopol-
itan tongues and traditions, themselves steadily evolving; through the emu-
lation of high registers or high styles, but also in competition with them;
via performance and oral-aural transmission, but also through literisation
and literary production; thanks to the lavish patronage of the king or his
courtiers, but also without such largesse. For its part, the state was not always
the most important agent of vernacularisation in south Asia, compared to,
say, France or Poland, where the state vitally aided the spread of French and
Polish by making them the official languages of administration (in 1539, in
both cases).254
Indian rulers, like those anywhere in the world, were guided by what they
discerned as their priorities and yet limited by their own predispositions or
prejudices. The Mughals chose to operate in Persian for good reason, yet also
supported the production of Braj works, even as they largely ignored other
languages. The lasting impact of the Jesuits at the Mughal court was as
transmitters of art and the religious iconography described above, whereas in
China they additionally played a key role in transmitting scientific and math-
ematical ideas then circulating in Europe, a fact that reflects the very different
concerns of particular rulers as much as differences in intellectual life at their
252 Bayly, Origins, v, for citation, and 20–49.

253 See: Bayly, Empire and Information, 180–211.
254 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii, 261–64; Şahin, Empire and Power, 226.
courts and within their kingdoms.255 Knowledge, and especially what is com-
monly called ‘science’, is the subject of the next chapter, which inevitably
returns not only to the vernacularisation of scientific thought in south Asia,
but also considers its limits.
255 Koch, ‘Being Like Jesus and Mary’, 199, for this observation. Flowers, ‘Scientific Knowledge’,
reviews the impact of the Jesuits on science at the Qing court while surveying the contexts,
priorities, and development of scientific knowledge in the imperial court, among Chinese
intellectuals, and in society at large.
10 Knowledge
Shortly after the Mughal conquest of the Deccan, an unknown artist in

Aurangabad –versed in the conventions of Deccani as well as Mughal and
Rajput painting –set about his work. Someone of wealth had commissioned
a copy of a work by the polymath, Muhammad Baha’ al-Din al-‘Amili, a.k.a.
Shaikh Baha’i (1547–1621), a man who had served as the highest officer on
religious and juridical matters in the Safavid Empire before travelling and con-
tinuing his writing in the fields of theology and philosophy, mathematics and
astronomy, architecture and poetry. It was Shaikh Baha’i’s masnavi entitled Nan
va Halva (‘Bread and Sweets’) that our unknown artist was illuminating for his
Indian patron. In the manuscript copy upon which the artist worked, the Arabic
preface appeared in black ink, with Persian interlinear translation in red, while
the poem itself appears in Persian in black, with Arabic headings in gold.
Surviving as perhaps the only illustrated version of Nan va Halva, the artist
went well beyond outlining the text with golden clouds and flowering plants,
with borders featuring rocky landscapes populated with fantastical birds and
animals. Although not lending itself to illumination, he must have found some
of the author’s parables highly amusing, for he produced four full-leaf and
incredibly witty paintings to illustrate parts of the text. A school where only
the sciences are taught is the subject of the picture accompanying the chapter
on the regrets of a life spent learning things of no use on the day of resur-
rection (Fig. 10A). In the top right, we see an elderly teacher, book in hand.
Around him, one student is in such a state of stupor from drinking that his
turban has fallen from his head, while another (a Sufi, bottom left) is dozing,
and another still (a yogi, bottom right) prefers to ‘meditate’.
Thinking about this picture, the text it was illuminating, and the context to its
circulation and reproduction is germane to the themes of this chapter. What kind
of school is this, where we find such a motley group of students? How, in fact, did
one acquire a formal education in early modern India? In what venues and what
languages did learning take place? How did knowledge travel and circulate? How
was it translated as it moved across boundaries erected by culture, language, local
traditions? And what was the relationship of ‘science’ and ‘religion’? Animated
by these concerns, this chapter begins by identifying who literate people were and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-10
Knowledge 427
Fig. 10A A School of the Sciences, from a Manuscript of Nan va Halva by Muhammad
Baha’al-
Din al-‘Amili (watercolour, gold, and inks; unknown artist in
Aurangabad; c. 1690)
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States, 1999.157
428 Knowledge
how they acquired literacy and an education, before examining some of the larger
impacts of this learning, including the formation of the self and the critical self-
awareness of one’s role in intellectual or other kinds of labour. The larger part of
this chapter concerns the forms of knowledge extant in the early modern world,
which is, both by necessity and by design, a selective survey.
Poking fun at the sciences, Fig. 10A seems to allude –quite knowingly –to
what historians have called useful knowledge, the presence or supposed absence
of which they have placed at the centre of explanations about the Great
Divergence.1 Some modes or forms of knowledge (ilm) have been encountered in
the preceding chapters, from other-worldly wisdom to alchemy, from urban eth-
nography and travel writing to literary science and musicology.2 Some merit more
attention than can be granted in the present chapter, while others are represented
by still-nascent fields of scholarly inquiry. Take, for instance, comparative phil-
ology, long and widely presumed to have come into being through the energies
of such Western intellectuals as the eighteenth-century Company Orientalist,
Sir William Jones (1756–94). This ‘science of language’ was developing in the
Indo-Persianate ecumene long before Jones’ arrival on the scene; in fact, he
relied to an extent on the insights and findings of those Indo-Persian thinkers
who scooped Jones’ supposed discoveries, even if this fact has largely been for-
gotten because so few contemporaries were equipped to establish the degree of
Jones’ originality. This having been established, it is now for historians to study
the achievements and early modern culture of inquiry (Humanism, if you will)
among non-Western thinkers, as Rajiv Kinra has set out to do.3
A separate problem relates to numerous forms of knowledge remaining
embodied and transmitted orally-aurally and thus fairly mysterious in the
context of early modern India. Add to this secret knowledge, such as intel-
ligence. The artist of Elizabeth I’s famous ‘Rainbow Portrait’ may have
pictorialised the message ‘non sine sole iris’ (‘no rainbow without the sun’)
by showing her holding a rainbow, the queen being the sun by implication,
but he also painted eyes and ears camouflaged in the folds of her gown.
These variously reminded onlookers of the queen’s wisdom in matters of
both heart and mind, or that the Elizabethan peace resided in the work of
her spies, such as Francis Walsingham (d. 1590), and their command over
the world of whispers and shadows –yet, by the same token, declared defi-
ance of her sovereignty as a hopeless cause.4 Of informants and political
1 Parthasarathi, Asia, especially 185–222 on useful knowledge in pre-colonial India, responding

to ideas forwarded, most especially, by Joel Mokyr concerning the causes of ‘Industrial
Enlightenment’ in Britain first and foremost, rather than other parts of the world. For criticisms
of Mokyr’s work: Clark, ‘Review Essay’, especially 90–93.
2 Aside from kingly interest in alchemy in various locales around the globe, which we have already
encountered, we might note the pivotal role of religious groups, such as the Naths, in the context
of early modern India; see: Ramos, Tantra, 81.
3 Kinra, ‘Comparative Philology’, which is the source of this discussion. See, also: Kinra, ‘Noble
Science’.
4 The portrait now hangs at Hatfield House, outside London. See: Strong, Gloriana, 31, 156–61.
For a different reading of the picture: Dimmock, Elizabethan Globalism, 103–27.
Knowledge 429
intelligence much before the colonial transition in south Asia –let alone
in the time of Elizabeth’s Mughal contemporaries, such as Akbar –we
know little, however, especially when compared to recent findings on early
modern Ottoman information networks.5 A final issue concerns the tying
of particular communities of knowledgeable people to intellectual produc-
tion in particular registers. The outcome was the fracturing of whole discip-
lines (and their historiographies), although evidence of cross-fertilisation
between Sanskrit and Persianate learning, for instance, is discernible as an
early modern development.
Against this, the present survey encompasses those knowledges that helped
make sense of one’s position in space (i.e., the geographic, navigational, and
cartographic) and those which helped maintain one’s place in the passage of
time (i.e., mathematics, horology, and the astral sciences), while also broaching
botany and medicine. These were also active intellectual fields in other parts
of the world. Two wider issues arise from comparison. In the first place, India
and Indians played an important part in networks of scientific knowledge pro-
duction, some of long-standing (e.g., those directed toward Iran and central
Asia), others more recently revivified due to new forms of connectivity (e.g.,
links to Europe), but they seldom did so merely passively; Indians actively
collaborated with intellectuals across the subcontinent or from faraway
places, while taking an interest in new ideas developed elsewhere. The second
issue concerns the relationship of knowledge communities and ‘scientific’
institutions with the state. On the one hand, scientific activity and learning –
expressed in cosmopolitan registers, while also being vernacularised –was
enclaved by language and community, yet fairly free from political interven-
tion or interference. On the other hand, science was not steadily yoked in
south Asia to the interests of the state and to national progress, as it was in
other parts of the world, with important implications for the organisation and
ideology of the scientific community on the eve of colonialism.
10.1 Literacy and Learning

Under the wooden sign showing two golden compasses, not far from the docks
along the Scheldt and under the shadow of Antwerp’s towering cathedral, was
the townhouse with its printing workshops and saleroom founded in the mid-
sixteenth century by Christophe Plantin (d. 1589). Trained as a bookbinder,
he relocated from Paris to the Low Countries.6 Before seventeenth-century
Amsterdam, with its global trade that made the port-city a cosmopolitan place,
there was sixteenth-century Antwerp, then the north’s leading port, the locus
of the first financialisation of the early modern world economy, and home to
5 Bayly, Empire and Information, 10–96, on later eighteenth-century India; Ghobrial, Whispers of
Cities, on late seventeenth-century Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
6 The availability of artistic talent was one motive (stated by Plantin in a letter explaining his
move), but religious and political convictions were another; Chipps Smith, Netherlandish
Renaissance, 402.
430 Knowledge
a great number of ‘outlanders’ (foreigners) –making it the perfect place for

exiles and Protestant ‘heretics’ to hide in plain sight.7 Because it was such a
place of commercial exchange and human traffic, it was also the ideal location
for a wide-reaching, cutting-edge publishing venture.
On the distribution side of things, Plantin had the good fortune to be
awarded a monopoly granted by the Papacy for the supply of liturgical texts,
the patronage of Philip II of Spain, representation at the renowned Frankfurt
Book Fair, and a ready market around Europe, not least across the channel, in
England. On the commissioning side, Plantin was shrewd to realise challenging
projects and cultivate men of great learning, such as Abraham Ortelius (1527–
98), the geographer and cartographer who was born and died in Antwerp and
produced the first modern atlas; the Flemish doctor and botanist, Carolus
Clusius (1526–1609); and the Italian merchant-turned-urban ethnographer
of Antwerp, Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–89). Aside from these and other
learned figures, Plantin’s intellectual network encompassed those possessing
religious learning and knowledge of languages; hence, he was able to publish
one of the most ambitious and famous works, the Polyglot Bible, with its par-
allel texts in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, a copy of which even
made its way to the Mughal court, as we have seen. The house would later go
on to print Arabic dictionaries and grammars, too.8
What is revealed by this case study of Plantin’s business? At the grandest
scale, it shows us the impact of early modern globalisation upon knowledge
production. Plantin’s networks ranged from the immediately local and often
quite city-centric to those continental in scope, but his contacts –many of
whom we shall return to in this chapter –also relied on correspondence
networks stretching around the globe. Plantin’s fortunes were imbricated
within those of his friends and contacts, and vice versa, just as aspects of his
production and distribution of books were interleaved in the life of the city,
its politics, and its global trade. Although the printing press had been around
since the invention of moveable type in the previous century, the production of
printed books began to take off in the sixteenth century. We can only speculate
about the precise aetiological impact of the age of discoveries upon this accel-
eration. What the rise of print in Europe does urgently raise, however, is the
7 It was Antwerp’s ‘beurs’ that gave us the ‘bourse’ –which was virtually ‘plagiarised’, as Pye puts
it, in the form of the English stock exchange –as well as being pivotal to the creation of money
markets. The city was so commercialised that the attic of the beurs was the site of an art market,
for art had become a commodity bought and sold on the open market, too. Pye, Antwerp, 116–
39. See, also: Prak, Dutch Republic, 87–150, for the larger economic picture of Antwerp and
Amsterdam. To envision ‘Golden Age’ Amsterdam’s cosmopolitanism, consider: Kolfin and
Runia, Black in Rembrandt’s Time.
8 These were the work of Franciscus Raphelengius (who had collaborated on the Polyglot Bible),
his sons, and Thomas Erpenius. See: Hamilton, Arab and Arabists, here especially 259–68, and
passim, for essays revealing how ‘global’ and interwoven were learning, knowledge production,
and messianic thought in the early modern world. See, also: §3.3.4–§3.3.5.
Knowledge 431
issue of how knowledge was transmitted, how (and how far) it circulated, and
how it was received, both in places impacted by moveable type and those that
were not, such as early modern India.9
A print revolution did not take place in south Asia until the nineteenth
century.10 To be sure, there were challenges to the utilisation of moveable type
by users of (cursive) non-European languages (e.g., Persian, Sanskrit, Braj,
Punjabi, etc), although Plantin’s printing of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic
texts shows that this was not insurmountable.11 There were also good reasons
for keeping works in manuscript rather than printed form (e.g. secrecy, not
wanting or needing to reach a general audience, etc), to the extent that we
must acknowledge the limits and even the resistance to print not only in Asia
but also in Europe, not only several centuries ago but even today.12 As for the
reasons for print not taking off in India before c. 1800, these are not especially
relevant, save to note the problems of culturalist interpretations that speak of
an aversion to print outside Europe/Christendom.13
In this connection, we might briefly note the printing house set up in 1726 by
Ibrahim Müteferrika in the Ottoman Empire. It may only have endured piecemeal
after his death in 1746/7, but it was hardly a failure when sales and circulation are
placed in comparative context –both in terms of the Ottoman market and against
figures relating to early printing ventures in Europe. It did not stimulate a print
revolution, which only occurred in the next century, but Müteferrika was an ‘agent
of evolution’, Orlin Sabev argues, smoothing the way from a scribal-manuscript
culture to one based on print.14 In early modern India, too, manuscript-scribal
cultures of various sorts (e.g., those based on palm leaf) were the basis of the
communication of ideas and of lower-and higher-level learning, themselves
transformed by the introduction of paper and the different kind of manuscript-
scribal culture it engendered.15 Before delving into the forms of knowledge and
fields of inquiry cultivated by the early moderns, it is worth pausing to consider
how the early moderns acquired literacy and thereby accessed higher learning, if
at all. Because, as we shall see, certain knowledge traditions were tied to particular
languages, our immediate concern is with what can be called a ‘general education’
in early modern India’s lingua franca (Persian) and in vernaculars.
Percolating from royal courts into society at large since the arrival of the
first of the Delhi Sultans –a few poetic or historical manuscripts here, a flurry
of workaday loan words there –Persian was only declared the language of
Mughal administration during Akbar’s reign.16 Indeed, the Mughals did not
9 Actually, the printing press was introduced by Jesuit missionaries in 1556, but was neither
much used nor made much of a wider impact: Mattausch, ‘Printing Press’, 59.
10 See: §2.5.3.
11 Mattausch, ‘Printing Press’, 65–68, for details of an (unsuccessful) Gujarati initiative.
12 Wooding, Tudor England, 320.
13 C.f. Mattausch, ‘Printing Press’, 68–78.
14 Sabev, ‘Ottoman Turkish Printing’.
15 O’Hanlon, ‘Performance’, especially 93–96.
16 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Making of a Munshi’, 186–87.
432 Knowledge
embrace Persian immediately (§9.1); Babur wrote his memoirs in his native
Chaghtai Turkish, for example, which was also the first language of his son and
successor. The adoption of Persian is all the more curious given the scope and
extent of its usage, especially when set against other north Indian languages
(§9.2). True, it was well-established as the register of the Muslim elite. That
said, it was not so important to the Mughals’ predecessors, while Hindavi was
on the rise and received some praise from Muslim commentators as a register.17
Thus, as Muzaffar Alam plainly states, any explanation of Persian’s rise must
‘be sought more in the convergence of factors within the Mughal regime than
in the Indo-Persian heritage of the earlier Muslim regimes.’18 The precise causes
are murky, but one factor was surely the arrival of successive waves of talented
writers, scholars, and artisans from Iran following Humayun’s return to India
and the reconquest that began his second reign.19 A turning point came in
Akbar’s reign, when Persian ‘emerged as the language of the king, the royal
household and the high Mughal elite’, as well as of the administration, once
the latter had been reorganised by the Iranian émigré Mir Fathallah Shirazi,
under whom worked a cadre of talented Iranian clerks.20
Persian’s spread across the Indian subcontinent then accelerated and
deepened, its reach extending well beyond the spatial and temporal domains of
the Mughal Empire, which it outlasted.21 A critical factor in this development
was not that Persian was declared the regime’s lingua franca per se, or that
record keeping at all levels of the state was thus to be done in Persian, but that
the middling and lower-level bureaucracy was willing and able to actually effect
this policy. We have already encountered the important category of bureaucrats
sometimes known as munshis or muharrirs (clerks, scribes, secretaries) or as
kayasthas, an increasing number of whom came from Khatri, Kayastha, or
Brahman families (§7.2.3). We have met some of the most celebrated munshis
of their time –Chandar Bhan Brahman, Raghunath Ray Kayastha, Sujan Rai,
and Anand Ram ‘Mukhlis’ –through the accounts they have left us.
The munshi was not a single creature, but a catch-all term for a range of
higher-and lower-level civil servants, while the category of Indian scribal
peoples was wider still.22 Nevertheless, the elite munshis’ accounts help us
understand the clerks’ world, from their education and training to the dis-
charge of their daily duties once in office. That said, first-person accounts –
let alone autobiographical accounts –are a relatively rare find. Thus, we may
turn to another set of sources, comprised of normative texts intended for the
17 The Mughal elite eventually took a closer interest in Hindavi, and the explosion of Persian in
some ways proceeded in parallel with (and sometimes in interaction with) the development of
Hindavi and its dialects (e.g., Braj, Avadhi); Alam, ‘Pursuit’, 317–19, 342–48.
18 Ibid, 319.
19 Ibid, 319–24, 348.
20 Ibid, 324.
21 Persian was only abolished as the ‘official language’ of the state by the Company in the 1830s.
22 O’Hanlon et al, ‘Scribal Service People’.
Knowledge 433
scribal class (so-called mirrors-for-munshis, analogous to mirrors-for-princes).

The latter includes the classic Insha’-i Harkaran by Harkaran Das Kambuh of
Multan, penned during the reign of Jahangir and translated in the early period
of Company rule, or the Nigarnama-i Munshi, which was concerned with the
munshi’s training and those technical subjects of which ‘he ought to rightfully
claim a mastery’.23
How, then, did largely Hindu Indian communities –until then working
in Hindavi –learn and master Persian, some even going on to earn renown
as Persianate litterateurs and savants? We do not have the kind of rich social
history of language(s) and their learning lately produced by John Gallagher
for early modern England. He focusses on schools and universities, but also
extracurricular and extrainstitutional education (e.g., in the home, coffeeshop,
or marketplace, which were becoming increasingly important venues for lin-
guistic encounters and learning), and thus on teachers, textbooks, and (speech-
oriented) conversation manuals as well as conventional dictionaries and
grammars. He is also attentive to the polyglot character of the British Isles,
where speakers of some English dialect or other might also be familiar with
cosmopolitan and regional languages (e.g., Latin and Cornish), and where a
plethora of ‘foreign’ languages and their dialects had to be reckoned with in
workplaces and wider society (e.g., French, Tuscan/Italian), all of which gave
rise to a linguistic mêlée not dissimilar to that found in early modern India.24
We do, however, know of the reform of madrasa education in Akbar’s time –a
pivotal development involving the ‘introduction of secular themes in the syllabi
at middle levels’ that was part and parcel of Mir Fathallah Shirazi’s reforms.25
A detour through Mir Fathallah’s career is instructive, revealing how this
change came about as well as some larger issues relevant to our study of know-
ledge. Having matriculated in the curriculum taught in the celebrated and
well-connected centre of Shiraz, he was learned in ‘mathematics, statecraft,
astronomy and history, and could therefore contribute to a state administra-
tion that used linear time and a new solar calendar in the service of a ruthless
revenue collection.’26 His teacher fell out of favour, triggering Mir Fathullah
and his scholar-comrades’ search for a substitute patron. They went not to the
Mughal north, but the Deccan, for it had extensive and close cultural, commer-
cial, religious, and intellectual links to Iran and was more hospitable to Shi‘is.
There, a former pupil had become a scholar of renown, tried his luck and
succeeded as an advisor to the Bijapur sultan, and was hence able to place his
23 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Making of a Munshi’, 186.

24 Gallagher, Learning Languages, whose point of departure is the observation that English was
the tongue of some islanders on the periphery of Europe, which perhaps makes it different to
those broad-reaching languages described in this chapter. Gallagher also expressly observes
that language ability was not a matter of fluency or not, but of multiple (il)literacies and
competences, often closely depending on context or habitus.
25 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Making of a Munshi’, 187.
26 Anooshahr, ‘Shirazi Scholars’, 334, for citation, and 335–37, for deeper analysis of Mir
Fathallah’s education and his intellectual milieu.
434 Knowledge
countrymen into important positions in the sultanate. Thus, Mir Fathallah was
enticed to the Deccan, which played an important role in mediating India-Iran
flows of human capital, and where he learnt how to acculturate his learning to
the Indian context.
The death of the pro-ghariban (pro-Iranian) ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I, combined with
the new and more inclusivity ideology of the Mughal state following the for-
mulation of the policy of sulh-i kull (§3.3.4), prompted Mir Fathallah’s reloca-
tion to the Mughal lands. There, he worked with Raja Todar Mal to streamline
the Mughal state apparatus.27 His training in astronomy meant he was also
tasked with devising a new calendar for the empire that reconciled the Muslim
calendrical system based on lunar cycles with Indic solar or lunisolar systems
to, among all else, smoothen the functioning of the revenue-bureaucratic
system of the state.28 After taking some responsibility for the education of
Mughal noble youths, he helped redraw educational curricula, taking inspir-
ation from the Shiraz tradition as ‘Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), Koranic exe-
gesis (tafsir) and the study of reports from the time of the Prophet (hadith)
were downgraded in favour of astronomy, philosophy (hikmat), medicine,
mathematics, poetry, history and mythography’.29 The latter, Ali Anooshahr
notes, ‘were not significant topics of study in Shiraz and their inclusion obvi-
ously reflects the contingencies of Akbar’s court.’30 Overall, this change –and
the intellectual climate to which the Shirazi scholars contributed –was ‘key to
the incorporation of Hindu administrative officials into the Mughal adminis-
trative system.’31 Political context, his career amply reveals, had a strong influ-
ence over what was studied and taught, how it was learnt, and who partook
in this education, even as the madrasa system and the broad structure of the
programme resembled the kind of education received in, say, Istanbul or the
Deccan.32
Returning to the middle and lower rungs of the state apparatus, we should
note that some Hindus learnt Persian before this time, yet kayasthas subse-
quently began to join ‘madrasas in large numbers to acquire mastery in Persian
language and literature, which now promised a good career in the imperial
service.’33 Of course, the costs and benefits had to be carefully weighed up.
Administrative careers could become a family occupation and parlayed into
landed rights, making possible the acquisition of gentry status and the enjoy-
ment of an urbane life among the literati, as seems to have happened in Bengal,
27 Ibid, 339–44.
28 Blake, Time, especially 119–32, 138–40.
29 Anooshahr, ‘Shirazi Scholars’, 344.
30 Ibid, 344.
31 Ibid, 344, for citation, and 347–48.
32 Fleischer, Bureaucrat, 13–40, for the education of an Ottoman contemporary, Mustafa Ali;
Şahin, Empire and Power, 15–48, on Celalzade Mustafa, ditto. For an intricate portrait of early
modern Persianate education in the Deccan: Flatt, Living Well, 34–43, 167–209.
33 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Making of a Munshi’, 187. Such was the importance of Persian,
that Shudras also mastered the language, according to Kinra in Writing, 24.
Knowledge 435
or compensate for –if not recover –lands and status lost during Indo-Muslim
conquest, as was the fate of certain Brahmans in the Deccan.34 Yet, service to an
‘unclean’ or ‘barbarian’ master could imperil one’s caste status (§2.1.2; §3.2.1),
requiring some ideological-rhetorical fillip to rationalise a Persianate educa-
tion and one’s subsequent career within Indo-Muslim states of the sort found
in manuals known as mestaks.35 At the same time, the ‘mundane routines of a
scribe’s work, his careful use of instruments for preparing paper, pen and ink,
his hours of labour at escritoire or writing table, the accuracy and legibility of
his writing and his conscientious management of documents entrusted to him’,
Rosalind O’Hanlon notes, ‘could also constitute a form of religious service.’36
Private tuition was available to a select few, from the young Chandar Bhan
to the imperial princes, with learning in the madrasa classroom being the norm
for others.37 Proceeding in stages –from learning the script, to basic proficiency
in language, to an all-round learnedness in Persianate works on the arts and
sciences –studies in the madrasa likely sat side-by-side with the learners’ edu-
cation in other venues (e.g., the family firm or home), and was thus a conscious
investment and by no means a quick crash-course.38 Part of this education
involved a structured programme covering Persian language, starting with use
of the nisab genre (i.e., rhyming dictionaries for children) and building to more
complex dictionaries and primers in grammar, and also Persian literature,
via tazkiras (compendia containing poets’ biographies and short examples of
their verse) and set texts reflecting what may be called literary classics (e.g.,
the thirteenth-century Gulistan by Sa’di); language and literary learning nat-
urally reinforced one another.39 Proficiency was also attained and honed via
training in more practical arts as learners read and engaged with Persian-
language treatises on akhlaq; advice literature or textbooks (dastur-al amal),
including those on arithmetic (hisab) and accountancy (siyaq); and munshats,
which advised –through prose exemplars or models of belles-lettres – on insha,
the art of writing in Persian (notably, of epistolary compositions), and ultim-
ately of Persianate comportment, and on scribal skills (navisindagi).40 In time,
34 Chatterjee, ‘Scribal Elites’, 460–62, and passim, for a portrait of high-status groups’ service in
sultanate and Mughal Bengal that decentres and nuances the account provided, above.
35 Guha, ‘Serving the Barbarian’, here especially 507, 513–22; Minkowski in ‘Learned Brahmans’.
See, also: §7.2.3.
36 O’Hanlon et al, ‘Scribal Service People’, 447–48, which draws on the work of Desphande and
others.
37 Dudney, ‘Persian-Language Education’, 82; Faruqui, Princes, 78–82, for details of the imperial
princes’ education.
38 Such is the picture given by Nek Rai’s autobiographical account of his early years, described by
Alam and Subrahmanyam in ‘Making of a Munshi’, 191–206. See, also: Alam, ‘Pursuit’, 326–
30; Haider, ‘Accountancy Manuals’, 268–70. On the role of family and professional networks
as a resource offering access to patronage or mentorship, training in the norms of professional
conduct, (scarce) reading materials, and news, as well as the very great difficulty of maintaining
multiple affiliations amidst changes in politics and patronage: Dhavan, ‘Networks’.
39 Dudney, ‘Persian-Language Education’, 80, 83, 85–87.
40 Chatterjee, ‘Mahzar-namas’, 397–99. See, also: Flatt, Living Well, 39–52.
436 Knowledge
new Indo-Persian works and commentaries relating to each of these genres

were added, some penned by kayasthas themselves as the latter became fully
acculturated in the (evolving) Persianate tradition and attained fame as literati.
Indar Sen’s Khulasat us-Siyaq (1703–04), a self-avowedly up-to-date account-
ancy manual, is one such example.41
So far, we have dealt with the education of fairly elite actors, but what of
those a little lower down the socio-economic hierarchy? ‘Sikhism’s written
culture and egalitarian principles’, Hardip Singh Syan highlights, ‘seems to
have fostered Sikh schools in certain parts of Mughal India.’42 Of import-
ance here are the masands (administrative officers), because their main role
was to support sangats (congregational communities) and because they
were appointed on the basis of their literacy as much as their piety.43 The
masands, much as the Sikh literati and savants, wrote and read Punjabi and
Braj (in Gurmukhi script) and perhaps other languages like Persian. These
literate Sikhs are likely to have created schools for local sangats on the gurus’
compulsions, where Sikh boys would have studied the scriptures and gained
some numeracy and literacy in vernaculars like Hindavi, and which were thus
a rough counterpart to the madrasas. The evidence is scant, but it seems like
the composition of the masands as a class was changing from its establishment
during the guruship of Amar Das (1552–74) through the following century or
so, with a majority of higher-evaluated castes (Brahmans and Khatris) giving
way to those of humbler origins (mainly Jats), such was the empowering effect
of the education received in the Sikh temple-schools.44 Similarly, as Buddhist
monasteries mushroomed across the countryside in early modern Siam, they
helped transform an ‘intensely local and fundamentally illiterate’ culture. Boys
studied for as little as six months, more usually for a few years, which gave
them basic vernacular literacy (in Tai). But vernaculars like Tai or Braj were
becoming more cosmopolitan registers, so that the effect of educating the sons
of agriculturalists, fishermen, woodcutters, and the like was to link them to an
extra-local culture.45 This effect was compounded by the circulation of people
and ideas. Thus, a Jat boy educated at a local temple-school might now grow
into adulthood to became a masand, whereupon he became part of a network
of Sikh leaders and communities forged via written communication in coun-
terpart to those better-known networks of learned Brahmans who submitted
dharmapatras to raise funds or seek adjudication in doctrinal matters.46
41 On works in this genre: Haider, ‘Accountancy Manuals’. These often had a section on time and
calendars, such was the importance of timeliness to accountancy and record-keeping, and to
which this chapter returns.
42 Syan, ‘Debating Revolution’, 1119.
43 Ibid, 1119.
44 Ibid, 1119–20. This correlates with Bayly’s observation in Empire and Information, 37, of rela-
tively higher literacy in these areas at the start of the colonial period.
46 Bayly, Empire and Information, 206. See, also: O’Hanlon, ‘Speaking from Siva’s Temple’;
Bronner, ‘South Meets North’.
Knowledge 437
Troupes of professional entertainers were part of this developing world

of communication and literacy. Moving along pilgrimage and trade routes in
Siam, for instance, their primary function was the performance of important
rites (e.g., marriages, funerals, temple dedications). Such mobility was made
possible by the spread of vernacular literacy, yet circulation also had the
impact of diffusing elements of extra-local culture throughout the land,
thereby integrating previously diffuse and localised societies via common
forms of dress, ritual, discourse, and so forth.47 In India, too, ‘wandering cul-
tural specialists’, as C.A. Bayly has described bards and puppeteers, actors
and jugglers, ‘moved rapidly […] often from bases at the major pilgrimage
places’ and ‘conveyed political and social messages which might originate in
either the literate or the non-literate spheres.’48 It was through kirtans and
bhajans that the Sants and Sikhs extolled god, while tamashas (entertainments,
usually consisting of song, dance, and comedy sketches) were performed for
a broad public in Shahjahanabad and elsewhere. In both towns and villages,
in private homes and courtyards or open-air performance spaces and closed
assembly rooms, notes Francesca Orsini, ‘singers performed and storytellers
(kathavachaks) recited and expounded in front of mixed audiences’.49 This
was not a uniquely Indian development, for Japanese mendicants by turns
entertained large crowds on the streets and ministered to merchants’ religious
needs in private, to take one example, but performance did have added signifi-
cance in south Asia because of the relatively lower degree of textual literacy
compared to Japan or Europe.50
Orality was probably more important in south Asia than in other parts
of Eurasia; whatever the contributions of Sikh and other temple-schools,
they were based upon fairly loose networks of priests, even when compared
to Thailand and Burma.51 A similar level of prosperity to India notwith-
standing, Tokugawa Japan was a society that supported ‘more than 40 per
cent male education, mass lithography, and a system of commercial horse-
back messengers’, in contrast to the monopoly over literacy by the clerical
elite that ‘was the preserve of little more than 10 per cent of the male popu-
lation’ in south Asia and the Ottoman middle East.52 There is much truth
to Bayly’s observation that Indian society was a ‘literacy aware’ –if not a
highly literate –one.53 There also seems to have been a breaking down and
opening up of knowledge and access to it, catalysed by the forces unleashed
by popular religion and imperial administration.54 But our interest turns to

48 Bayly, Empire and Information, 208–09.
49 Orsini, ‘Inflected Kathas’, here 195–96.
50 Nobuyuki, ‘Mendicant Monks’.
52 Ibid, 5, for citation, and 37–38, for a nuanced discussion of regional and rural-urban variations.
53 Ibid, 39.
54 Ibid, 42, for citation, and 204, for description of the modes of oral transmission.
438 Knowledge
early modern developments in the arenas of higher learning and scientific

knowledge, for which textual literacy was (often) essential.
10.2 Early Modern Selves, the Body, and Embodied Knowledges

A side-effect of this literacy, learning, and the culture of inquiry was arguably a
critical self-consciousness. A good deal has been written of the early moderns’
purported discovery or realisation of the self and the ‘inner’ world of the con-
scious mind, although some scholars –uncannily echoing the racist views of
historical actors regarding Africans –have viewed this development as pecu-
liar to the West.55 We have already seen, however, that it would be utterly false
not to view the growth of individuality as a broader phenomenon.56 Inspired
by the work of the Renaissance scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, who popularised
the notion of ‘self-fashioning’, Indian historians have examined the conscious
fashioning of the kingly self and its presentation or performance in specific
spaces and places (e.g., at the jharoka-i darshan, on shikar, in the travelling
court and camp; §8.2–§8.3), to take one case.
William Shakespeare explored this self- consciousness in dialogues and
soliloquies found, for instance, in Hamlet (1600). Elsewhere, he and others
wrote of/from the ‘self’ in sonnets and prose fiction, but it was most concretely
manifested in first-person narratives and autobiography, as well as day-books
and account books.57 A famous example is the diary kept by Samuel Pepys
(1633–1703), which is well-known because it provides as fascinating a perspec-
tive on the workings of the English state and such events as the Great Fire
of London as it does on its author. Pepys was a state secretary, much like
his near-contemporary, Chandar Bhan Brahman, whom we have repeatedly
encountered in this book. Both men crafted complex epistolary selves.58 In
fact, given that Pepys’ diary was published posthumously, almost a century
after his death, ‘one can say with some confidence that even without the benefit
of print capitalism’, Rajiv Kinra stresses, ‘Chandar Bhan probably had a much
broader imagined community of readers than his English counterpart’s “secret
masterpiece” ’, with ‘a great many of them hoping to emulate’ the master’s
‘literary style, his career trajectory, and his confident sense of Mughal gentle-
manly identity in order to advance their own careers.’59
How exceptional was Chandar Bhan’s epistolary and autobiographical self ?
Although ‘less common perhaps in Mughal India than in the Ottoman domains’,
55 Sabean and Stefanovska, ‘Introduction’, 3. For a rich medical, philosophical, and cultural his-
tory by a literary scholar, see: Hackett, Elizabethan Mind, with discussion of ‘how Elizabethans
defined their own minds against the minds of all these Others’ (145), specifically Africans, on
144–76.
56 See, also: O’Hanlon et al, ‘Scribal Service People’, 450.
57 Hackett, Elizabethan Mind, 1–3, 285–341.
58 Kinra, Writing, 8.
59 Ibid, 9, for citation, and 159–90, for analysis of Chandar Bhan’s life and letters.
Knowledge 439
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam note, first- person narratives

did occupy ‘a respectable place in Mughal belles-lettres.’60 Autobiographical
works were penned by the Mughal emperors Babur (in Chagatay Turkish)
and Jahangir (in Persian), which stand alongside those of Babur’s daughter,
Gulbadan Begum (1523–1603), and his cousin, Haydar Mirza Dughlat (1499–
1551), though these were not quite autobiographies in the modern sense of
revealing the author’s individuality.61 As for memoirs written by commoners,
the first noteworthy example is Banarasi Das’ Ardhakathanak –discussed in
earlier chapters –which was written in Braj and made its appearance during
the reign of Shah Jahan.62 A steady increase in such accounts followed, how-
ever, including one by ‘Abdul Latif Gujarati and Nek Rai’s Tazkirat al-Safar
wa Tuhfat al-Zafar (‘Account of Travel and the Gift of Success’), before the
real explosion in the eighteenth century.63 Yet, such appearances of the self
were not exclusively linked to the culture of the Mughal, Persianate, or even the
larger Indo-Islamicate ecumene.64 The extensive Tamil-language private diary
left by Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709–61), a businessman and sometime agent to
the French Governor of Pondicherry, is a striking example in its richness and
difference from the works of intellectuals like Chandar Bhan Brahman.65
All this demonstrates the implication of the conscious mind/body in know-
ledge production, to which can be added the scribes’ self-disciplining of their
bodily labour and their self-reflection on their labour routines as religious ser-
vice.66 As for the interaction with (let alone the impact upon) developments in
knowledge about the body and what we would call psychology, and on medi-
cine or healing, much remains to be studied.67 Take, for example, Ayurveda,
the now world-famous Indic system of bodily knowledge and life science.68
Our understanding of how people received Ayurvedic remedies is remarkably
incomplete, and it remains to be said whether there was anything like the div-
ision of labour between prescribing physicians and dispending druggists or
pharmacists of the sort that emerged in urban centres in late Ming China,
60 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Making of a Munshi’, 191. See, also: Şahin, Empire and Power,
175–77.
61 Dale, ‘Autobiography’. See, also: Dale, Babur.
62 The Safavid ruler, Shah Tahmasb, also wrote a first-person narrative.
63 Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Making of a Munshi’, 192, for citation, and 192–206, for discus-
sion of Nek Rai’s text.
64 How far the ‘vividly present’ self constructed by Siddichandra in his autobiography was
influenced by developments outside Sanskrit literature –namely, within the north Indian,
Persianate ecumene –cannot presently be commented upon, save to note Pollock’s observation
that it was unprecedented: ‘New Intellectuals’, 20.
65 Washbrook, ‘Tamil Diary’.
66 See, also: Haider, ‘Accountancy Manuals’, 272–73, which describes the routine (incorporating
puja) prescribed as good or ethical conduct in the advice literature.
67 Compare with: Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, which focuses on Galenic understandings and
is thus particularly relevant to the discussion that follows, above.
68 Wujastyk, ed., Roots, is a useful introduction.
440 Knowledge
against the backdrop of deeper marketisation.69 Other traditions extant in early

modern India, such as Unani tibb, are more revealing: ‘learned physicians wrote
their texts in cosmopolitan registers of Arabic and Persian,’ Shireen Hamza
notes in an immensely valuable new study, ‘but they used other languages and
registers to communicate orally with patients and procurers of medicines’ (e.g.,
farmers/growers, yogis/foragers, pharmacists/traders), such as Hindavi.70 To do
so, they relied upon medical glossaries that translated formal names in cosmo-
politan or high registers into local, vernacular-language ones.71
Unani (or yunani, lit. ‘Ionian’) denotes a body of knowledge deriving from
the theories of Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, and Ibn Sinna (Avicenna) that
viewed the body as a system constituted of four humours (air, fire, water, earth).
Humoral balance amounted to good health, whereas disequilibrium lay at the
root of illness according to its practitioners. Like Ayurveda, Unani was of very
long standing by the early modern period, but it was hardly static. Well after
the medieval golden age of Islamic science, a fourteenth-century Indo-Muslim
scholar knowledgeable in Unani, Shihab al-Din Nagauri, synthesised the four
Galenic humours with the three Ayurvedic doshas (variously composed of air,
fire, and/or water), of which he had learnt upon his search for knowledge from
learned yogis, and brought the work of Persian and Indian physicians together,
referring to them both as hakims or practitioners of medicine.72 Indian hakims
continued through the early modern period to engage with medical ideas across
knowledge traditions via translation and efforts toward compilation and sys-
tematisation, giving rise to a hybrid and plural landscape of medical know-
ledge and practice.73 This dynamism notwithstanding, it may also have been
the case that knowledge about health and the body was changing not so much
in its central concepts or theories, as primarily in its social character, in the two
or three centuries before the dawn of the Enlightenment and the beginning of
colonial rule.
Unani operated at two levels within early modern India. First, there was
Unani as a courtly or ‘aristocratic virtue’, that was ‘tightly controlled’ through
literary production and actual medical practice by ‘Iranian physician families
69 Berger, Ayurveda, 8, on its murky past; Pearson, ‘Hindu Medical Practice’, for a fraught attempt
to uncover something of Ayurvedic practice from sixteenth- century Portuguese sources;
Grove, ‘Indigenous Knowledge’, which discusses the caste of practitioners; Bian, Know Your
Remedies, 126–52, on change in China.
70 Hamza, ‘Vernacular Languages’, 116, for citation, and 120.
71 Ibid. European contemporaries are also clearer on Unani (than Ayurveda) and its practitioners
because they were mutually steeped in Galenic theory: Pearson, ‘Hindu Medical Practice’.
72 For the original Persian and a parallel English translation of this neglected text, with commen-
tary, see: Hamza, ‘Hakim’s Tale’.
73 On the integration of Ayurveda and Indic medical knowledges within Unani and, vice versa,
the absorption of Persianate medical wisdom into Indian learning, see the ground-breaking
work of Fabrizio Speziale in his Culture Persane. See, also: Hamza, ‘Vernacular Languages’,
122; Flatt, Living Well, 57–60, 253–59. Translation not only involved moving from one lan-
guage to another, perhaps cosmopolitan or vernacular, but also between the oral and textual,
or vice versa.
Knowledge 441
(hakims)’ –that is, as ‘high knowledge’.74 Their migration was part of the
larger movement of Iranians to early modern India, which saw such men as
Hakim Abul Fath Gilani leave Gilan for Delhi in the sixteenth century, or the
departure from Shiraz of Nur al-Din Muhammad Abdullah and Muhammad
Akbar Shah Arzani in the seventeenth century. They found ready patronage at
the Mughal, Deccani, and other courts, partly because the humoural theory of
the body corresponded to ideas about the body politic and political sovereignty.
These ideas about the microcosm and macrocosm linked the health of the indi-
vidual and the proper organisation of society to the kingdom as a whole (§7.2.1;
§4.2.1).75 By the same turn, medical manuscripts and encyclopaedias (tibbs)
produced by hakims upheld aristocratic virtue and consequently had political
value; many Persian hakims held important positions at court, where medical,
literary, historical, and political knowledges were imbricated through their
written output and practice. Nur al-Din Muhammad Abdullah, for instance,
was the nephew of the influential courtier, Abu al-Fazl, and became a doctor in
residence at the Mughal court. Nur al-Din received imperial patronage: his tibb
was dedicated to Dara Shukoh, while his influential pharmaceutical dictionary
was dedicated to Shah Jahan. He was additionally supported by a Mughal
nobleman, Amanallah Khan (d. 1637) –‘himself also a practicing physician
and the author of at least one work on pharmacology, as well as a Persian
translation of a fourteenth-century Sanskrit medical treatise’ –to whom he
dedicated his dictionary of Arabic and Persian medical terminology.76
Second, there was Unani as medical wisdom, the spread of which was linked
to hakims of lower stature who trained in ordinary madrasas, where they read
Persian/Unani and Arabic medical treatises, but seldom the high knowledge and
literary forms of tibb. Some of these men apprenticed to the Iranian hakims of
the court and thereby ‘gained access to the ideas of the ornate Persian medical
manuscripts their masters had authored or collected’, but ‘their tension with
the hakims of high Persian learning simmered’. This tension had intensified
by ‘the mid-eighteenth century when Persian-knowing families experienced a
weakening of their hold over medical knowledge.’77
On the one hand, the declining power of the Mughal court reduced the
opportunities for patronage at the old imperial centre, yet correspondingly
created new venues for Persianate learned men in the flourishing regional
kingdoms. This helped preserve Unani as high knowledge.78 On the other
hand, the writing and circulation of medical manuals in an easy-to-read
vernacularised Persian, many of which also contained ideas from Arabic
74 Alavi, ‘Medical Culture’, 856.

75 Ibid, 856–58. See, also: Anooshahr, ‘Emotional Communities’; Flatt, Living Well, 52–73.
76 Kinra, Writing, 35, for citation and details of Nur al-Din’s career and its significance, and
32–35, for a snapshot of medicine at the Mughal court derived from Chandar Bhan Brahman’s
account.
77 Alavi, ‘Medical Culture’, 864.
78 Ibid, 865–67.
442 Knowledge
texts and medical traditions, was changing the character and status of Unani
tibb as a form of literary and intellectual output. One defence against this by
elite hakims was to switch to a doctrinaire language –Arabic –and embrace
the ‘general orientation of literate Muslim society towards new learning that
was streaming in from the Arab lands.’79 The result was to confine certain
medical knowledge to Arabic and to those who knew this language and, by
extension, to maintain the prestige of the latter while making the former
more rarefied.80 Another consequence, however, was that medical know-
ledge ‘dropped its Persianate comportment’ to become ‘more austere and
scientistic.’81 As this example shows, knowledge production and practice
were inseparable from early modern mobility and circulation (of people and
ideas), statecraft and imperial politics, and the choice of expressive registers
amidst language change.
In the eighteenth- century Ottoman Empire, Cretan Muslim and Greek
physicians and intellectuals ‘had important roles in spreading new medicine and
information about natural sciences’, presumably through a combination of trans-
lation and practice.82 In the Mughal Empire and its successor states, a similar role
may have been played by those European physicians and East India Company
surgeons who found employ in the service of Indian rulers. Perhaps the most
well-known, for his Travels remains a widely read account of his time abroad, is
François Bernier (1622–88).83 The Frenchman joined the entourage of a Mughal
noble, with whom he discoursed on European discoveries in the sciences, and
through whom he gained a position as Aurangzeb’s physician.84 Because a great
deal of knowledge was uncodified, it is possible that Indic knowledge about the
body and medicine was from time to time impacted by the work of these carriers
of foreign knowledge traditions.
But not necessarily. Galenic theory remained popular in Europe through
to the late Enlightenment, as evinced by the continued use of bloodletting
and purges to bring the humours into balance, even as such ideas had been
challenged from the sixteenth century by Andreas Vesalius and others; hence
the compatibility of European practitioners with the medical expectations
of elite patients in south and southeast Asia.85 Given their dependence upon
indigenous healers and the similarity of Galenic ‘cures’ to those used by local
populations in early modern Atlantic Africa, Europeans actually ‘learned and
willingly borrowed more from locals than they gave in return or contributed
79 Ibid, 867.
80 Ibid, especially 868.
81 Ibid, 867.
82 Yacioglu, ‘Disciplining Bodies’, 1565.
83 Bernier, Travels, 350–454.
84 See, also: Beasley, ‘Decentering’, 29. For some detail of English surgeons attending south
Indian rulers and potentates around the same time, see: Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge,
especially 115–18. There were numerous others besides these men.
85 Cook, ‘Medicine’, especially 411–16, on the European side; Alberts, ‘Translating’, on the Thai.
Knowledge 443
to the African population’s health.’86 It would be wrong to assume, therefore,

that European doctors demonstrated anything sufficiently novel to have left
an impression on non-European court physicians, no matter that the former
were rewarded for their medical service. If anything, European physicians
were remade by their exposure to other traditions, as the career of René
Charbonneau (1643–72) in Siam illustrates. The embrace of French medical
practitioners had much to do with the Siamese king’s universal sovereignty
and his harbouring of all who came to his land to shelter or bring gifts and
wisdom from faraway places (§8.4), rather than the inferiority of existing
(mostly Sanskrit) learning or the shortage of practitioners (except surgeons).
This explains the presence of Chinese, Indian, and farhangi/firangi (‘Frankish’,
or European) physicians alongside Siamese ones. If surgeons were in short
supply in Siam, it is because the spilling of blood abrogated received notions
about the maintenance of order, with the letting or shedding of royal blood
being especially dangerous.87
Besides surgery and healing, numerous other forms of knowledge were and
remained ‘embodied in the status of the particular informant or knowledge
community’ in south Asia, where ‘professionalisation’ did not go hand-in-
hand with ‘textualisation’. Instead, ‘knowledge-rich communities’ remained
decentralised and overlapping, as in much of the early modern world at large,
albeit perhaps to a larger extent than in, say, east Asia or western Europe.88
Architectural design and the realisation of plans by builders and craftsmen
remained largely embodied and uncodified to a seemingly greater extent than in
the West, instead transmitted orally-aurally or via learning by doing, posing a
challenge for their study by historians.89 And even where knowledge was trans-
mitted textually, the emphasis was often on the ‘externalisation’ of wisdom
thus received; hence, as C.A. Bayly suggested, ‘ethical treatises understood
the science of good government to be an embodied rather than an abstract
science’.90 It is to such texts and the theories and wisdoms they contained that
we now turn.
10.3 Codified Forms of Knowledge and their Registers

On 6 December 1847, Aloys Sprenger was commissioned by the East India
Company to survey the books in the library of the erstwhile nawab of Awadh
and any other nearby collections deemed of interest. With the help of his
86 Kananoja, Healing Knowledge, 9–10, for citation, and passim, for a fascinating and wide-
ranging recent study.
87 Alberts, ‘Translating’.
89 Against these challenges, historians have lately made great strides, as exemplified by: Dadlani,
From Stone. See, also: Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, 215, for a between-the-lines reading of
buildings to discern the nature of design and building practices.
90 O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom’, 891, for this paraphrasing of Bayly’s ideas.
444 Knowledge
assistant –one ‘Ali Akbar –Sprenger pursued his task and planned a sub-
stantial catalogue before taking two years’ sick leave, the result of which was
to rush out a slenderer volume than hoped.91 What his and other catalogues
reveal, nevertheless, is something of the range of knowledges and knowledge
traditions extant in early modern south Asia, not to mention their pertinence
or interest to Indian rulers. In addition to texts in cosmopolitan registers –
namely, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian –are those in the ancestral languages of
certain Indian dynasties (e.g., Pashto), in poetic and/or local languages (e.g.,
Turkish, Hindavi), in other ancient languages of learning (e.g., Greek, Latin),
and in European languages (e.g., English, French). In terms of subject matter,
works of history, genealogy, and biography (especially tazkira), sit alongside
poetry, instructional literature on such topics as gentlemanly comportment,
comedy and satire, and works on jurisprudence, ethics, astrology, astronomy,
medicine, mathematics, philosophy, and allied technical subjects (e.g., veter-
inary science, farriery, falconry and hawking, elephants, accountancy, and so
forth).92
Such collections were hardly amassed by accident; besides the gift of a single
valuable book or the depositing of significant collections, as Jai Singh I did in
Delhi, Indian rulers employed whole teams of scriveners and bookbinders to
make copies of important works, or retouch or remake existing manuscripts,
sometimes even despatching missions to acquire texts containing innovative
learning from lands near or far, as we shall see.93 And, of course, there was the
arrogation of rivals’ prestigious collections during conquest; this was how Tipu
Sultan’s (r. 1782–99) library of several thousand volumes was amassed and also
how it was subsequently unmade/remade by the British.94 As for the role of these
libraries, this was not merely intellectual but also instrumental, for knowledge
was power: the possession of valuable texts or entire collections, the patronage
of scholars, the engagement with scholarship as part of the commitment to self-
improvement, and the consultation and cultivation of specific bodies of wisdom
were all tied up with the dispensation of ‘good kingship’ and the accumulation of
this-worldly and supernatural abilities (see, e.g., §2.3, §2.5).95
Royal libraries were by no means the only places where scholarship was
produced, stored, and/or consulted; temples, maths, khanaqahs, and other
religious institutions or large elite households are likely others, while the
market for poetry and the epics meant ownership of a few literary works was
91 Sprenger, Catalogue.
92 Khan, ‘Awadh Scientific Renaissance’. See, also: Bayly, Empire and Information, 195; Alam and
Alavi, trans., eds., Pollier, 32–35; Lally, ‘Empires and Equines’, 100, 106–07.
93 Gupta, ‘Remapping the World’.
94 Ehrlich, ‘Plunder and Prestige’.
95 For a slightly different reading of the relationship of knowledge to power, encompassing
surveillance, news, communication, and their respective networks in early modern India,
see: Bayly, Empire and Information, 10–44.
Knowledge 445
probably wider still, from imperial capitals down to qasbahs.96 Nevertheless,

royal collections give us some insight into the relationship of certain know-
ledge traditions to particular registers. We have already encountered the so-
called Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic cosmopolises that formed counterparts to
the Latin cosmopolis in the West. What concerns us here are the languages of
science.97
In Europe, there were efforts to renew Latin (and Greek) connected to
Humanism and projects of Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies. Latin retained its appeal even in the seventeenth century among big
thinkers wishing to reach a wide audience, to give their work the prestige and
stability that would ensure its warm reception, and to help it endure the test
of time. This explains the use of Latin by Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton.98
Against this, however, was recourse to vernaculars by such prominent thinkers
as Galileo Galilei (Italian), Francis Bacon (English), and René Descartes
(French). Sometimes the outcome of authors’ unfamiliarity with Latin, it
was otherwise a more active choice in which a role was played by national
institutions and nation-state projects, or the desire to reveal hidden or secret
knowledge.99 Ultimately, their use not only as languages of the imagination
and other-worldly ideas, but also as languages of science, meant vernaculars
displaced Latin in this period.
Compared to pre-modern Europe, then, the reach of vernacularisation was
more limited in pre-colonial south Asia. Certain fields of knowledge produc-
tion seem to have been ring-fenced, by and large remaining the preserve of
Sanskrit and Persian specialists; namely, those concerning ‘systematic’ thought
on this-worldly matters, a fact so plain as to have passed comment by contem-
poraries such as Mirza Khan in his Tuhfat al Hind (c. 1675), a survey of Braj
Bhasha.100
In the specifically Indic ecumene, according to Sheldon Pollock’s prelim-
inary inquiries, Sanskrit retained an ‘almost total –in some regions total –
linguistic monopolisation […] over the three primary disciplines of grammar,
hermeneutics, and logic and epistemology’, while vernacular works on law
96 Ibid, 198–99, on different kinds of libraries and who could access them, and 42, on the
availability of cheap versions of literary-religious works; O’Hanlon, ‘Speaking from Siva’s
Temple’, 258–59. As for record-keeping and knowledge more broadly conceived, families
played an important role in this regard in early modern India: O’Hanlon, ‘Performance’. See,
also: O’Hanlon et al, ‘Scribal Service People’, 449.
97 Pollock, ‘Languages of Science’, 25.
98 Ibid, 36.
99 Ibid, 37.
100 Note that ‘science’, ‘scholarship’, ‘learning’, and ‘systematic knowledge’ could all be
translated by the Sanskrit word shastra, but the latter’s own meaning –and its relation to ‘kin-
dred concepts’ like jnana and vidya –is as murky and manifold as ‘science’ is a pliable signifier
in English: ibid, 21. Note, also, that science did find greater expression in Braj Bhasha than
any other vernacular, ‘but in a highly restricted sense’, the exception proving the rule as far as
Pollock is concerned: op. cit., 26–29. See, also: Guha, ‘Bad Language’.
446 Knowledge
and moral philosophy (dharmshastra) are rare, and those on Ayurveda exhibit
the clear hegemony of Sanskrit over other registers.101 Among the plaus-
ible explanations, he points to the desire for ‘orthographic stability’ offered
by Sanskrit for bodies of knowledge whose meaning –some contempor-
aries believed –would be muddied by recourse to vernacular registers. This
was because vernaculars were evolving and thus unstable in the early modern
period –although Sanskrit was, too, as some critics took pains to highlight.102
A number of historians have lately shown how royal courts and the nascent
courts of princes might be better conceived as households (§7.3.1). A related
move has been to shift the focus of attention from royal courts as sites of
scholarly patronage and intellectual production, to such entities described
by historians as ‘Sanskrit intellectual households’ or ‘Brahman scholar
households’, especially in the context of Banaras. That city began its rise from
the late sixteenth century, partly thanks to Mughal patronage of Sanskrit intel-
lectual life, and thereby secured its place in the religious and intellectual life
of north Indian and western Deccan (Maratha) Brahmans.103 The Sanskrit/
Brahman scholar households were composites in the sense that different
(male) householders ‘contributed to its collective fortunes in ways that suited
their individual talents: some as intellectuals, some as local educators and
some again as copyists or in local administrative service roles.’104 These scholar
families ‘defined their membership, and their reputations, both in terms of the
biological sons who contributed to their resources, and the wider quasi-filial
relations established through teaching’; so much so, in fact, that we can talk of
the prestige of being connected to particular household lineages.105
The Sanskrit intellectual scene in early modern times was far more vibrant
than can be characterised here. We ought pause, however, to consider the
degree of intercommunication on matters of science between Sanskrit
specialists and their counterparts in the Persianate or Indo-Islamicate ecumene.
Whereas ‘intellectual intercourse among astronomers may have been rela-
tively relaxed and some scholars, such as the Jain Siddhichandra, celebrated
their skills in Persian’, other sources indicate ‘the resistance among most
Sanskrit intellectuals (Jains aside) to the use of Persian.’106 ‘Among Kashmiri
Brahmans’, for instance, ‘there even emerged a new caste division between
101 Pollock, ‘Languages of Science’, 21–25.

102 Ibid, 29–36.
103 See: ‘O’Hanlon, ‘Speaking from Siva’s Temple’. Elsewhere, too, Indo-Muslim patronage was
key to Sanskrit-Brahman cultural production; see, for examples: Keune, ‘Eknath’, 77–78.
Those scholarly and social networks soon reaching out of Banaras were not immediately all-
encompassing. In the lifetime of the prolific writer, Appayya Dikshita (1520–93), they scarcely
touched the Tamil country directly, though this changed after his death, when he was read in
Banaras and his descendants visited that city. See: Bronner, ‘South Meets North’.
104 O’Hanlon et al, ‘Scribal Service People’, 452.
105 Ibid, 452, for citation; O’Hanlon ‘Speaking from Siva’s Temple’, for a detailed study. See,
also: Vendell, ‘Scribal Household in Flux’; Gomez, ‘Sanskrit’, 187–91.
106 Pollock, ‘Languages of Science’, 35.
Knowledge 447
karkun (bureaucrats) who learned Persian and entered the service of sultans,
and the bhasbhatas (language scholars) who maintained a Sanskrit cultural
identity.’107 Textual translation across such a gulf involved a complex pro-
cess whose impetus came from curious and inquisitive royal patrons (§3.3.3),
seldom from ‘experts’ themselves –though this does not preclude discourses
between the learned operating in Sanskrit and Persian (§9.1).
Yet, the world of Sanskrit learning was neither hermetically sealed off by
social/
household reproduction, nor insulated from the interest emanating
from other communities.108 After all, the tentacles of the scholar household
gripped the Persianate and Sanskrit traditions and the realms of bureau-
cratic as well as religious or literary production. And Brahmans, Jains, and
other Sanskrit-literate elites were not merely recipients of patronage from the
Mughals, Deccan sultans, and other Indo-Muslim rulers, or collaborators in
courtly projects of translation from Sanskrit into Persian; some also acted as
informants. Siddichandra’s teacher, Bhanuchandra, helped Abu al-Fazl with
parts of Ain-i Akbari concerning Hindavi culture, for example, while Brahmans
supported the work of the Jesuit, Roberto Nobili (1577–1656), who sought
local knowledge to shape his version of accommodatio and thereby successfully
convert south Indians (§3.1.2).109
Another way of visualising exchange across knowledge traditions demarcated
by register and religious affiliation is to look in the opposite direction; just as
some Sanskrit scholars offered up their wisdom to their counterparts in the
Persianate or Islamicate ecumenes, so, too, were some Sufis engaging with Indic
languages and religious traditions. Without abandoning Dakhni and denoun-
cing their Muslim identity, Sufi holy men in the Deccan were known to write
in (metrical) Sanskritised Marathi or to expound on philosophical traditions
from the Sanskrit world. While belonging to Sufi orders like the Qadiri, they
were simultaneously ‘part of lineages of Vaishnava or Shaiva teachers’ –a fact
which helps us make yet further sense of the appearance within the same frame
of the Sufi and the yogi in the painting that opened this chapter.110 With all this
in mind, then, our attention turns to particular fields of this-worldly know-
ledge production that cut across the lines of sect, caste, and confession and the
concerns of particular communities, sometimes even bringing them together.
10.4 Space: Navigation, Geography, and Cartography

Geographical knowledge could fall into the category of literature on the
wonders and marvels (‘aja‘ib wa ghara’ib) of faraway places that was of long
pedigree. The high-
point of the Persian- language travel account was the
107 Ibid, 35.

108 See: Minkowski et al, ‘Social History’, and the essays introduced by that contribution, for a
sense of the ‘scene’.
109 Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals’, 20; Županov, Disputed Mission.
110 Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, 63.
448 Knowledge
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the topos representing an important

form of knowledge production in the Persianate world. That said, its impact
was undoubtedly lesser than that of the European travel account by dint of
European (printed) texts’ greater velocity of circulation. Persian accounts were,
after all, manuscripts read in a library or acquired as a copy made by a scribe,
rather than the cheap, printed pamphlet or book of its European counter-
part.111 To this can be added variations –evident across the Persianate world –
in the geographic scope of accounts as well as the investment and interest in
the genre by its (potential) producers and patrons. Europe, for instance, seems
not to figure in Indo-Persian accounts until the late eighteenth century. Even
those parts of Eurasia which were well-connected to the Mughal world and
in regular receipt of travellers and pilgrims from India, such as central Asia
and Iran, did not become the subject of contemporary accounts in the seven-
teenth century, or else these have not survived. By contrast, travellers from the
Ottoman lands, Persia, and central Asia left a rich vein of accounts about their
voyages and discoveries from the firangi lands in the west to Siam and coun-
tries even further east.112
Contemporaries did not possess curiosity of an exclusively freakish sort,
hungry only for wonders and marvels, however, nor was the rational accumu-
lation of precise, empirical information or statistical data on land, territory,
and countries unheard of. Take, as an example, the description and statistics
on Tibet, its geography, and its resources written by the seventeenth-century
Mughal courtier, Inayat Khan, garnered from his father, who had led an explor-
ation to this distant frontier region.113 Around the same time, the Qing Great
State began its first major phase of expansion. Eventually, its westward march
led to the reconciliation of diverse and often conflicting information, as well as
the systematisation of new (and new kinds of) geographic data. Even more sig-
nificantly, the horizons of this project gazed from such vantage points as Tibet
into India, which not only lay beyond the empire’s frontiers, but also beyond
the sphere of influence shaped by tributary relations. The larger result, Matthew
Mosca reveals, was to shift from a ‘frontier’ policy to a ‘foreign’ policy, and from
maintaining tributary relations to active engagement with geopolitics.114
Useful knowledge was highly contextually specific, therefore, and the value
of new kinds of knowledge or new ways of systematising it became apparent
at different junctures. Circumstance also powerfully moulded the kinds of
information that was prioritised or seen as valuable, rather than enjoyed for
its novelty value. Censuses were more important in Japan and southeast Asia,
Bayly argued, being more ‘constrained by shortages of labour rather than of
111 Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 357–60.

112 See, especially: Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 243–45; Emiralioğlu, ‘China’.
113 Bayly, Empire and Information, 21. On the neglect of frontiers in Mughal historiography, and
how (Mughal) contemporaries saw such spaces, see: Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, especially
4–16, and passim.
114 Mosca, Question of India.
Knowledge 449
cash’ compared to early modern India, where such information was collected
sporadically and generally in response to some specific need, while tending to
be less fine-grained.115 Cadastral surveys, by contrast, were invaluable to the
efficient functioning of the vast revenue-agrarian machinery of the Mughal
state (§7.1.2). The nascent Tokugawa Shogunate, likewise, depended on new
cadastral inquests and the resultant charts of agrarian yields to formalise and
assign noble domains and military stipends.116
A larger proportion of geographical and allied knowledge remained
embodied, partly because it was held by specialists who were not pressed into
the service of the state, and partly because it could be transmitted in non-
textual form to the relevant parties. Take, for instance, knowledge of places
reached by the regular caravans of merchants and sundry travellers that linked
north India with central Asia, Iran, Russia, and Tibet, or the Chinese agrarian
heartland with the southern frontier toward southeast Asia, the western fron-
tier toward central Asia, and with the Russian Empire. These movements were
predicated on the geographic, environmental, and political knowledge of those
pastoralists responsible for this locomotion, often involving thousands of
animals.117 They knew which routes to take, which were safe from bandits, and
how to deal with corrupt bureaucrats trying to extract more than they were
permitted. They also knew when to set off from north India before the hot and
wet season, how to avoid snow in the high mountain passes, and how to time
their passage so as to ensure pasturage for their animals and provisions for
travellers were available at every stage of their journey.118
That said, such experts might inscribe their wisdom from time to time,
offering us valuable glimpses of contemporary wisdom. Ahmad ibn Majid (d.
c.1504) of Julfar in Oman, for instance, was the son and grandson of pro-
fessional maritime pilots (mu’allim). He was familiar with instruments from
the Islamicate world, such as the qiyas (compass) for star measurement and
another for measuring latitude.119 He used a 365-day solar calendar starting
at Nowruz and saw the monsoon not merely as a meteorological phenomenon
based on the winds but also as a temporal one; it had a timing and so, therefore,
did departure from port to port. Thus, he navigated by combining techniques,
technologies, and knowledges, for by ‘interpreting winds and geography and
the sighting of land, and with the guidance of the Polar Star which indicated
latitude, the mu’allim determined his course and made necessary corrections
along the way.’120 Ibn Majid shared his expertise by writing navigation manuals
in verse (and prose) so as to aid memorisation. Significantly, they demonstrate
115 Bayly, Empire and Information, 6, for citation, and 22–23.

116 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii, 470; Yonemoto, Mapping, 9, which notes the crudeness
of the project and its products.
117 See, also: Mosca, Question of India, 15–16.
118 See: Dale, Indian Merchants; Lally, Silk Roads.
119 Sivasundaram, ‘Indian Ocean’, 47.
120 Ibid, 47–48.
450 Knowledge
the achievements and impact of Arab nautical science in the Indian Ocean
world on the eve of the Europeans’ arrival in those waters via the Cape of
Good Hope for the first time.
For too long narrativised in miraculous terms or else as the result of
European ingenuity, the so-called Age of Exploration or Occidental breakout
(§1.3.2) can be reconceived as a process of appropriating the embodied
knowledges of local merchants or maritime pilots; their codification under
the aegis of western European states and corporations; and their interaction
with new ideologies and technologies (e.g., navigational, geographic, military,
naval, imperial) that supported overseas territorial or commercial expansion.
Rather than unfolding in sequence, it was probably a highly iterative process,
with Europeans turning again and again to the knowledge of non-Europeans,
whether in places that were becoming familiar or else as they ventured farther
around the globe. Perhaps the most breath-taking example of pre-modern geo-
graphical and navigational knowledge can be found within Tupaia’s map of
1769. Tupaia (d. 1770) was a priest and navigator born in Ra’iatea in the Pacific
whose extensive knowledge was appropriated by Captain Cook, for whom he
produced his famous map that charted various far-flung islands and voyaging
routes.121 It stands as a reminder that the epistemic explosion concerning our
terraqueous globe and its representation in cartographic form rested upon the
foundations of indigenous peoples’ knowledges and to the early modern uptick
in travel and exploration in which both European and non-European peoples
participated actively.
Acknowledging this role of non-European peoples and knowledges, some
might nevertheless describe exploration as a European phenomenon by
claiming that Europeans singularly pursued the kind of long-distance, over-
seas voyages that led to the discovery of new continents. Alas, in the late medi-
eval period, western European merchants ‘remained almost totally confined,
both physically and intellectually, to a small slice of the world bounded by
the north Atlantic and the Mediterranean’, whereas their counterparts from
the middle East to Japan capably plied long-distance land and sea routes.’122
The most famous of the state-sponsored voyages were those of the Chinese
admiral, Zheng He (1371–1433). The fruits of such voyages were manifested
in a number of high-quality maps, such as the so-called Mao Kun Map from
China of the Ming-era, the Kangnido Map of 1402 from Korea, the Javanese
map shown in 1512 to the Portuguese captain, Albuquerque, and the Ottoman
map produced by Piri Reis in 1513.123 Although they differ in their coverage
and do not adhere to the conventions of modern cartography (for reasons
121 Eckstein and Schwarz, ‘Tupaia’s Map’ for a fresh (and controversial) reading of the chart and
the knowledges represented therein.
122 Casale, Ottoman Age, 5.
123 On Piri Reis’ map, see: Casale, Ottoman Age, 23–25. Woodward, ‘Mapping the World’, offers
an excellent visual and analytic survey of European and Asian maps –including the Kangnido
Map –and the interaction of these two knowledge traditions.
Knowledge 451
elucidated below), each of these examples is remarkable for showing the

area from the Cape of Good Hope or the Horn of Africa toward lands more
familiar to their makers, all with considerable accuracy.124
Because of their relative isolation, the late medieval Iberian states neces-
sarily had to harness the knowledge of local captains, navigators, and crews
as they ventured further from Europe; such persons were the wellspring of
the epistemic explosion linked to the Age of Exploration. But it is wrong to
assume that knowledge of the outside world was readily channelled toward
imperial centres in the middle East and Asia, just because some of their subjects
possessed such wisdom by virtue of their travelling to faraway places, and just
because state-sponsored missions had been made in times past. Or, to put it
differently, what matters is whether these courts remained sufficiently curious
about the outside world to the extent of propagating new knowledge. Recent
scholarship suggests that the expansion of the Iberian empires precipitated a
sharp intensification of such curiosity, which was sometimes also of a new kind
and gave birth to what has lately been described as ‘Catholic Orientalism’.125 In
fact, historians have steadily overturned the cliché of Iberian exploration and
conquest as motivated by the limited priorities of the monarchs of what were
essentially medieval kingdoms –namely, ‘glory, gold, and God’ –by pointing
to the role of scientific learning as cause and effect of Portuguese and Spanish
empire-building. Cosmography and natural history got the conquistadores to
the New World and Asia, permitting the gathering of valuable observations,
new data, indigenous knowledge, and specimens from faraway places for royal
or learned patrons, in turn.126
In the Ottoman case, official and lay missions as far afield China supplied
new information supporting the development of an ‘Ottoman geographical
consciousness’, which can be detected from around the turn of the sixteenth
century.127 The conquest in 1517 of territories straddling the Red Sea proved
pivotal, Giancarlo Casale argues, for these lands formed a gateway between the
Mediterranean/European and the Indian Ocean/Asian worlds. They provided
access to the revenues from the spice trade, opened a direct sea route from
the Ottoman heartland to Asia, with a new geographic and cultural awareness
deriving therefrom (especially of the larger Muslim world to the east), all of
which underwrote a new conception of the sultan’s universal sovereignty.128
Their conquest also set the Ottomans in direct competition with the Portuguese,
who had ‘discovered’ the trans-oceanic route to Asia under two decades prior,
who sought control of the spice trade, and for whom exploration and conquest
124 Pearson, Indian Ocean, 73–75, for details of these maps.

125 Barreto Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, which was a precursor to, but also inte-
gral to, the better-studied Protestant Orientalism. India, the authors argue, was vital to new
knowledges related to philology, ethnography, and medical botany.
126 See, e.g., Bleichmar et al, eds., Science.
127 Emiralioğlu, ‘China’, for a valuable analysis, with the coinage in the citation appearing on 161.
128 See, also: Emiralioğlu, ‘China’, 168–87.
452 Knowledge
nurtured an increasingly audacious imperial ideology that was projected into

the western Indian Ocean. Despite the medieval Arab geographers’ knowledge
of the Indian Ocean and surrounding lands, the sixteenth-century Ottomans
were relatively unfamiliar with this arena. During the reign of Suleiman (r.
1520–66) this knowledge gap was closed. The Ottoman vizier, Ibrahim Pasha,
had been responsible for the conquest of 1517 and was also instrumental in
compelling Piri Reis to expand his atlas and navigational guide, the Kitab-i
Bahriye (‘Book of the Sea’). It was a ground-breaking work of Ottoman geog-
raphy and cartography, absorbing recent information on the European voyages
to the Americas and Asia, and was presented to the sultan in 1526.129
Ibrahim Pasha’s efforts also resulted in such acquisitions as a chart attributed
to Pedro Reinel, the Portuguese court cartographer.130 This contributed to
intellectual advance and represented an intelligence coup, for such knowledge
was highly valuable and thus closely guarded.131 The ratcheting up of imperial
rivalry and economic competition over the ensuing decades spurred Ottoman
alliance-building with other Indian Ocean powers, particularly Muslim ones;
technological improvements in the military and naval fields; and the finessing
of geographic knowledge by, for instance, tapping the epistemic pools of local
maritime communities and travellers such as Seydi Ali Reis, author of the
Mir’atü’l-Memalik (‘Mirror of Countries’) of 1557.132 Thus, circumstances made
particular forms of knowledge about the outside world valuable in the sixteenth
century, prompting their patronage by the state in the Ottoman world as much
as in Portugal.133
How did contemporaries make sense of each addition to geographic know-
ledge brought by an age of voyaging and a thickening of globalisation? In many
corners of the globe, contradictory claims had come into being about the shape
of the world by the start of the early modern period. In Europe, for instance,
these were ‘put forth in classical sources (which of course did not entirely agree
with each other), scripture and medieval Jerusalem-centred mappaemundi, navi-
gational portolan maps, and reports by real or putative travellers and sailors
such as Marco Polo.’134 Geographic practice was revolutionised by two factors.
First, overseas voyaging, which supplied new geographic data to elaborate and
refine maps. Second, the translation of Ptolemy’s Geography into Latin in the
fifteenth century, which led to ‘the reintroduction of mathematical cartography’
and thus a ‘research method that brought all geographic data into competition
129 Casale, Ottoman Age, 36–37.

130 Barreto Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 36–45, on Portuguese mapping and car-
tography of the East.
131 Casale, Ottoman Age, 37–38.
132 This was an uneven development, which was put on hiatus during the viziership of Rustem
Pasha but then revived under Sokollu Mehmed Pasha after 1565, for instance; see: Casale,
Ottoman Age, especially 34–83, 117–151.
133 More broadly on this theme, see: Buisseret, ed., Maps.
134 Mosca, Question of India, 44.
Knowledge 453
on a unified field of debate.’135 Accepting that the world was a 360-degree

sphere, which did not happen overnight by any means, the cartographer’s task
then became one of reconciling geographic data to determine the point of this
or that place in finite space so that it might be represented visually. As maps
improved, so voyagers could make mathematical-astronomical observations
toward the fine-tuning of particular charts, such that accuracy was achieved
iteratively. The usefulness of maps increased rapidly over the sixteenth cen-
tury; by 1570, an Antwerp printer was turning out Ortelius’s world atlas, the
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which was the first of its kind.136 Ortelius was a con-
temporary of another Netherlandish geographer, Gerardus Mercator (1512–
94), whose cartographic projection of the globe remains the basis of almost
every modern map.
Until the mid-Qing period, by contrast, Chinese scholars strived toward
completeness, compiling citations from as many (frequently contradictory)
texts as possible into geographic compendia, even if this meant never settling
on a single image of the world.137 Under the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722),
a radically new kind of map was produced in China, one which was drawn
to scale and tried to show the relation of places in a systematic way, without
accompanying text (as in older forms of Chinese maps). It was the product
of a team of Jesuit missionaries working between 1708 and 1718; rather than
competition, as in the Ottoman case, it was collaboration with Europeans that
supported the production of new kinds of knowledge in China. This enterprise
corresponded, Laura Hostetler notes, roughly ‘with Peter the Great’s mapping
of Russia, French cartographic projects at home and in the New World, and
early British colonial exploits in India.’138 It was accompanied by ethnographic
inquiry and, together, these knowledges supported a universalist imperial
ideology and –as in the Russian, French, and British empires –colonial forms
of control.139 Finally, it epitomises to Hostetler a shift not from Oriental to
Occidental forms of systematising and representing geographic knowledge, but
from a premodern to an early modern kind, and one that was a product of
globalisation characteristic of the era.140 Having long been painted as disin-
terested in the outside world and culturally arrogant, late imperial China now
appears much more intellectually open and its rulers growing far more curious
135 Ibid, 44–45. See, also: Casale, Ottoman Age, 15–22, for further detail and reproductions of
key examples of some of the abovementioned kinds of charts, and the observation that Sultan
Mehmed II (d. 1481) also patronised the ‘rediscovery’ of Classical geographic knowledges, so
that Ottoman advances paralleled those made by European Humanists.
136 Woodward, ‘Mapping the World’, 24.
137 Mosca, Question of India, especially 26–46. See, however, Woodward, ‘Mapping the World’,
30–31, for discussion of Matteo Ricci’s (1552–1610) significant contributions to Chinese
map-making.
138 Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, 4.
139 Ibid, especially 36–49, 81–203.
140 Ibid, especially 13–25, 51–80, and passim.
454 Knowledge
about their realm and the world beyond than previously credited.141 How about
India, which has generally been painted as more open?
The Mughal dynasts from Akbar to Aurangzeb loftily conceived of their
empire as without limits, much like their Ottoman and Qing counterparts. On
the one hand, this explains the ‘conceit of the globe’ in Mughal paintings.142
Globes, as objects, were an early-modern novelty in Europe, with Elizabeth
I and her courtiers almost immediately seizing upon the political possibil-
ities of this new visualisation of territory and sovereignty, not least because
many of them were already involved in England’s growing overseas trade.143
The globe’s novel potential was not lost on the Mughals: gifts of globes and
maps representing the terrestrial globe were widely sought from the 1580s
onwards as Akbar developed links with European Christians.144 Mercator’s
Atlas was published in its first complete edition in 1595, a copy of which was
presented to Jahangir by Sir Thomas Roe (although purportedly returned),
the cartographic projection of the maps contained therein a departure from
those extant in Mughal India.145 Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry, scoffed that
the Mughal padshah called himself a ‘conqueror of the world’ yet had to ask
for his domains to be pointed out to him, before asking to be shown Persia
and Tartary (central Asia).146 Rather quickly, however, such knowledge was
absorbed by Mughal courtiers and artists like Abu al-Hasan, whose rendering
of the globe (§8.4) comes complete with annotations naming important places
within and beyond the Mughal realm, suggesting that he had access to maps
in the Mughal collection, perhaps even Mercator’s Atlas.147 Thereafter, globes
found their way into a number of Jahangiri and early Shah Jahani pictures
of these Mughal emperors. These never showed the globe alienated from the
kingly figure as an object of scientific learning, as in some Ottoman pictures,
but rather as something over which the emperor could exert domination, either
by standing upon a vast globe or else holding its entirety in the palm of his
hand.148 More broadly, Mughal artists adapted those forms of landscape pro-
jection and topographical representation that they found in European paintings
to convey geographic space in new ways.149
141 For a nuanced discussion, encompassing intellectual fields pertinent to the present discussion,
see: Mosca, Question of India, 5–11.
142 Ramaswamy, ‘Conceit’, which engages critically with the work of historical geographers,
historians of science, and cultural historians of cartography, not least the Renaissance scholar,
Jerry Brotton.
143 Ramaswamy, Terrestrial, 13. See, further: Dimmock, Elizabethan Globalism, especially 1–29.
144 For their rarity in the Mughal world: Ramaswamy, ‘Conceit’, 769–70.
145 Ramaswamy, ‘Conceit’, 752–53, 756–57 and nn. 3, 12.
146 Ibid, 758.
147 Ibid, 756–57 and n. 9.
148 Several of these are usefully reproduced in: ibid, 761–68, which are analysed on 771–76, and
see also 770, for discussion of an Ottoman picture of a globe as a scientific device.
149 Beach and Koch, eds., King of the World, 138–42, 189.
Knowledge 455
On the other hand, so Jos Gommans argues, the Mughals’ conception of

kingship and empire explains a relative incuriosity on their part about the
imperial margins and what lay beyond, in turn explaining ‘the poor state of car-
tography’ at large, for ‘conspicuously missing from virtually all Mughal maps
are territorial limitations’, with the projection and realisation ‘being extremely
rough and appear[ing] to focus on the lateral lines of roads and rivers’.150 We
should be careful about attributing this to Mughal notions of universal empire
per se. The Ottomans held a clear conception of borders or boundaries (hudud,
in Arabic) even as maps made from the sixteenth century artfully subordinated
those limits to stake the Ottoman sultan’s claim to the lands beyond (as
Europeans did, too). This demonstrates how cartography could actually service
universal ambition.151 And, whereas early cadastral surveys spurred shogunal
mapping enterprises that steadily improved the stock of knowledge and clarity
of cartographic representation, to the point where all manner of maps were
printed and sold to a public curious to visualise Tokugawa Japan, the same
cannot be said of Mughal India.152
Whether the attitude apparent in the Mughal centre was also common at
other Indian courts remains largely a matter of speculation, although pil-
grim maps might have been produced cheaply enough to find nearly as broad
a market as the kinds of ephemera commonly bought in Japan.153 What
is apparent, however, is an interest in all manner of maps by the late seven-
teenth or early eighteenth centuries that led to the amassing of ‘early modern
India’s most extensive cartographic collection’ by the Kachhwaha dynasty of
the Rajput state of Amber.154 This comprised a wide range of map artefacts
under a common rubric (taraha), including a map of late seventeenth-century
Surat painted on cloth and marked with important buildings (including noble
mansions, gardens, and European warehouses), another of early eighteenth-
century Agra, as well as a fine map painted on paper of the newly laid-out city
of Jaipur complete with architectural as well as topographical detail.155 There
are also ‘route maps, military maps, pilgrimage maps, construction drawings
150 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 20. This contrasts with the relative accuracy of the globes
copied by Mughal artists into Mughal paintings (§8.4). The Mughals are perhaps peculiar,
however, rather than being emblematic of Indian curiosity in the world and its mapping;
they seem to have been less interested, for instance, in Persian cosmographical works –some
containing maps of the world –than their counterparts in the Deccan: Gupta, ‘Mapping the
World’.
151 Brummett, ‘Ottoman Space’.
152 Yonemoto, Mapping, 8–42, which is attentive to the challenges of these enterprises and notes
the ‘shogunate’s nonproprietary attitude toward cartographic information’ (16) that enabled
commercial production of maps.
153 For this latter suggestion, see: Venkateswaran and Tillotson, eds., Masterpieces, 86–87.
154 Khera, Moods, 39.
155 These examples are reproduced in: Venkateswaran and Tillotson, eds., Masterpieces, 48–49,
58–59, 68–69.
456 Knowledge
of individual buildings, and gardens drawn on grid paper, maps depicting forts
and palaces outside of Amber and Jaipur, and maps related to the purchasing
of lands.’156 Their importance was such that they appear in the records of both
the palace library (potikhana) and the painting workshop (suratkhana), while
court artists were trained to be as adept in genres such as portraiture as in
mapmaking.157
At first glance, the route maps in the Jaipur collection bear resemblance
to earlier Mughal exemplars, except painters were not only in receipt of
new information supplied by surveyors, but also developing techniques to
improve a map’s functionality. Thus, in addition to giving a sense of the
terrain and the location of urban precincts and important infrastructure
like water bodies and tanks, and annotations of place names, the makers
give ‘the distance from one place to the next, prioritising directionality and
sequence of travel on the ground’ with the ‘network of small junctions,
important stations (denoted by two concentric circles), and diagrammed
urban landmarks creat[ing] a cartographic artifact ready for use.’158 Such
works, Dipti Khera reveals, are composite products that bring together
the expertise and talents of different kinds of experts.159 A beautiful, late
eighteenth-century map of the fortified city of Ranthambor is a world
apart from the simple and crude maps of the high Mughal period, serving
very well its patron’s aesthetic sensibilities, his desire to commemorate his
predecessor’s seizure of the fort some decades prior (and its original form
ahead of subsequent modifications), and thus his military-technological
interests, even if the planimetric view seems clumsy when set against changes
to urban cartography in early modern Europe, where a crude bird’s-eye view
had long given way to two-dimensional projections.160
Cartography was not static in late Mughal India, therefore, and its distinct-
iveness is explicable with reference to the very different priorities of Amber’s
rulers, for instance, from patrons in certain European centres. At the same
time, Khera’s work reveals the extent to which maps were not just about dom-
ination and ownership, but also about an aesthetic appreciation of the land-
scape, honour or pride of place, or simply about knowledge –ambitions and
sentiments that could also be expressed in visual artefacts other than maps as
we know them. And the very same held true in early modern Europe, no matter
that these facts have been easy to forget in the obsession to chart the rise of
modern forms of geographic knowledge.161
156 Khera, Moods, 39.

157 Ibid, 39.
158 Ibid, 41.
159 Ibid, 41, and 42, for reproduction of examples.
160 Ibid, 43–44, for discussion and a reproduction of the map; Borsay, Urban Renaissance, 81–85,
on European developments.
161 See, instructively: Wooding, Tudor England, 18–19.
Knowledge 457
Fig. 10B The Jaipur Jantar Mantar

10.5 Time: Mathematics, Astronomy, and Horology

Today, a glance at our phones or digital devices lets us know the time with
extraordinary precision, not to mention such information as the day of the
week, month, and year, or the time many thousands of miles away in another
part of the world. Timekeeping or horology is something we take for granted,
therefore, and we would be hard pressed to conceive of –let alone name –our
local time expert. Yet, this was not so in the past, when knowledgeable per-
sons known as a jyotisha (in Sanskrit) and munajjim (Persian) or muneccim
(Ottoman Turkish) were vital to the proper marking of religious rites and
festivals, the ceremonial and daily business of the royal court, and the execu-
tion –on the part of the state –of such procedures as annual tax collection and
revenue disbursement.162 If the 24-hour day, 7-day week, and 365-day and 12-
month year has hegemony nowadays, the same was not true in the past, when
the day might start at sunrise or sunset depending on local ways of dividing
162 On this last, see: Blake, Time, 107–40. See, also: Bayly, Empire and Information, 247–52.
458 Knowledge
time, for example, or when the Islamic lunar calendar jostled with different
lunisolar or solar calendars of various forms (of which the Gregorian calendar
that came into being in 1582 was but one). Reconciling and navigating between
these different systems made the job of the time expert even more complex
and important in the multicultural empires of the Safavids, Mughals, and
Ottomans, Stephen P. Blake highlights. ‘In the Indic temporal system, as in the
Islamic,’ he writes, ‘it was the astronomer/astrologer who was the time expert’,
so that horology, astronomy, and astrology were imbricated.163 With an astro-
labe and astronomical almanac (zij) in hand, the jyotisha or munajjim looked to
the skies and consulted their charts to inform local people –potentates and the
poor alike –of the current date/time. The munajjim’s bread and butter, how-
ever, came from casting horoscopes or interpreting such events as equinoxes,
solstices, eclipses, or the appearance of comets.164
For astronomical knowledge to be of service to the just ruler of a well-
functioning kingdom and his pious and observant subjects, accuracy was piv-
otal. It was this quest for accuracy that bequeathed the world a handful of
early modern observatories still standing across north India today, although
their existence owes to the curiosity and engagement with diverse bodies of
scholarly knowledge by a sub-imperial ruler, Jai Singh II. We have already
encountered the raja of Amber in connexion with his realisation of an innova-
tive plan for a new city –Jaipur –built on an orthogonal grid, the form of
which partly derived from engagement with archaic Sanskrit manuals (§4.2.1).
Jaipur was the site of one of his new observatories (Fig. 10B); others were
constructed in the Mughal capital at Delhi, in Ujjain (the capital of the raja’s
jagir of Malwa), and in the religious and intellectual centres at Mathura and
Varanasi.165 Known as jantar mantars (lit. ‘calculation instruments’), these
complexes contained a group of large masonry instruments used to calculate
the movement of the celestial bodies, including a sundial.166
According to an eighteenth-century Indo-Persian account, Jai Singh was
assisted by Mirza Muhammad ‘Abid and Mirza Khayr Allah in the observa-
tories’ construction, for they were knowledgeable in scholarship from across
the Islamicate world. The observatories were modelled on the famous and
once cutting-edge one in the Mughals’ ancestral lands in central Asia, built
by their relative Ulugh Beg Mirza (d. 1449), who had also patronised scholars
and built a university.167 As for the astronomers responsible for making and
163 Blake, Time, 59, for citation, and 48–75, on the work of time experts in each empire, as well as
discussion of technologies such as water clocks.
164 Ibid, 10–14.
165 The Mathura observatory was torn down during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
166 Blake, Astronomy and Astrology, 119–20, explains the construction and function of the
instruments, as well as differences in their number and uses between the five observatories.
See, also: Venkateswaran and Tillotson, eds., Masterpieces, 56–57.
167 Hodgson, Venture, 145; Anooshahr, 312, who also describes the impact of Ulugh Beg’s
patronage of scientific inquiry on the early Mughal rulers. See, also: Blake, Time, 17–19, for
details of the observatory at Samarkand and its contributions to Islamic astronomy.
Knowledge 459
recording observations, they were drawn from both the Indic-Sanskritic and
Islamicate-Persianate intellectual ecumenes, although men such as Jaganatha
Samrat were encouraged to learn Persian and Arabic to master the classic
Islamic astronomical texts. Jai Singh also employed Jesuits.168 Based on their
data, Jai Singh prepared the Zij-i Muhammad Shahi (1728).169 But in 1730, he
despatched a mission to Portugal –comprised of one Father Emmanuel de
Figueredo and Muhammad Sharif, among others –to obtain new instruments
and texts. They returned with an edition of the Tabulae Astronomicae of
1702 by Phillipe de La Hire (1640–1718), from whom Jai Singh appropriated
‘refraction-correction tables’ –hitherto unknown in Islamic astronomy –to
revise his own calculations, which he produced in the Zij-i Jadid-i Muhammad
Shahi (‘New Astronomical Treatise of [Emperor] Muhammad Shah’) of 1731–
32, and which became well known among contemporary Indian and Iranian
scholars, including those from Shiraz, which was still an important centre of
mathematical and astronomical training.170 These works were deposited along-
side others in Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, as well as Hindi, Bengali, Latin,
French, German, and English, in a library with over 200 titles.171 Thus, Jai
Singh’s scientific pursuits brought together different practitioners and their
respective bodies of knowledge within India, while also linking north India to
central Asia, Iran, and western Europe.172
In this example, Indian science mediated knowledge transfer from West to
East to such an extent that the idea of diffusion becomes untenable. It was
not, moreover, the only example of the scholarly engagement with ideas from
other knowledge traditions, and knowledge did not merely flow from Europe
to the rest of the world. We know, for instance, how Chinese Muslims played
a key role in collecting and translating Arabic and Persian treatises, hoping
to reconcile Islamic with Confucian thought, ultimately making the learning
168 Blake, Astronomy and Astrology, 120–22. See: Minkowski, ‘Learned Brahmans’, for a bio-
graphically and bibliographically led survey of Hindu astral scientists at the Mughal court
and thus the longer history of knowledge exchange across these ecumenes (and occasional
resistance to absorbing yavana or ‘westerner’ science).
169 See, for discussion of the zij tradition, including the distinction between observational and
computational works: Blake, Astronomy and Astrology, 113–18.
170 Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Early Persianate Modernity’, here 266, and 266–69, for details of later
Indo-Persianate astronomical knowledge production. For a recent and detailed dive into the
engagement with ideas contained in de la Hire’s text, see: Plofker, ‘Sanskrit Mathematical
Astronomy’, especially 23–29. For two relevant primary sources from the Jaipur archives
and accompanying commentary that enrich what is described here, see: Venkateswaran and
Tillotson, eds., Masterpieces, 70–73. See, also: Blake, Astronomy and Astrology, 124.
171 Blake, Astronomy and Astrology, 122.
172 Other fields of intellectual, technological, or practical knowledge likewise engendered new
networks, while also being sustained by those of longer standing. Of these, we might note the
transfer of underground water storage technology from western Asia to the western coast of
India in the early modern period (i.e., along the commercial-cum-religious routes across the
western Indian Ocean), resulting in a new set of buildings (tankas or cisterns) and water man-
agement techniques; see: Keller, ‘Cloistering Water’.
460 Knowledge
they contained available to Chinese intellectuals at large.173 We also know from

the sixteenth-century Ottoman admiral, Seydi ‘Ali Reis, of being detained at
Humayun’s court because of the emperor’s desire to understand the equator,
measuring solar and lunar eclipses with an astrolabe, and the workings of
astronomical tables, much as we know that seventeenth-century Latin works
were translated into Persian, including those by Rene Descartes (1596–1650)
and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), who published on the transit of Mercury.174
If Gassendi’s scepticism and empiricism earns him the accolade of being a
‘quintessentially “modern” […] scientist and philosopher’, and since François
Bernier translated his works in India before returning to –and championing
Gassendi in –France, then it is significant that Gassendi ‘actually found a
receptive audience in India simultaneously with, if not in fact prior to, his
influence in Europe.’175 Yet, what was not translated is also significant, as
Marshall G.S. Hodgson noted: ‘not the works of Kepler or Galileo –only, it
seems, such works as did not presuppose major transitions from the Islamicate
tradition: planetary tables, in particular.’176
Science (hikmat) certainly had an important place at the ‘court of the
cosmocrat’ –as the Mughal centre from Humayun’s time has been characterised –
much as it did in other parts of the contemporary Indo-Islamicate world and
post-Mughal south Asia. Yet, this very placement dictated the shape of inquiry
and the kinds of knowledges that were of interest, sought out, and in receipt
of patronage.177 It would be wrong to assume that this was widely at odds with
the relationship of royal centres to astronomy, astrology, or other ‘rational’
and ‘occult’ sciences elsewhere in the Islamicate world.178 In early modern
Christendom, too, messianism and looking to the skies for portentous wisdom
was widely prevalent and not necessarily at odds with the flourishing of ration-
alism and scientific inquiry in many of the same venues (e.g., at royal centres)
or under the same patronage (e.g., by kings).179 In Germany during the 1680s,
for instance, Johann Jacob Zimmerman –a theologian and astronomer, who
predicted the End Times coming before the year 1693 –was widely celebrated
and earned a disciple in Johannes Kelpius (1667–1708). His work on the Great
Comet was not only cited by Isaac Newton (1643–1727); he also earned a wider
173 Weil, ‘Unveiling Nature’.

174 Anooshahr, ‘Science’, 306.
175 Kinra, ‘Handling Diversity’, 288. See, also: Beasley, ‘Decentering’, 29.
176 Hodgson, Venture, 145.
177 See, most valuably: Anooshahr, ‘Science’. Humayun’s interest in the astral sciences, as
Anooshahr notes, blurred the boundaries between astronomy (hay’at), astrology (nujum),
divination, and cosmology –not that this was unusual anywhere in the world –while his
interest in astrology was perhaps secondary and subordinate to that in mathematics (riyazi).
C.f. Orthmann, ‘Humayun’s Search’.
178 Lefèvre, ‘Messianism, Rationalism’, for a deeper examination of how these categories of
thought sat together in Mughal India, situated within the empire’s wider Indian Ocean and
Indo-Islamicate context. Khafipour, ed., Empires, 345–400, for primary source materials.
179 See: §3.3.5.
Knowledge 461
following that helped take his lineage of apocalyptic, astrological, alchem-

ical, and occult thinking to north America.180 Once we realise that such a
figure as Johannes Kepler (1571–64) maintained an interest in astrology and
conceived of the universe as a living body in his ground-breaking work that
gave enormous credence to Copernican heliocentrism, or how the father of the
gravitational-physical theory of the solar system, Isaac Newton (1643–1726),
maintained a lifelong interest in writing about the End Times, then we can
begin to understand how ‘[a]‌pocalyptic thought coexisted easily with mod-
ernity and even Enlightenment.’181
It would also be very wrong to assume that Indian science was totally unre-
ceptive to more cutting-edge ideas that marked a substantive break with existing
learning, let alone being inherently averse to doing so, much as historians of
the middle East and China have likewise shown such notions to be falsehoods
born of ignorance.182 Taking but one example, the keeper-practitioners of clas-
sical Sanskrit mathematical astronomy and its texts (jyotishastras) had for cen-
turies engaged with ideas hailing from ancient Greek and Islamic astronomy,
also being interested in new instruments (e.g., the astrolabe), a tendency not
abating through the early modern period (Jai Singh had a telescope in his
possession, for instance). The impact of Western science in the colonial era,
as it happens, was not to simply subsume Indic astrology so much as create
new branches.183 By the same turn, we should note that medieval astronomers
working in the Islamicate ecumene sometimes conversed with and absorbed
ideas from Sanskrit scholars, while the modern observatory built in late
eighteenth-century colonial Madras could not have functioned without the
Indians expert in the jyotishastras. The modern/Western relied on the Eastern/
traditional, in other words.184
But there are always limits to such two-way exchange, with resistance to
change or disinterest in dialogue coming, potentially, from either side.185 Surely
responsibility for the types of European works found in Jai Singh’s library lies
partly with the raja’s intermediaries. On the one hand, Jai Singh was benefit-
ting from the steady globalisation of knowledge. Another well-known example

181 Ibid, 118, for citation and discussion of Newton; Blake, Astronomy and Astrology, 138, on
Kepler, and 143–45, on how astronomy continually invigorated astrology (and, thus, magical
thinking; see: §2.5.2), and vice versa.
182 The Ottomans built an observatory to rival Ulugh Beg’s in 1579 and, though it was ‘torn
down by a superstitious vizier’, its astronomers had gathered much valuable data, meanwhile;
Hodgson, Venture, 121.
183 Blake, Astronomy and Astrology, 112–25, digests the two-way exchange between Indic and
Islamicate astronomy from medieval times to the eighteenth century. See: Plofker, ‘Sanskrit
Mathematical Astronomy’, on the various branches of colonial-era Indic astronomy. See,
also: Bayly, Empire and Information, 252–64.
184 Kumar, ‘Instrumental Brahmin’.
185 On a different set of Jesuit networks involved with the transmission of Indian astronomical
knowledge to Europe: Raina, ‘French Jesuit’.
462 Knowledge
of this process and its outcomes is the dialogue opened by the Jesuit, Matteo
Ricci (1552–1610), with the Ming imperial court following his presentation
of mechanical clocks. His aim was to establish a mission station, in which he
succeeded, but the larger impact was exchange between Chinese and European
mathematicians and scientists (including those cartographers, described above)
and the creation of an observatory in the Forbidden City.186 A less-known,
but nonetheless impressive example, is the observation of celestial bodies and
the cultivation of astronomical and mathematical knowledge in Timbuktu,
present-day Mali, which was the capital of the Songhay Empire and linked –
via pilgrimage and trade routes –to north Africa and Arabia. The manuscripts
found there have hardly been studied, although preliminary inquiry suggests a
lively interest in learning from the Islamic and wider world, and that the obser-
vation of the stars was used to determine the direction of Mecca, necessary for
Muslims to pray.187
On the other hand, networks and those shaping them connect what/who
they want to connect, to the extent of privileging certain actors, spaces, or ideas
while marginalising or ignoring others. The Catholic Church had condemned
the heliocentric ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), even burning one
Dominican mathematician and astronomer alive for espousing such views,
while Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was brought before the Inquisition. Thus,
it is little surprise Catholic scholars were working in the frame of Ptolemaic
astronomy, and that the Jesuits brought back de La Hire for Jai Singh, and
not Copernicus, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), Kepler, Galileo, or Newton.188 If
more cutting-edge learning was available in Tokugawa Japan, it had as much
to do with the interest in information among the shogunal government as
the expulsion of the Portuguese. This resulted in the monopoly over Euro-
Japanese exchange passing from Portugal to the Netherlands. The concur-
rent Dutch commercial ‘golden age’ nurtured the intellectual ‘enlightenment’
that underwrote the rise of rangaku (Dutch learning) beginning in c. 1640
but especially from 1720, not to mention the return flow of Asian medical
knowledge to Europe.189
Scientific advance in Europe and the creation of a Europe-wide intellec-
tual community could be blocked by opposition from powerful institutions
like the Catholic Church, therefore, much as now-disregarded sciences like
astrology or more traditional forms of astronomy retained their place in
186 See: Flowers, ‘Scientific Knowledge’. A useful guide to Jesuit science across the early modern
world, critical of the development of the historiography, is Donato and Pavone, ‘Science’.
187 Medupe, ‘Timbuktu’.
188 Blake, Astronomy and Astrology, 124, for this observation, 130–32, for how Copernicus
‘marked the beginning of the end for the superiority of Islamic astronomy and astrology’,
even as his heliocentric theories were prefigured by (and probably borrowed from) Islamic
thinkers, and 133–43, for the evolution of his ideas via Brahe and Kepler to Newton. See,
also: Blake, Time, 64–65.
189 On the bakufu’s hunger for information: Boot, ‘Dutch-Japanese Trade’. On scientific exchange
in both directions: Cook, Matters of Exchange, 339–77.
Knowledge 463
European monarchies in ways just described (see, also: §2.5.2). Significantly,

however, another set of developments was underway. One facet of this was
vernacularisation; languages like English were on the rise, their standardisa-
tion and spread occurring in tandem with both political centralisation and
the corresponding decline of Latin.190 ‘Old limits’ remained upon what could
be known and the ancients retained their authority in the Sanskrit ecumene,
however, which evinced ‘nothing comparable to the moment in seventeenth-
century England when scholars of natural philosophy decided to look at
nature itself rather than read Aristotle and Galen –whose works from that
moment on became chapters in a history of science and no longer science’,
Sheldon Pollock writes.191 We have already seen that vernaculars were the
loci of innovation in early modern India. What concerns us presently is how
‘the vernacular both intellectualised itself and institutionalised its power,
processes indissociably linked to new national and statist projects.’192 This
occurred in parts of Europe but not in south Asia. There were eight national
academies founded in western Europe before 1671, including the Académie
Française (1635) and the Royal Society (1662), receiving their impetus as
much from gentlemen as those in professions (e.g., gardeners, physicians).193
Thus, when seventeenth-century European scientists were self-consciously
declaring an ‘intellectual renewal’, some chose to do so in their respective
vernaculars; hence, the titles of works by luminaries like Galileo, Blaise
Pascal (1623–62), and Robert Boyle (1627–91) reference the nuovo/nouvelle/
new.194
Although the vernacularisation of science culminated in the creation of
national institutions in parts of Europe, it would be remiss to ignore the role
played by overseas empire.195 A new current gradually swept through cer-
tain European courts and aristocratic-cum-intellectual circles, one which
linked astronomy and other natural sciences not to ideology but to pros-
perity, not to monarchical authority but to state power. Royal patronage
of learned societies in early modern France and England, for instance,
illustrates the extent to which war, the profits from trade in goods and
enslaved persons, and the worldwide networks engendered by commerce
gave impetus to scientific discovery in the fields of astronomy, mechanics,
metallurgy, engineering, and so forth.196 Reflexively, overseas voyaging and
190 Gallagher, Language Learning, 9.

191 Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals’, 23.
192 Ibid, 25.
193 Cook, Matters of Exchange, 412–13.
194 Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals’, 22–23.
195 C.f. ibid, 26.
196 See: Satia, Empire of Guns, 161–64, and much of the first part of that book. There were,
however, not only significant continuities between these institutions as patrons of scientific
learning and the royal courts that preceded them, but also key differences between the new,
national institutions themselves, with the British society woefully underfunded compared to
the French; see: Moran, ‘Courts and Academies’.
464 Knowledge
dominion nourished botanists and other natural scientists with specimens,

observations, and data –the last including meteorological and astronom-
ical data from aboard ship, such as Captain Cook’s observation of the
transit of Venus in the Pacific.197 Such flows of information and materials
made even small states –like the Dutch Republic –capable of becoming
important players in the so- called Scientific Revolution.198 Inspired by
French and British forerunners and this scientific ferment, Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) articulated his hopes for ‘the unification of
sapientia (wisdom) and potentia (power) in the service of social reform,’
seeing ‘learned societies as providing the rulers of political societies with
the knowledge needed to bring about rational social change.’199 In 1700, the
Berlin Academy was founded for an increasingly powerful state, albeit one
without an empire; Leibniz, carrying his vision of science as the servant of
the state, was installed as its first president.200
We can glean a little of the status of astronomy in British culture and pol-
itics from the incorporation of the figures of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and John
Flamsteed in the decorative frescos of the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval
College beside the Thames. Completed in 1726, these frescos also depict the
personification of the continents (Africa, America, Asia, Europe), the riches
derived from trade, and the prowess of the navy, thereby explicitly linking
the astral sciences with trade and empire in a building used by wounded and
retired veterans of the British navy. Flamsteed (1646–1719) had lived and
worked a short walk away at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, being the
very first Astronomer Royal. Flamsteed’s celebrity and his immortalisation
in the frescos and other images seems not to have an equal in early modern
India, however, where identifying the names of particular astronomers is dif-
ficult enough. This is not because Jai Singh was the only eighteenth-century
Indian ruler who took great interest in astronomy/astrology, for we also know
of Raja Krishnachandra (1710–83) in Nadia, Bengal, whose knowledge of the
astral sciences and its key texts has recently come to light through examination
of his correspondence with servants of the East India Company.201 Rather, it
was the very different social and political context of knowledge production
that distinguishes these Indian kings’ scientific interest from that of European
rulers and elites.
197 Excellent surveys can be found in: Grove, ‘Indigenous Knowledge’, on European inquiry into
botanical-medical knowledge in Asia from the Portuguese onward; Drayton, ‘Knowledge and
Empire’, focusing on Britain and its empire.
198 Cook, Matters of Exchange; Swan, Rarities. None of this is intended to reinstate older views
of Europe as the locus of scientific advance, with the non-European world merely supplying
the raw materials, such picture having been thoroughly dislodged thanks to, for instance: Raj,
Relocating.
199 Moran, ‘Courts and Academies’, 270–71.
200 Ibid, 271.
201 Ehrlich, ‘New Lights’, which also presents these sources in full.
Knowledge 465
10.6 Conclusion
Gunpowder, the late Marshall G.S. Hodgson alleged, made possible Ottoman,
Safavid, and Mughal territorial expansion and consolidation (§6.4.2), leading
to a larger economic, cultural, and intellectual ‘florescence’, in turn.202 Yet, for
Hodgson, this ‘Persianate flowering’ was limited in two respects. In the first
place, it was not the ‘origination’ of something new, but more of a ‘culmination’
of achievements made by states and societies in the Islamic world over several
centuries. It was, moreover, rather conservative in character at that. Echoing
the ideas of Johan Huizinga (§11.2), Hodgson noted that Persianate poetry
and its forms were reworked ‘within established lines of tradition’, instead
of smashing down the walls of convention.203 Another set of limitations, to
Hodgson’s mind, became apparent upon comparing the Ottoman, Safavid,
and Mughal flowering to the one taking place at the same time in Europe –
land of the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment –a world in which, he
believed, ‘new channels of creative activity are being opened up, where the
accent is rather continuously on innovation, even drastic innovation, and
where, for a time, the usual conservative spirit of agrarianate-level society is
damped down.’204 But, we might pause to ask, is any of this fair?
Gunpowder technology, we have already seen, was not always decisive, facts
that have compelled the urgent rethinking of the whole Military Revolution
and the very idea of the gunpowder empires. Giving substance to the notion of
ex oriente lux, a generation or so of increasingly globally minded Renaissance
scholarship has discerned the imprint of Muslim thought in the European
classics of the period and in the sciences, of the Muslim world upon Humanist
inquiry and the nascent idea of ‘Europe’, and the far wider and more sustained
impact of East-West exchanges on the arts and culture.205 That said, it was
not simply a case of the East giving and the West receiving, for dialogue and
exchange was a two-way flow, even if it worked out differently in one direction
compared to the other. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Mughal
courtier, Abdus Sattar, was tasked to study Latin and firangi science, religion,
and politics, to add a further example to those described in this chapter.206 Lest
we privilege East-West channels, we should remember that the boundaries of
inquiry were –for better or worse –sometimes set by the choice of register, not
to mention that other geographies of circulation (e.g., around the Persianate
world, within the Indian Ocean) or established links to other non-European
202 Hodgson, Venture, 49–52.

203 Ibid, 14, 15.
204 Ibid, 15, for citation, and 120, where he alleges that these Occidental developments would have
been difficult for ‘outsiders’ to comprehend and engage with, though he implies –by noting
the proximity of the Ottomans and their relations with Europe –that other factors must also
have been at play.
205 See, for instance: Saliba, Islamic Science, especially 193– 255; Adelman, ‘Mimesis’, 92;
Meserve, Empires of Islam; Jardine and Brotton, Global Interests.
206 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 178.
466 Knowledge
centres (e.g. Shiraz) might have been more important or prestigious than those
reaching to the Occident.
A similar set of revisionisms is leaving its mark upon the history of early
modern science and medicine.207 Until relatively recently, this historiograph-
ical field was fairly elitist in its preoccupations, largely focusing on upper-class
men in the West, under whose aegis there was said to have been a Scientific
Revolution and an Enlightenment in Europe –concepts the scholarship did
not hesitate to perpetuate –that bequeathed ‘modern science’ to the world.
One route to repainting the canvas was to rethink what comprised ‘science’
in broader terms and thereby bring into view the work of such (non-elite) fig-
ures as herbalists and astrologers, and even those charlatans and quacks who
captivated and duped contemporaries. A complementary enterprise has been
to consciously fix upon the gendered, classed, and raced dimensions of histor-
ical inquiry, often with the result of bringing a wider and more diverse range
of actors into the frame.
Another feature of much of the historiography was its Eurocentrism, for
modern science was thought to have developed only in Europe and from there
diffused to other parts of the world in the early modern and colonial eras.
Against this, historians have lately tried to decentre scientific inquiry and to
think in plural terms about the sciences, rather than talking of a science, tout
court. At the same time, they highlight the contributions of non-European
peoples and knowledges in the making of Western scientific modernity; some
have even studied such learning and wisdom in its own right and on its own
terms.208 Although the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment have been
central to identifying early modernity and writing its history, these revisionist
manoeuvres have not eviscerated so much as enriched our understanding of
the early modern world. To explore this historiographical turning point, we
might usefully examine a form of knowledge about which little has so far been
said in this chapter, but which any survey of the early modern world would be
remiss to ignore: ethnobotany.209
A fourteen-volume, fully illustrated herbal titled Le Jardin de Lorixa (‘The
Flora of Orissa’), found in archives in Paris, has been critically studied by Kapil
Raj.210 At face value, it was the work of one L’Empereur, a French surgeon
born in Normandy who travelled to India and found employment in the service
of the French East India Company (est. 1664). His motivation seems to have
been to gather valuable knowledge about unfamiliar botanical species so that
207 For a recent survey of developments in the history of science written from a French academic
perspective: Romano, ‘Reflections’.
208 Such critiques have been mounting. See, most recently, Shank, ‘After the Scientific Revolution’,
which forms the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History out-
lining the roots of the problem while calling for what has been described, above, and pro-
posing means of redressing the historiographical status quo.
209 See, for instance: Grove, ‘Indigenous Knowledge’.
210 Raj, Relocating, 35–39, for the details that follow.
Knowledge 467
they might be put to the benefit of European healers. He wished, more specif-
ically, to present this material in codified form, for he was aware that Indians
were knowledgeable about useful plants, thus often bypassing druggists by
making their own preparations. In this endeavour, he was no pioneer, for the
arrival of successive European nations in the Indian Ocean world was accom-
panied by a corresponding interest from their respective communities of nat-
ural scientists, their activities often having a competitive dynamic to them. In
the first place, there was the Portuguese work of Garcia da Orta (c. 1500–
c.1568) and Cristovão da Costa (c.1515–c.1592), which presented information
collated on the Malabar coast in Portuguese and was translated into Latin
almost immediately in 1567 by Charles de l’Escluse (Carolus Clusius), the emi-
nent botanist and founder of the botanical garden in Leiden.211 Then came
Hendrik Adriaan Van Reede tot Drakenstein’s (1636–91) illustrated Hortus
Malabaricus (‘Garden of Malabar’), which was published in twelve volumes
in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693 and became a standard reference work,
followed by a book by fellow Dutchman, Paul Hermann (1646–95), on Ceylon’s
flora. The English, too, collected plants and submitted them to London, via a
critical engagement with experts in natural knowledge and materia medica in
such arenas as royal courts, military camps, city hospitals, urban physic gar-
dens, the bazaar, and apothecaries’ shops.212
Much as European traders relied on local intermediaries or agents to exe-
cute their business dealings in Asia (§5.3.2), so Europeans interested in plants
ascertained valuable information by tapping into the relevant local epistemic
and artisanal communities to produce what Anna Winterbottom calls ‘hybrid
knowledge’.213 L’Empereur, for instance, had pharmacopoeias and other texts
translated from Oriya (the language of Orissa/Odisha) into Hindustani –
of which he had some knowledge –to serve as the basis for his translations
into French, while he also relied on agents to travel far afield to consult with
locals, collect plants, and make note of their therapeutic and economic uses.
L’Empereur also relied on local artists to draw and paint the leaves, stems,
flowers, fruits, and seeds of specimens, the results of which can be found
in the Paris manuscript, and which mark a departure from Indian pictorial
representations of flora in form, execution, and their overarching purpose or
use.214 ‘His’ work was composited and illustrated in south Asia, therefore, and
only shipped to the Académie des Sciences in Paris once completed in 1725. His
contribution, Raj argues, ‘much as that of Van Reede and da Orta’ lay ‘not in
211 Barreto Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 77–111. See, also: Walker, ‘Remedies’, for
later transmission of medical learning from the Indian Ocean world to Portugal.
212 Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge, 112–39, which is centred on, and looks outward from,
Madras.
213 Ibid, here 1–3, where the limits of the term are addressed.
214 Raj, Relocating, 40–52, which includes a comparison of the Jardin de Lorixa with the Hortus
Malabaricus. On the long-term, lasting impact of such collaboration on Indian pictorial trad-
ition, see: Dalrymple, ed., Forgotten Masters.
468 Knowledge
gathering information held by undifferentiated, authochtonous groups, but in

reconfiguring and constructing knowledge, skills, and specialised practices –for
the regional, as much as for the European, knowledge markets.’215
These men and the works bearing their authorship were not mere extensions
of European practices and traditions, but merit studying in their own right,
given the reliance on various kinds of local specialists and on various acts
of linguistic and inter-cultural translation.216 India, as a space and place, and
Indians, as knowledgeable or highly skilled people, played a vital role in what
have long been conceived as European intellectual developments in the early
modern period, therefore, much the same being true in other parts of Asia, in
Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific world.217 ‘Indians’ does not only mean
Indian men, however, and here we might valuably examine the frontispiece
to L’Empereur’s manuscript, painted by a local artist in a hybrid European-
vernacular style. It depicts a European figure (presumably L’Empereur)
standing beside an Indian ascetic/savant, an Indian painter, an Indian assistant,
and, most notably, an Indian woman carrying a basket of specimens, probably
those she has collected herself.218 That a woman is part of this scene testifies
to the fact that the (embodied) skills and knowledges upon which Europeans
relied in producing early modern knowledge was not only derived from non-
Europeans, was not only processed and sometimes circulated in the wider world
before it made its impact in Europe, all of which helps decentre the Scientific
Revolution, but was also hardly an all-male preserve.219
Indeed, from the preceding pages, it might seem that teaching and learning,
knowledge production and dissemination, intellectual dialogue, debate,
and exchange were fields of life inhabited only by men. True, entry to cer-
tain institutions of learning, contact with certain intellectuals, and receipt of
patronage for the pursuit of inquiry were largely (if not wholly) restricted to
men, and not only in early modern India, but also across most of Europe,
where notable exceptions prove the rule.220 The ‘almost universal dictate that
Sanskrit was the language of men’ is not entirely unwarranted, Kashi Gomez
argues, although it was also the case that ‘a certain subset of women could, and
did, have access to Sanskrit learning’, while an even smaller number entered the
record as authors.221 Indeed, there are signs of the situation changing in early
modern times, with more women cropping up as the authors of Sanskrit texts in
Vijayanagara’s successor states, for instance, not least as the rise of households
215 Raj, Relocating, 57.

216 Ibid, 58–59.
217 There exists a large literature on this topic, although mostly for the period from the mid-
eighteenth century onwards. See, however: Grove, ‘Indigenous Knowledge’.
218 Raj, Relocating, 33, for a reproduction. See, also: Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, 94–96, on indi-
genous women’s scientific knowledge.
219 Schiebinger, ‘Women’, 201–05, for European and indigenous women naturalists.
220 Ibid, 192–99.
221 Gomez, ‘Sanskrit’, 169–70.
Knowledge 469
as important political, economic, and intellectual units provided well-placed

women greater access to the intellectual productions of the Sanskrit world.222
In the early eighteenth-century Tanjavur kingdom, Gomez highlights, a
‘prolific Sanskrit author and commentator’ named Ghanashyama ‘regularly
paid tribute to his two wives Sundari and Kamala in his writings’ and, more-
over, ‘undertook a joint commentarial project with them’ on an important
medieval Sanskrit drama.223 As for the Persianate sphere, we know of around
twenty female poets already in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iran; a late
Safavid travel account written by a woman; the verses of Mughal royal women;
and a late eighteenth-century Indian text authored by one Bibi Hashmat al-
Daula, whose translation of oral tales from various vernaculars, combined
with standard Persian prose and poetic works, she herself knew to represent
what Zahra Shah calls an ‘incursion into the conventionally male domain of
literary Persian.’224 And vernacular literacy was itself a means for female lit-
erary and intellectual expression, as evinced by a late seventeenth-century Braj
‘courtesan’s handbook’ titled the Kridavinoda (‘The Pleasure of Amusement’)
written by Mohan Rai, one of several literate maidservants and courtesans at
the Jaipur court.225
Women probably played a larger part in intellectual life than we might
think. Women may not have had their star trumpeted in what was an avow-
edly male-dominated world; little of their achievement is known to us unless
they were mentioned by their male counterparts and correspondents, or had
the means and abilities to leave some account of their own life and works.
One such example is the scientist and philosopher Katherine Jones (1615–91),
Viscountess Ranelagh, who corresponded with some of the leading lights of
the English Enlightenment and was sister to the chemist and co-originator of
what became the Royal Society, Robert Boyle, arguably influencing him a great
deal.226 Our difficulty in envisioning women’s roles derives from how they have
been obscured by the historical record, but it is also a product of where we –
as historians –have chosen to focus our attention. Turning from the women
hidden in the midst of the crowd, such as Katherine Jones, we might also use-
fully shift our gaze from elite spaces to the everyday habitations of various
knowledges and their practitioners.227 Thus, for instance, if we look away from
Ulugh Beg’s or Jai Singh’s observatories and beyond the gendered confines
222 Ibid, 193–94.

223 Ibid, 168–69.
224 Szuppe, ‘Jewels of Wonder’; Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 24–44; Shah,
‘Female Authorship’, 448–49, for citation and discussion of where else female authorship can
be discerned in the Indo-Persian cannon, and passim.
225 Venkateswaran and Tillotson, eds., Masterpieces, 40–41.
226 Much has changed since the publication of Schapin and Schaffer’s prize-winning and seminal
Leviathan and the Air-Pump, concerning Boyle’s debate with Hobbes, in which we find scant
mention of Boyle’s sister, for we now have DiMeo’s Lady Ranelagh, an extensive intellectual
biography of Katherine Jones demonstrating her depth, breadth, and reach in scientific life.
227 See, here: Schiebinger, ‘Women’, 199–201.
470 Knowledge
of ‘gentlemanly science’, we bring into view women like Bija Munajjima –a
mystic, mathematician, astrologer-astronomer renowned for her ability in cal-
culating calendars, poet, patron of literature and charitable institutions, and
the fierce rival of local (male) intellectuals.228 Born in fifteenth-century Herat,
she might be unusual because her name entered the record, and her renown
was certainly due to her extraordinary talents, yet there are few reasons to
believe she was an oddity.
To bring such women into view, we might begin by looking away from
public spaces or from court physicians, at the same time conceiving the early
modern medical landscape as plural, populated by diverse actors (ecclesias-
tical, popular, and medical proper). Thus, we might see those women who
assisted hakims and other bodily specialists (vaidyas), exorcists, and priests,
or were medical practitioners in their own right, not least midwives (dais) and
female healers and herbalists operating in private spaces.229 African women,
for instance, were vital to providing early modern Europeans with access to
local sources of healing knowledge, as recent research reveals.230 As for gen-
dered medicine, we now know that indigenous women from the Americas to
Asia were vital, possessing bodily and healing knowledge relating to menstru-
ation, pregnancy, and abortion.231 Abortion rights, moreover, reveal how early
modern (gendered) medical practice was entangled with the development of
capitalism, religious belief, and state power –some of the overarching topics of
this book. In a thought-provoking recent study of eighteenth-century Marwar,
Divya Cherian has linked Hindu women’s bodies and their abortion rights
to the political influence of merchant communities, and the latter’s evolving
notions of property, which included female family members; the adjudications
of Brahmans –as gatekeepers of the caste order –over the boundaries of the
licit/illicit, including concerns about sexual relations; and the widening juris-
diction of the state’s authority.232
This interrogation of the historiography, historical methods, and sources is
apt as we move toward a form of knowledge examined by way of conclusion,
in the next and final chapter of this book. The period after Timur left saw an
upswell in the production of ‘heroic narratives, genealogical accounts, local or
caste puranas, [and] biographies and hagiographies’ in India’s high languages
and vernaculars. These offered ‘kings, merchants, and spiritual figures, through
the medium of professional poets or members of their circles,’ Orsini and
Sheikh note, ‘a way of producing one’s own history or inscribing oneself in
larger histories.’233 Such productions range from inscriptions carved in stone,
228 Szuppe, ‘Jewels of Wonder’, 328–29.

229 Here, inspiration is taken from David Gentilcore’s model of medical pluralism in Healers and
Healing, see especially 2–3.
230 Kananoja, Healing Knowledge, especially 73, 90, 98, 107, 114–19, 122.
231 See, e.g., ibid; Few, ‘Medical Mestizaje’. Indicatively, for south Asia, see: Bayly, Empire and
Information, 264–66.
232 Cherian, ‘Governing’.
Knowledge 471
to manuscripts in their own right, but ‘history’ can also be found within the
entries in those numerous glossaries and dictionaries produced at this time
that ‘offer[ed] etymologies and lexical histories in their explanations’, as well
as paintings that ‘deliberately relocated “classical” tales to local landscapes,
turning them into records of their own times’, and more besides.234 History in
its diverse forms was an important field of knowledge production, therefore,
while a consciousness of the past and one’s place within it reflected the early
modern discovery of the self as much as it reveals –to us, the moderns –some-
thing of the period’s distinctiveness, as we shall see.
234 Ibid, 4.
11 Conclusion
Originating in train of the Counter-Reformation, and first propagated by

Catholic institutions and princes, the Baroque was an elaborate style that
influenced architecture and the visual arts, as well as music and perform-
ance.1 It reached its apogee in Europe in the later seventeenth century but,
thanks to the world-encircling Spanish and Portuguese empires, enjoyed a
truly global career lasting well into the nineteenth century. Baroque archi-
tecture even travelled and mutated across northwest Europe and crossed
the channel to England. St Paul’s Cathedral, rebuilt after the Great Fire of
London of 1666, stands in testament to the style’s power and appeal even in
Protestant lands, where buildings and their decoration were thus linked to
those found from Mexico to Manilla. The Baroque also worked its magic in
places beyond the reach of Catholic or Protestant monarchs and mission-
aries, however.
Upon the Ottoman court’s return to Istanbul in 1703 from Edirne, where
it had lived out much of the later seventeenth century, sultanic patronage of
the arts and architecture sought to proclaim and reassert imperial identity, all
the while marking a break with the past –both the long-gone glories of the
sixteenth-century classical age and the turbulence that followed. Under Ahmed
III (r. 1703–30), the first steps were subtle yet decisive: a playful reworking of
Ottoman classical architecture (its forms, materials, and motifs) by suffusing
these with the selective borrowing and refiguring of influences from Europe.
Under his successors and other elite patrons, there was a sea change –albeit
one built upon the experimentation and new bodies of experience of the
preceding years –in the form of the Ottoman Baroque. It was because the
Baroque had become a global mode that the Ottomans did not merely emu-
late, but instead appropriated and localised it into a truly hybrid style, thereby
announcing the dynasty as key players –with their own distinctive identity and
history –in what had by then become a truly international political sphere.
Its crowning glory was the sultanic cathedral- mosque of Nuruosmaniye
1 For a sophisticated problematisation of the Baroque, its moorings, usefulness, and critics: Hills,
ed., Rethinking. See, also: Lyons, ‘Crisis’.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003007333-11
Conclusion 473
in Istanbul (completed in 1755), which offered a paradigm of the Ottoman

Baroque without resulting in narrow standardisation. The Ottoman Baroque
remained the imperial mode for projects –from fountains and bathhouses, to
funerary monuments, mosques, madrasas, and numerous other structures –for
over a century to come.2
It should perhaps be of little surprise that the Baroque left an impression
on the cityscape of Istanbul, for it was a cosmopolitan capital with close and
long-standing contacts to the very places that gave genesis and expression to
the style. It might be more remarkable to find that the Baroque left its mark
in Russia, notably in St Petersburg (progenitor of the ‘Petrine Baroque’),
although Tsar Peter’s motivations for engaging with the style were similar to
those of his Ottoman counterparts: the new capital was intended to help the
Romanovs stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their ‘modern’ Western neighbours
and proclaim the dynasty’s glory following their victory in the Great Northern
War (1700–21).3 It may be more remarkable still to find the Baroque in the
Qing Empire, for China has all too easily (and erroneously) been labelled a
closed society.4 A set of ‘European pavilions’ (Xiyanglou) in the Baroque style
were constructed within the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) in Beijing at
the behest of the Qianlong emperor, who also commissioned a set of twenty
views of these structures in 1783. Although only the ruins stand today, due to
destruction wreaked by European troops in 1860, an excellent impression of
the complex is given by the copperplate engravings designed and produced by
the court artist Yi Lantai, who trained under Giuseppe Castiglione, the Italian
Jesuit artist at the Qing court.5 This was ‘Européenerie’, the Qing counterpart
to the Occidental fashion for ‘chinoiserie’.6
Insofar as Baroque architecture was a reaction to the geometry of classicism,
Bernier’s description of the Taj Mahal –with all its sinuous lines and ‘bizarre’
layouts –celebrated the complex as a worthy exemplar for the emerging style.7
Indeed, the encounters with India prompted by his and Tavernier’s travelogues
spurred French interest in seventeenth-century India in ways that shaped
French Baroque design and dress.8 What is surprising about India, despite its
openness to ‘foreigners’ and its receptiveness of the fruits of those manifold
cross-cultural exchanges described in other chapters, is the absence of serious
2 The powerful revisionist survey of the style provided by Rüstem in Ottoman Baroque is the
source of these points.
3 Ibid, 160–63, for these ideas and arguments.
4 Mosca, ‘Qing’, instructively surveys recent work and the empire’s place in global history.
5 Of the 200 sets distributed to imperial family members, high nobles, and foreign dignitaries, one
set of The Twenty Views of the European Palaces of the Yuanmingyuan by Lantai Yi (c.1783–86)
is now archived in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 29452:9, and is partly accessible
online.
6 Thomas, ‘Yuanming Yuan/Versailles’.
7 Beasley, ‘Decentering’, 32–33. On the relationship of ‘bizarrerie’ to the Baroque: Hills, ed.,
Rethinking, 13.
8 Beasley, ‘Decentering’.
474 Conclusion
engagement with the Baroque in its nascence or maturity.9 Buildings in the

style were restricted to Goa and other Portuguese settlements, although there
was sufficient cross-fertilisation with local building traditions that distinctive
local styles are discernible in each of the coastal regions (Konkan, Malabar,
etc), while Catholic structures offered models to the architects of a handful
of Hindu temples thus bearing the imprint of the Baroque.10 By contrast to
the Ottomans’ expansive engagements with the style, nevertheless, artistic and
architectural innovation under the later Mughals and their successors did not
involve experimentation with the Baroque. Instead, contemporaries toyed with
the prototypes of the Shah Jahani era.
This neither meant an absence of innovation, nor was it the result of some
failing. If the Ottoman Baroque came into being partly from the neglect of
the Ottoman classical tradition, combined with the entry of fresh talent with
exposure to new models, it was the more successful inter-generational repro-
duction of knowhow, the respect for istiqbal, and the codification of forms that
perpetuated innovation within the frames set by Shah Jahani prototypes –over
wholly new ones –in the Mughal world.11 Even more significant was the desire
for a highly historically reflexive style; this made architecture a form of history
or historiography (§9.3.1). Thus, previewing wider arguments presented in this
chapter, architectural historiography did not take off in the colonial period
thanks to British antiquarians, for it was already established in Mughal times.12
This brief sketch encapsulates the three key issues examined in this
chapter. First, the roles and significance of history, historical consciousness or
reflexion, and historiography in the period surveyed in this book. Second, the
cross-cutting themes that link India’s and Indians’ experience of the fifteenth
to eighteenth centuries to those of people in other parts of the world, to the
extent that we can start to talk of ‘global early modernity’. And third, the
frontiers and limits of our current knowledge regarding early modern India,
of global connection in times past and, ultimately, of the concept of (global)
early modernity itself.
11.1 History, Historical Consciousness, and their Uses

Colonial rule did not instil a newfound historical consciousness, much as
it brought few other gifts to Indians. Contrary to the fiction authored by
Europeans, Indian society was not frozen in time and without history on the
eve of colonialism, nor did Indians lack a notion of time and its passage, as
9 See, however: Koch, ‘Baluster Column’, on the likely impact of prints of early Counter-
Reformation structures; ‘Emperor Aurangzeb in a Shaft of Light’ (painting attributed to
Hunhar, Mughal, reign of Aurangzeb), Freer Gallery of Art Collection, Washington DC.,
F1996.1, central to which is a decidedly Baroque pictorial conceit –parting storm clouds
pierced by celestial light.
10 Pereira, Baroque India, especially 134–61, 376–88.
11 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 46–54.
12 Dadlani, From Stone, 113–74.
Conclusion 475
Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam valuably

remind us. They point to the manoeuvres integral to the making of this fiction
about south Asia’s pre-colonial past, including the systematic downgrading
of materials to the status of mere ‘myths, legends, literature, puranic stories,
folklore, and phantasmagoria’ from the advent of Company rule over India,
as well as the performative frustration of European historians at the dearth of
‘hard evidence’ of the sort that might yield ‘empirical data’. These processes
were born of colonialism yet nurtured by the empiricist turn associated with
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), his historical methods, and his insistence on
archival sources.13
Against this, Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subramanyam then show how
historiography had, in fact, established a significant place for itself in the south
Asian ‘ecology of genres by the late medieval centuries’. Next, they demon-
strate the significance of the period from c.1500, which ‘saw the emergence
of a new and specific historical awareness’ and an associated upsurge in the
production of works that were clearly understood to be historical –rather than
fictive –by their readers/audiences, even if they appeared in genres that we
might not readily classify as such.14 These include folk-epics and courtly poetry
(kavyas) in a range of south Asian vernacular and cosmopolitan languages
sometimes sufficiently rich in historical consciousness as to be deserving to be
seen as forms of historiography.15 Thinking yet more broadly, histories of col-
lective pasts (family, caste, clan, locality, kingdom) can be found and a histor-
ical consciousness discerned in texts and tellings for a range of audiences, from
bardic performances and poetry, to prose works of world history, sometimes
tucked away in manuscripts on non-historical themes but also more overtly.16
Knowledge of the past –being attentive to the history of a place and its
peoples –was vital to the just prince.17 History and memory, in material form,
also constituted a kind of knowledge manipulated and appropriated by Indian
rulers in the fabrication of their kingship and political ideology. The Mughals
appropriated the royal symbols and styles of other great dynasties from the
Indo-Islamicate world or the Persianate cosmopolis (§8.1–§8.2), whether or not
they had legitimate grounds to do so. They were by no means singular in this
regard, for the Aravidu rulers of Vijayanagara drew readily upon the legacy of
the Chalukyas, a Hindu dynasty whose empire had once extended over a vast
swathe of the medieval Deccan and formed part of the Sanskrit cosmopolis.18
13 Narayana Rao et al, Textures of Time, 3, for citation. See, also: Chatterjee, Cultures, 4–12.
14 Narayana Rao et al, Textures of Time, 138.
15 Others have taken this contribution to task not for its conclusions, for few would doubt that
early modern Indians could be historians any more or less than their counterparts in Europe
or elsewhere in the world, but instead about how the authors have constructed their analysis.
See: Mantena, ‘Questions’, as well as other contributions to the overarching special issue evalu-
ating Textures of Time.
16 Guha, History, 50–82, offers a useful survey.
17 Chatterjee, Cultures, 1.
18 Eaton and Wagoner, Contested Sites, 77–89.
476 Conclusion
Fig. 11A Step Well in Vijayanagara’s Capital

The Aravidus made use of Sanskrit and vernacular (Kannada, Telugu) histor-
ical works as they linked their genealogies and titles to Chalukya ones, while
reworking the remnants of Chalukya buildings (e.g., temples, water tanks, and
sculptures) not in any mere utilitarian fashion, but for iconic effect, something
revealed by Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner’s attention to both
the textual record and the remains of the built environment. The individual
pieces of the stunning step well pictured in Fig. 11A were labelled before being
transported so that they could easily be reassembled in situ. As the Aravidus
established connections to their venerable predecessors by these means, they at
once also appropriated the rhetorical and visual languages of empire.19
And nor were they the only rulers in this part of India to do so. On the
one hand, the Bijapur sultans possessed a very different heritage and hailed
from a very different ecumene to the Aravidus; their ancestor was born in cen-
tral Eurasia and was Shi‘i, after all. On the other hand, their kingdom was
a cultural melting-pot, comprising new Persian migrants, old Dakhni hands,
Habshis, and countless others, but this same fact revealed the imminent danger

Conclusion 477
of the polity fracturing along any of these socio-ethnic cleavages. Thus, by

reworking Chalukya structures and linking Bijapur rule to Chalukya imperi-
alism, the Bijapur sultans created an imperial ideology that transcended social
conflicts yet was wholly and ‘authentically indigenous’.20 Their neighbours in
Golkonda, meanwhile, were engaging with the heritage of the Kakatiyas –rulers
of a major Chalukya successor state until the fourteenth century –in parallel
fashion. In this we find a merging of the Persian and Sanskrit cosmopolises as
part of the ‘Indianisation’ of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, another family whose
origins lay in Persianate central Eurasia, Eaton and Wagoner argue.21 What is
forgotten is as important as what is remembered, especially when a memory or
legacy is wilfully side-lined. The Marathas, for instance, were ‘largely imper-
vious to the appeal of Vijayanagara as a repository of ancestral glory’, instead
situating themselves and their rise within (and against) the Deccan Sultanates
and the Mughal Empire.22
And to cast our gaze wider still, the newfound historical awareness among
early modern Indian rulers was not a uniquely Indian development. The earliest
Qing rulers claimed descent from the twelfth to thirteenth-century Jin dynasty
and called themselves the New Jin, for example, and also represented the Yuan
dynasty –the last Mongol house to rule over China –in such a way as to make
Manchu-Qing imperialism seem like its natural legacy.23 Examples throughout
this book testify to how the Safavids, Ottomans, and Habsburgs moulded and
manipulated the Classical inheritance and that of more recent times, lore as
well as legend, in the formulation of imperial ideology. Yet, it was not only
emperors and the chief architects of their imperial projects who profited from
retelling and even reworking the past. ‘Tudor England’, Lucy Wooding writes,
‘was deeply preoccupied with its own historical past.’24 This is hardly sur-
prising: the global Renaissances and Reformations of the fourteenth century
onward were either rooted in the engagement with older forms of knowledge
or encouraged deep historical reflexion in the face of novelty and rupture (see,
for instance: §2.5, §3.3.5). Add to this the rise of Indian vernaculars in the early
modern period, a process that often necessitated the emulation/appropriation
of the forms and genres of Classical languages (§9.2).
History was put to other uses, too. In villages, towns, and cities, Indians were
asked to bear witness to the transfer of property and other legal undertakings,
local elites signifying their rank by including their title, while the illiterate
asked neighbours to sign on their behalf, others still making little pictures or
designs on the page that represented their trades or caste identities.25 Of itself,
20 Ibid, 126 for citation, and 125–56, where the analysis is attentive to the changing causes and
deepening character of successive sultans’ engagement with the Chalukya idiom.
21 Ibid, 204, for citation, and 203–30 for analysis.
22 Guha, ‘Frontiers of Memory’, citation from 274.
23 Crossley, The Manchus, 12, 133, 144–46.
24 Wooding, Tudor England, here 4, and passim.
25 Hasan, ‘Property and Social Relations’. Guha, History, 97–104, examines subaltern historical
consciousness more carefully than can be described here.
478 Conclusion
this may not have been novel. But the early modern centuries saw the intensi-
fication of contests over caste privileges and customary entitlements thanks to
steady commercialisation and subinfeudation in tandem with the state’s greater
intrusiveness, both in terms of its revenue demands and qanunisation, so that
plaintiffs made greater recourse to the courts from Mughal Bengal to the
Maratha country (§7.3.3).26 Regime change in the eighteenth century variously
imperilled one’s existing privileges or presented the bold with an opportunity
to daringly pass off as long-standing entirely new and unprecedented claims,
in any case putting an even greater premium on memory and records. Thus, we
find parties bringing forth artefacts like stone markers and copperplates as well
as paper records, while also presenting to the authorities key witnesses willing
to testify to the veracity of so-and-so’s claims to proprietary rights or ritual
entitlements having been made or renewed in (living) memory.27 ‘That credible
narratives depended on evidence was an idea widely diffused’ in early modern
India, Sumit Guha writes.28
By turns unsettling and affording creativity and reinvention, changing times
have often been the crucible of tradition. Individuals or groups might remould
the past to create traditions and (collective) identities, placing themselves
within the cannon or situating themselves against or apart from their forebears.
In the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, for instance, the pro-
duction of poetic compendia or tazkiras –hardly a new genre –was booming
for this very reason.29 Chandar Bhan Brahman, the Mughal state secretary
and Persian litterateur and writer par excellence, whom we have encountered
repeatedly (see, especially: §7.2.3, §10.1–§10.2), naturally featured in many of
these compendia, making the poet-historian himself the subject of history.30
Musical artistes and their patrons, likewise, gave form to tradition against
the backdrop of canonisation and invention (§9.3.3). Lineage was crucial for
many professional groups, be they weavers or merchants, but it signified more
than training and skill, trustworthiness and reputation, for artists, musicians,
writers, and religious figures. Lineage meant being part of a saintly silsila and
the authority that came with it, consequently being as important among Sufis
as it was for Sikh leaders after the death of Guru Arjan.
Imperial rivalries, sectarian conflict, and the increasingly crowded
and competitive marketplace for salvation together explain why the early
moderns turned ever increasingly to the historical mode.31 The Nanak
Janamsakhis, hagiographies of Mira Bai and other bhaktas, and histories
26 See, also: O’Hanlon, Venkatkrishnan, and Williams, ‘Scribal Service’, 445.

27 O’Hanlon, ‘Performance’; O’Hanlon, ‘Petitioning’.
28 Guha, History, here 93, and 83–117, for an instructive discussion.
29 Kinra, Writing, 11–13, valuably pauses to consider tazkiras as a kind of source for the study of
literary modernity and the under-utilisation of this particular archive.
30 Ibid, 240–85.
31 On the imprint of imperial rivalries on historiography in the Ottoman context, see: Şahin,
Empire and Power, especially 157–85.
Conclusion 479
of the different Vaishnava sampradayas were as much for the edification of

readers/listeners as they were crystallisations of new traditions and com-
munities.32 For Hindus and Sikhs, time was cyclical and the Kali Yuga was
nigh, ideas contemporaries engaged with to justify their reluctance to invest
Shivaji Bhonsle as a Kshatriya king (§2.1.2) and to make clear Gobind’s
role as a leader and protector at the advent of dharamyudh (§2.4.4, §6.3.2).
For Muslims awaiting the start of the new millennium in the late sixteenth
century, hopes might rest on a messiah-like figure, to the extent that Muslim
sultans –and their rivals and critics in equal measure –drew strength from
their promises of ushering in a great renewal during what now appears to
have been a broader age of apocalyptic and chiliastic thinking across much
of Eurasia (§3.3.5, §8.3). Merging dynastic history with Muslim history or
the history of Indian kingship, Indo-Persianate scholars bent the past to
their masters’ service.33
Others looked to the present to shape their future, serving themselves
and their masters at a single stroke. Take, for instance, those Brahmans and
Jains who worked to produce the Sanskrit- Persian translations in Akbar
and Jahangir’s courts (§3.3.3). They put pen to paper, offering praise to the
Mughals, sometimes creatively re-casting the foundations of Mughal rule, at
the same time recording their time in imperial service for posterity. In the case
of those Jains banished from court, this involved ‘setting the record wrong’
in numerous ways, as Audrey Truschke aptly puts it.34 Again, what we find
in early modern India –the increasingly polemical force of historical writing
among religious and political communities –was in keeping with developments
in, say, the Tudor realm and was thus apiece with the bigger picture.35 As the
examples discussed so far make clear, furthermore, the appeal to the past,
the employment of the historical mode, and the creation of historiography
in south Asia was not an exclusively Persian(ate) enterprise, for it flourished
in many languages (e.g., Sankrit, Braj, Bengali), not to mention a range of
registers, genres, and even via non-textual means (e.g., oral culture, architec-
ture or the built environment as the fabric of space-time), among a wide range
of actors from all corners of Indian society.36 In fact, as Kumkum Chatterjee
showed us, there was much cross-fertilisation between the Persianate and the
Bengali, political and literary culture, trans-local tarikhs and vernacular genres
such as mangalkavya in the making of history in seventeenth and eighteenth-
century Bengal.37
32 Compare this with fifteenth and sixteenth-century Ottoman historiography, which was also
concerned with defining who was Ottoman and what the Ottoman state was: Çipa and Fetvaci,
eds., Writing History.
33 See, also: Anooshahr, ‘Mughal Historians’, here especially 298–99.
34 Truschke, ‘Setting the Record Wrong’.
36 See, further: O’Hanlon, ‘ “Premodern” Pasts’.
37 Chatterjee, Cultures.
480 Conclusion
Just as important in animating this historical consciousness, perhaps, was

a sense of pessimism, danger, or loss. Anxieties regarding time’s passage to a
new era were not only to do with the Kali Yuga or the Islamic millennium.
Contemporaries also worried about the corruption and decay that had beset
the Mughal imperium, or else profited from declinist talk, be they courtiers or
figures like Ahmad Shah Durrani and Shah Wali Allah. They also felt a mix-
ture of pride and a sense of loss, which sometimes manifested in a nostalgic
mode, as in the case of urban-cum-family histories that notables began produ-
cing toward the end of our period (§4.3.2). The power of history and the fear
of a cherished world slipping away combined to give impetus to archiving,
from the preservation of deeds and documents by humbler folk, to the creation
of grand royal libraries (§10.3) –sometimes by the appropriation or absorption
of entire extant collections –by the Mughals, the scions of the Kacchwaha
house, and Tipu Sultan, to draw but a few examples from previous chapters.
History was –and remains –a site of creativity and contestation, not least
when memory involves (real or imagined) hurt that mutates into grievance.
How we choose to retell the history of Islam in India or narrate the experience
of Muslim rule (see, especially: §3.1.1, §3.2, §3.3.4), for instance, might depend
on feelings of hurt or grievance and the value to be gained from deploying or
denying these emotions.
We have explored the origins and impact of the metaphor of the globe
in European and Indian visual culture (§8.4), so it bears noting that early
modern globalisation inevitably shaped contemporary historiograph-
ical practice, too. What made the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an
‘explosive conjunctural moment in relation to the changing conventions of
history-writing’, to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s mind, was ‘the rise to prom-
inence of the innovative form of “world history,” which is to say history-
writing on a world scale.’38 As the continents became more connected, so
historical production took on new aims and significances in a wide range of
locales, including south Asia.39 The historical mode, and the pervasiveness
of a new kind of historical consciousness, were not only defining features
of the early modern world. They also form a bridge between older, over-
lapping categories like Renaissance or Reformation and the notion of the
early modern, while also linking developments previously seen as uniquely
European (or only examined in that context) with those elsewhere. What
other cross-cutting themes can be discerned in what has been presented in
the previous chapters?
38 Subrahmanyam, ‘World Historians’, 28, for citation, and passim.

39 Compare with: Marcocci, Globe on Paper, which examines the brief moment in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries when something like ‘global history’ came to be produced, and thus
forces us to reckon with the changing nature and impact of historical production over time.
Conclusion 481
11.2 Early Modernity and Global History

Seeing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries not as the beginnings of the ‘nor-
thern Renaissance’, but as the final stage of the Middle Ages, Johann Huizinga
famously employed the metaphor of a fruit tree to explain his perspective. ‘Old
forms of civilisation’, he wrote, ‘die off at the same time and in the same soil in
which the new finds the nourishment to blossom.’40 Over in the south, in Italy’s
city-states and republics, a Renaissance might already have been underway, but
in his survey of the Burgundian lands he found:
medieval civilisation in the last tide of its life, as a tree with overripe fruit,
fully developed and mature. The rampant growth of old, compelling forms
of thought over the living core of the idea, the withering and stiffening of
a rich civilisation41
He called this period the Herfsttij, which can be translated as ‘autumntide’.42

Huizinga’s magisterial work remains valuable for scholars of northern
European history, yet it is also a valuable way of thinking about ideas central
to this book. In the grander scheme of things, he challenged the view of those
numerous innovations of the painter Jan van Eyck’s time as constitutive of a
so-called Netherlandish Renaissance and, ultimately, of the very utility of the
Renaissance as a concept. In all the manifold novelty of the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries that scholars were –and still are –wont to overidentify, seeing
it all as marking a break with the past, Huizinga saw merely the encrustation
of old ideas.
Huizinga was writing long before the advent of ‘early modern’ as a period
label, which emerged out of Anglophone scholarship rather than his native
Dutch, in any case.43 Incidentally, the English had started using the terms
‘modern’ and ‘society’ by the sixteenth century, but they did not call their own
society ‘early modern’, they did not use the term ‘early modern’, and they would
not have understood what was meant by the term ‘early modern’ as we employ
it today. According to Phil Withington, the first use of the term can be traced
to a published lecture by William Johnson delivered at Cambridge in 1869. It
did not become widespread until the 1940s, however, when it also took on a
very particular meaning among economic historians interested in the prelude
to the Industrial Revolution. Only in the 1970s, thanks to the work of social
historians –most notably, Keith Thomas (‘Age of Authority in Early Modern
41 Ibid, 3.
42 See: Small, ‘Epilogue’, for Huizinga’s agony over how to title his thesis and his translators’ anx-
iety about how to best render the Dutch in English.
43 Starn, ‘Muddle’, explains why continental European scholars had no need for ‘early modern’
until recently.
482 Conclusion
England’, 1976), Natalie Zemon Davis (Society and Culture in Early Modern
France, 1975), and Peter Burke (Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1972;
Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1978) –did the term become
more widespread and come to be used to define a period of several centuries
that were witness to a whole host of changes.44
Huizinga’s criticisms are a reminder of the limitations of trying to apply
period labels –the Renaissance, in his case. On the one hand, the idea of
early modernity has not supplanted or assimilated such overlapping terms
as the Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment.45 On the other, some
scholars prefer it to the Renaissance, say, because it is broader and less
Eurocentric.46 Ayesha Ramachandran observes that it invites –perhaps even
compels us –toward ‘seeing in the same frame’, thereby forcing us to reckon
with the coexistence of Petrarch, the so-called father of the Renaissance, and
the great Persian writer known by his nom-de-plume, Hafez (‘memoriser’ or
‘safekeeper’).47 At the same time, this very openness and expansiveness is also
a limiting feature, for what –if anything –gives the ‘early modern’ coher-
ence as a concept? And once we break out of Europe and begin to compare
developments across the globe, as this book has sought to do, is it possible to
agree on a periodisation and set of defining features characteristic of early
modernity at large? Or do we possess yet another concept that does not travel
well, appearing in some places earlier or later (or never), like the Renaissance
in Huizinga’s analysis?
11.2.1 Themes
As the early moderns rediscovered the learning of the ancients –often via
the Muslim world –so they experienced a rebirth and the feeling of novelty
and innovation that came with it. As their familiarity with faraway places
and peoples grew, so their feeling exceptional or unique might have been
blunted, where their sense of self and their place in the world was not, in fact,
sharpened.48 Such is the rosy portrait of Europe and Europeans, but let us con-
sider other parts of the world.
44 Withington, Society, 45–70. See, also: Bhargava and Nath, ‘Introduction’, 17–19.
45 A little over two decades old, and thus a little dated, Starn’s ‘Muddle’ nevertheless remains a
good guide to some of the issues at stake.
46 Alternately, one could conceive of and explore the many renaissances witnessed across time and
space, in turn helping to cut the (European, singular) Renaissance down to size; see: Goody,
Renaissances.
47 Ramachandran, paper presented at the roundtable on ‘Is there a Global Early Modern?’,
Institute of Historical Research, London, 7 February 2022. The event was held to mark the
publication of a set of essays on the ‘multiplicities’ of the global early modern in Modern
Philology, vol. 119, no. 1 (2021), of which Ramachandran was co-editor. C.f., Strathern,
‘Global Early Modernity’, 326–27.
48 Marcocci, Globe on Paper.
Conclusion 483
India’s different regions were already connected to one another and, in

turn, with other parts of the Indian Ocean or Islamicate worlds, with states
and markets strung along the terrestrial Silk Roads, and even with the
Frankish lands to the west –albeit not via the Cape of Good Hope –long
before 1498 (§1.3.1, §5.3.1).49 Occidental breakout was precisely that: a back-
ward and secluded part of the world discovering people and places that were
already well-integrated or in regular contact (§1.3.2, §10.4). Or to put it dif-
ferently, the arrival of the Europeans in Asian waters in 1498 was a landmark
event from a European perspective. But its impacts in the East –and there
were impacts, as this book has shown –were slower to come about or subtle,
usually more palpable where they ramped up existing trends. Because they
had not lost touch with classical learning, furthermore, so Indians may not
have experienced a Renaissance in the period covered in this book. But there
was a humanistic turn in Persian-, Sanskrit-, and vernacular-language works,
indicative of how Indians were curious and cosmopolitan, even if not quite
in ways resembling European cosmopolitanism/humanism (and why should
they be so?).50
We no longer conceive of early modernity as a clearing house for the world
that developed in the nineteenth century, instead taking the period on its own
terms. That said, historians do continue to split hairs over the modern(ity) part
of ‘early modern(ity)’ and its paradigmatic Eurocentricity.51 Alan Strathern
notes, however, that many historians of Asia have been willing to ‘suppress
certain epistemological qualms’ arising from engaging with early modernity as
a concept, chiefly because ‘the pay-off is an innovative reconsideration of the
dynamic potential of non-western societies in the period immediately before
the arrival of full-blown European imperialism in the nineteenth century threw
all others off course by imposing its own reductive brand of modernity across
the board.’52 A corollary of this is that we can think of multiple early modern-
ities, even as they may have been interlinked or born of connections.53 Another
way of dealing with the thorny problem of ‘modernity’ is to look into contem-
poraries’ mentalités, asking whether and to what extent they felt that they were
living in new or changing times. Did Indians feel this way?
Let us return to the Kali Yuga, which shaped Hindu and Sikh thought and
made its appearance in numerous genres. Thinkers had long been employing
this concept in a bid to ‘make sense of times that they considered particularly
corrupt and debased.’ Thus, its appearance in early modern discourse does not,
of itself, signal the feeling of a break with the past and the entry into a new
era; the Kali Yuga was already in train, at least to some minds. And yet, the
causes of contemporaries’ disquiet do reveal a feeling that times were changing,
49 See, also: Strathern, ‘Global Early Modernity’, 319–20.

50 Khera, Moods, 22, who draws upon Mana Kia’s recent work.
51 See, usefully: O’Hanlon, ‘Contested Conjunctures’, 765–67, and passim.
52 Strathern, ‘Global Early Modernity’, 328, for citation, and 327–30.
53 This endeavour is not without its problems and critics; see, e.g.: van der Veer, ‘Modernity’.
484 Conclusion
often quite suddenly. Among their concerns, Rosalind O’Hanlon notes, was
the ease with which people could change their modes of life –thanks to urban
growth and imperial expansion –in ways that unsettled the moral order. Caste
was not respected due to the prosperity and social mobility associated with
commercialisation, enterprise, and new livelihoods, resulting in new marriage
partnerships (i.e., those outside one’s jati and varna). ‘Many rulers were Turks
and Yavanas, or local country upstarts’, O’Hanlon summarises, whom contem-
poraries felt they could not rely upon ‘to maintain the varnas in orderly sep-
aration.’ Overall, there was a great ‘mixing-up of peoples’; some intellectuals
deemed the consequence to be the collapse of the four-fold varna, with only
Brahmans and Shudras remaining, as the sages foretold when they prophesied
the advent of the Kali Yuga.54
Upon stepping back and surveying what we have explored in this book, we
might collect the manifold experiences of early modernity under two broad
headings or themes. The first relates to identity and expression. The early
moderns had a newfound sense of their place in space-time, from those with a
heightened or novel historical consciousness, to those Indian thinkers identi-
fying in their perceptions of change the advent of the Kali Yuga. The challenge
to orthodoxy posed by Bhakti and its emphasis on direct devotional encounter
(§2.1.1, but see also: §2.2.1 on devotionalism in Sufi Islam and §2.4 on the
Sants and Sikhs), the development of (spoken) vernaculars into fully literised
languages that competed with classical/cosmopolitan ones (§9.2), and the more
general search for local ways of making culture in an increasingly globalised
world, not to mention their impact in turn on, say, Sufi Islam, are all key in this
regard.55 So, too, is the response of elite groups to these ‘challenges’ (as they
often viewed them), which sharpened Brahman intellectuals’ sense of identity
and privilege.56 There seems to be more than sufficient evidence that Indian
elites were self-aware and becoming more so over time: they took pains over
their self-fashioning, they penned (auto)biographical works or else explored
their inner selves in texts (§10.2) and probably out in public space, too, and
they propounded or embodied new notions of individual agency through their
dissenting discourse.57 As for commoners, their individuality might remain
hidden behind the barricades erected by communities defined by caste, occu-
pation, language, or ethnicity, but these same communities were also finding
their political voice (§4.2.4), and the ways in which the state was made from
below (§7.3) or increasingly reflected local identities (§7.4, §9.2) from the late
seventeenth century is also telling.
54 O’Hanlon, ‘Social Worth’, 568, for citations. See, for other dimensions of how contemporaries
began ‘periodising’: O’Hanlon, ‘Contested Conjunctures’, 768.
55 On this last, see: Ghani, ‘Sufism’, 50–53.
56 See, for instance: O’Hanlon, ‘Contested Conjunctures’, 778–86.
57 On this last, see: Jain, ‘Individualism’. See, further: Rizvi, ‘Affect, Emotion, and Subjectivity’,
for fascinating new work on ‘art as affect’ and the representation of the self in/through non-
textual media/means.
Conclusion 485
These last examples can be linked to the increasing power and reach of the
law and the greater legalism evident from the sixteenth century in the Tudor or
Ottoman realms and from the later seventeenth century in the Mughal lands.58
The strengthening of the state’s legal institutions and the recourse to litiga-
tion by subjects took place, in turn, within the context of wider and deeper
commercialisation as well as an uptick in mobility linked to the intensifica-
tion of globalisation, which forms our second cross-cutting theme. These
processes fuelled disputes over property rights (§4.2.3, §5.1.2) as well as, more
importantly, the competition over land and its resources (§5.1). The former
might be resolved in law courts whereas the latter more often simply led to the
trashing of marginal groups’ rights (e.g., forest dwellers, migratory peoples),
with the accompanying transformation of the environment paving the way to
the Anthropocene.59 Their impact was imbricated, moreover, with bureaucratic
centralisation (§7.2.3), the elaboration of paper- based record- keeping and
scribal cultures, and the rise (or empowerment) of new scribal groups (§7.3.3,
§10.1) –but also, therefore, with imperial expansion, the evolution of markets
for violence (§6.1), and military competition (although this last had its limits;
see: §6.4). They supported the development of capitalism, but this was not
necessarily at odds with either the continued use of enslaved labour and the
growth and growing complexity of the long-distance slave trade (§5.2.2), or
with mercantilism (§5.4.3).
Who most felt the impact of the greater circulation of goods, people, and
ideas, the greater connection of places near and far, and the greater intru-
sion of the market? On the one hand, these processes supported urbanisation
(§4.1.1–§4.1.2), and it is no surprise that consumer society and the new forms
of sociability (§4.3.1) were more often urban than rural phenomena, notwith-
standing the fact that town and country were probably more blended than we
have previously imagined. On the other hand, as the examples summarised
here stand to show, few were left untouched as their lifeways or else their rela-
tionship to political authority was transformed in early modern times. When
thinking about people’s beliefs, furthermore, the market does not merely offer
a metaphor for the increasingly competitive space in which people sought or
supplied the path to salvation; commercial metaphors also pervaded one of the
early modern period’s new religions –Sikhism –whose first leader was born
into a mercantile-cum-scribal caste and who initially found a following among
fellow Khatris (§3.4). We might also note the impact on kingship; namely,
the reinvigoration of universalism (§8.4). And, more broadly, connection and
circulation were important to the (re)discovery of knowledge, including via
translation (§3.1.1, §3.3.3, §10.2–§10.3). All these features were in evidence
in other parts of the world, too, indicating areas of commonality or conver-
gence.60 Altogether, this helps explain why the idea of global early modernity

59 See, further: Bhargava, ‘Prism’.
60 For more on ‘connected histories’ and ‘unifying features’: Subrahmanyam, ‘Reconfiguration’.
486 Conclusion
has gained such traction, for it has the ‘capacity to capture the connective flux
of these centuries.’61
11.2.2 Horizons
Huizinga may have deemed fifteenth-century Burgundian literature and art

in their autumn-tide, with change occurring within the confines of medieval
forms so that, for instance, the poets spun ‘a never-ending postlude on thread-
bare themes’.62 Yet, in the same analysis, he was incredibly attentive to the
very different temporalities of change in different cultural forms (first in litera-
ture, then art, in his view), not to mention how change unfolded at a variable
pace across the varied spheres of intellectual, religious, and social life.63 We can
apply this logic to our periodisation of early modernity: art historians and lit-
erary scholars, economic historians and historians of science will each come to
different conclusions about when early modernity began and ended, because
the spirit of the age was probably crystallised in different media, institutions,
ideas, or practices at different times. Huizinga’s contrast of Italy, where the
Renaissance was in motion from the fourteenth century, with the Burgundian
lands, which was still stuck in the Middle Ages in van Eyck’s time, is also
instructive in another respect. How we define the early modern also depends
on where we are looking: certain regions or states might have experienced key
changes earlier than others, while ports and cities often heralded the new long
before its impact was felt in the countryside or hinterland towns. And this is
to say nothing of the idiosyncrasy of certain aspects of modernity and paths
toward it in particular places.
Here, recent scholarship on the Ottoman Empire is instructive. Take, first
of all, scholars like Daniel Goffman and Giancarlo Casale, who have been
preoccupied with the empire’s exchanges and rivalries with European states –
particularly in the Mediterranean arena –during the Ottoman classical age.
They not only find evidence of the Ottomans being shaped by the currents of
European early modernity, but also of the Ottomans being sufficiently influ-
ential as to have played a part in affecting developments in Europe, in either
respect aligning Ottoman early modernity with the European ur-narrative that
begins in the fifteenth century.64 Baki Tezcan, however, locates the departure of
the Ottoman state from the forms of the medieval kingdom –and thus a key
moment of transition toward political modernity –in the context of numerous
crises experienced from the late sixteenth century, his analysis aligning with
certain western European trends and developments in the same period, even
61 Strathern, ‘Global Early Modernity’, 319, for citation, and 324–25, for a list of some of the
features most associated with this period, which are not dissimilar from what has been dis-
tilled, here.
63 Ibid, 413–15.
64 Goffman, Ottoman Empire; Casale, Ottoman Age.
Conclusion 487
as his periodisation of the ‘early modern’ is a little more compact as a result.65

By contrast, Virginia Aksan situates the Ottomans vis-à-vis their southern and
eastern European neighbours (the Habsburgs and Romanovs), in this context
identifying a key moment of transition and the onset of early modernity in
the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.66 In a seminal guide to The Early
Modern Ottomans, Goffman and Aksan define the empire’s early modern
period with reference to key milestones –the conquest of Constantinople in
1453, the onset of the reform era in 1839 –for this allows them to accommo-
date all of these diverse analyses and the different periodisations to which they
give rise.67
For all the differences of perspective, Ottomanists have successfully
integrated Ottoman history into the frames of (European) early modernity –
so much so, in fact, that Ottoman history now seems out of kilter with global
history and the challenge to Eurocentricity that the global turn has renewed
with greater fierceness.68 Of course, not all global historians are alike. At
one extreme, we might place Jack Goldstone, for whom the entire project
guiding the designation of a period of a few centuries as early modern is
unquestionably Eurocentric, with the concept becoming meaningless when
watered down to render it useful to places beyond Europe.69 At the other,
Victor Lieberman identifies a ‘mix of accelerating territorial consolidation,
greater institutional sophistication, state-focused acculturation, rising lit-
eracy, and commercial intensification’ in numerous locales from c. 1450 or
1500 until about c. 1800 that merits the term early modern, even as he is
clear that this was just one cycle in a longer-term development lasting over
a millennium.70
Several leading historians of the Qing Empire have expressed their ambiva-
lence toward ‘early modernity’: it helps them deal with some long-standing
problems of periodisation in Chinese history, and it supports the separate pro-
ject of setting China within larger and less parochial contexts of analysis, be
they regional or global, yet the problems of [modernity =Eurocentric] and
[early =teleological] continue to give them pause.71 Indian historians have per-
haps been less troubled by these issues because their standard periodisations
were already inherently Eurocentric or Eurotropic: ancient times, a medi-
eval and/or pre-colonial period, followed by the advent of modernity upon
65 Tezcan, Second Ottoman Empire.

66 Aksan, ‘Locating’.
67 Aksan and Goffman, ‘Introduction’, 2. Aksan has also co-edited a special issue of the Journal
of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association entitled ‘Chasing the Ottoman Early Modern’
(2020) that is instructive.
68 Markiewicz, ‘Europeanist Trends’.
69 Goldstone, ‘Problem’.
70 See, especially: Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, 70; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. ii,
206–07.
71 Struve, ed., Qing Formation, especially the chapters by Evelyn Rawski, Jack Goldstone,
Jonathan Hay, and Lynn Struve.
488 Conclusion
the colonial transition.72 There were no Renaissances or Enlightenments to

break up the risibly long medieval era, the tail-end of which is nowadays being
reconceived as early modern. This peculiar way of dividing historical time
was bolstered by the Marxist bent of postwar scholarship, as well as a long-
standing elision of colonialism with modernity (and modernity with progress
and, ergo, colonialism with progress).73
Thus, using ‘early modern’ has been productive for historians of south
Asia in several respects. First, to help distinguish what is different about,
for instance, the worlds of the later Delhi and Deccan sultanates or the
Vijayanagara and Mughal empires from what preceded them; these states
and societies are no longer seen as the mere pinnacle (or ‘overripe fruit’, pace
Huizinga) of the very long Middle Ages.74 Second, to break with the narrowly
economistic frames of Marxist analysis (§5.1, §7.1), as scholars have sought
to expand their horizons and make sense of cultural, social, and intellectual
phenomena or processes. Finally, to break the link between colonialism and
progress, which has been dispatched to the dustbin once and for all not only
by postcolonial scholarship and the impact of Postcolonial theory, but also
by retrieving and examining –on its own terms –the advent of modernity in
the last pre-colonial centuries.
This early or pre-colonial path to modernity was in some ways distinctive
or idiosyncratic, but in other respects comparable to the forms and trajectories
witnessed elsewhere, including –but not limited to –Europe. Reflexively –and
this is significant –thinking about south Asia’s place within the early modern
world has helped provincialize Europe, which consequently seems less special,
its peoples and states no more a font of dynamism than their counterparts
further afield. The world of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries was witness
to multipolar and (multiply) convergent modernities, therefore, even if conver-
gence was not with Europe but some other important pole –not least India,
which became a fulcrum of the Persianate world in the early modern centuries
(§9.1), besides its prominent place within the Indian Ocean arena.75 That said,
we ought also to be willing to admit that novelty did not always spell mod-
ernity, and some divergences probably also deserve closer attention.76 There
were also cases where India(ns) played an accidental or inadvertent role in
shaping global phenomena, or ‘gave’ more than was ‘received’, as in the case
of the (French) Baroque. Ultimately, thinking globally is productive and has
given credence to the early modern –and even the global early modern –as a
period label.
72 A detailed discussion of how and why this emerged, has been reinforced over time, and has
variously been mobilised by historians down to recent times is offered by: Bhargava and Nath,
‘Introduction’, 6–12.
73 On the latter, see: Bhargava and Nath, ‘Introduction’, 1–3.
74 Bhargava and Nath, ‘Introduction’, 27, for some of the main ideas in this paragraph.
75 See, above: n. 47. See, also: Subrahmanyam, ‘Reconfiguration’.
76 Bhargava and Nath, ‘Introduction’, 30.
Conclusion 489
This book opened with Timur’s conquest of India because it triggered

processes that explain, among much else, the transformation of the later
Delhi Sultanate, the rise of the Mughal imperium, and the content and
character of Mughal imperial ideology and culture.77 1398 is not taken as
marking the start of the early modern period –which would be absurd –
and this book has sometimes looked over a longer horizon to make sense of
certain developments. Both the refreshing of India’s classical/cosmopolitan
languages and the process of vernacularisation, for example, have been set
within the longue durée dictated by the Sanskrit and Persian cosmopolises
(§9.1–§9.2).78 By the same turn, and in keeping with other scholars, it has also
focussed on developments from the sixteenth century or over the seventeenth
century where appropriate. This might seem slippery and unsatisfactory, but
it is also a reminder that every period label has its limits; for it to be mean-
ingful, a term like ‘early modern’ also needs to be used carefully and flex-
ibly. At the same time, this book makes clear that dates like 1498 –the year
of Vasco da Gama’s landing on Indian soil –do not mark watersheds; the
Europeans’ arrival in the Indian Ocean world did little to transform India’s
place in global networks overnight, even as it added a new dimension and
had importance in time.79
This book closes in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, in the
years between Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1739 (§1.3.3, §7.4), on the one hand,
and the so-called colonial transition, on the other. This may not only seem
conventional; it also runs the risk of eliding early modernity in south Asia
with Mughal rule while reifying the idea of colonialism as a kind of rupture.
After all, so much scholarship of the past forty years or more has advocated
for the continuities between the pre-colonial and early-colonial eras lasting
until the early nineteenth century, even though most scholars agree that colo-
nialism thwarted Indian states’ and societies’ various paths toward modernity
(or else simply put an end to developments underway in the preceding cen-
turies).80 At the same time, by offering a wide-ranging survey and retaining an
open-ended approach to the period’s ‘start’ and ‘end’ dates, India and the Early
Modern World suggests that such developments or phenomena as, for instance,
the growth of civic spirit and associated forms of urban literature (§4.3) had
a relatively belated advent in south Asia compared to Japan and many parts
of Europe. To this can be added the emergence of consumer society (§5.5) and
political society (§4.2.4). Thus, even points of similarity between India’s experi-
ence and those in other parts of the world were not necessarily ‘convergences’,
this book shows, for they were not always synchronous.
77 Strathern, ‘Global Early Modernity’, 320, evaluates other scholars who have done something
similar.
78 See, also: Asher and Talbot, India, 5–6.
79 Strathern, ‘Global Early Modernity’, 321–24, offers a useful appraisal of fixing upon 1492
or 1498.
80 See, for instance: Alavi, ed., Eighteenth-Century; Marshall, ed., Eighteenth Century.
490 Conclusion
11.3 Limitations and Future Directions

Championed by the Levellers, by remarkable and energetic campaigners like
Katherine Chidley, and by such women as the female signatories of the ‘The
Women’s Petition’ (1651) to Cromwell, the period of the English Civil War
(1642–51) saw a questioning of the constraints on women’s lives as part of
the –sometimes radical –reimagination of what society might be.81 This
challenge to what we might call the patriarchy largely came to nought, how-
ever, for the Cromwellian Protectorate was far from a radical break with the
past. Yet, in another sense, this challenge encapsulates how women’s lives and
roles were changing in the early modern period, both in England and prob-
ably many other parts of the world, too. There was no revolution, yet women
were becoming more vocal and visible and their roles were becoming more
expansive. Thus, wealthy women remained a source of charitable bequests and
artistic and cultural patronage, but probably on a larger scale due to the eco-
nomic expansion and ratcheting up of the state’s power since medieval times.
They continued to run businesses, but the birth of consumer society enlarged
the scope for women in setting fashions and in guiding the character and pace
of change in the household and its associated material culture. There remained
limits on what a (respectable) woman could do with her life, not least by
virtue of withholding from her an education equal to that of a man of similar
rank, but certain restrictions were lifted (on women in England following the
Restoration, for example).
A combination of print and vernacularisation supported women’s learning
and their entry into the Republic of Letters, to the extent that female readers
were represented in artworks, with some women even shooting to fame as
artists and writers in their own right in western Europe. Was an Aphra Behn or
Artemisia Gentileschi to be found in early modern India? Probably not. Purdah
was not an unimpeachable barrier, but restrictions on elite women’s entry into
certain social spaces limited their active and equal participation in society and
political debate. Mughal women of means could fund overseas voyages and
the erection of marvellous buildings, they could consult books in the imperial
library and discourse with specialists in religious and legal thought, influence
politics and occasionally take the reins of the state (§7.2.2), but was their sphere
of activity anything other than a parallel sphere or world-within-a-world to the
one shaped and inhabited by men? Might the wives and daughters of gentry,
merchants, qazis, and other middling sorts have been likewise constrained –or
might they, in fact, have been somewhat freer?82 Might the gendered experience
have been more sharply or loosely drawn in early modern India, and was it
changing more slowly or rapidly than in other parts of the world? Airing these
questions is an important step toward finding out whether or not they can be
81 Lincoln, London, especially 123–24, 138–39.

82 Compare with the freedoms, albeit exaggerated, of women described in the Zennaname, an
Ottoman work by Fazil Enderuni (d. 1810): Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 26.
Conclusion 491
satisfactorily answered. Among other topics about which this book has said
little or nothing are crime and punishment; health and disease; food; fashion
and dress; drama and performance; (natural) philosophy; marriage, reproduc-
tion, and the family; and sexuality.
So much for the limits to what we know about early modern India, but what
about the limits of global early modernity? There were, of course, rather literal
limits or frontiers: the limited impact of the Baroque, for example, or the blockages
in the circulation of scientific knowledges within Europe that had knock-on
effects for knowledge transmission between Europe and India in at least one
instance (§10.5); the lack of convergence or commonality arising out of differing
endowments or starting-points, such as the absence of guilds or powerful cor-
porate institutions in Indian cities relative to other places, with implications for
urban culture (§4.2.4–§4.4); the continuing importance of near neighbours and
regional arenas of circulation and exchange, not to mention the strengthening of
locality, each to the detriment of uniformity or synchronicity at the global level;
but also the roads simply not travelled and the places that were left behind, for
one reason or another.
At the more conceptual level, too, global early modernity may be limiting –if
not rather limited. Allyson Poska has recently denounced global early modernity
as classicist; sexist, in the sense of being defined as a world of male priorities;
and elitist, because even if this or that place experienced or was on a path to
modernity, it probably mattered little to the mass of society.83 Although this is
perhaps a little unfair based on what we have touched upon in this book, Poska’s
proposal that we consider the term from an intersectional perspective is a valu-
able one. We might take a radically different approach, as Alexandra Walsham
takes to the Reformation, and study change over time via the dialogue between
‘generations’.84 Rather than thinking in terms of ‘early modernity’ or a Mughal
‘classical age’, we might conceive of the ‘sulh-i kull generation’ (§3.3.4) comprising
such men as Chandar Bhan Brahman, to propose but one example. A comple-
mentary step toward greater inclusivity might be to focus more closely on the
family; this book has repeatedly shown the family to be an important unit, from
princely households (§7.3.1) and scholar households (§10.3), to the role of family
and kin in education/training or inter-generational knowledge transfer (§10.1),
the functioning of the bureaucracy (§7.2.3, §7.3.3), and long-distance exchange
(§5.3.3), as well as the family and kinship as both a problem and a solution to the
architects of early modern empire (§7.1.1, §7.2.1).
Of course, the early modern centuries were a time of both ‘the local and
the global, the connected and the confined, the cosmopolitan and the paro-
chial’, as Rosalind O’Hanlon puts it.85 These binaries do not neatly map onto
83 Poska, paper presented at the roundtable on ‘Is there a Global Early Modern?’, Institute of
Historical Research, London, 7 February 2022.
84 Walsham, Generations.
85 O’Hanlon, ‘Early Modern in South Asia’, 161, and passim, for a review essay focussing on sev-
eral important recent works in the field.
492 Conclusion
one another, she makes clear, for it was not merely the ‘local’ or ‘parochial’
that found itself ‘confined’, ‘disconnected’, or otherwise cut off from the
sorts of developments we have examined in this book. Rather than casting
the notion of global early modernity out of hand, therefore, we might begin
to acknowledge and explore the difficult to grasp, unwanted, or unsavoury
consequences of circulation, connectivity, and marketised exchange, of (some)
people finding their voice and articulating a sharper sense of their identity.86
Widening inequality between the rich and poor nations, or else within nations,
linked to neoliberalism and globalisation today should put into perspective any
emphasis on the boons of connectivity in times past. What, then, about those
individuals or groups who fell behind or lost out in early modern times? What
about divergences, either great or small? And what of the weak?
86 For moves in this direction made in this book, see, for instance: §5.5.
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Index
Abdul Qadir Badauni 112, 359, 370, 380 Avadhi: language 39, 381, 385–8, 390, 432
Abdul Rahim Khan-i Khanan 112, 116, Ayurveda 244, 439–40, 446
369
Abu al-Fazl 112, 121, 300, 302, 335, 346, Bahmani Sultanate 8–10, 12, 53–5, 101,
348–9, 359, 370, 441, 447 130, 143, 259, 301, 334–5, 403
accommodatio 94, 95, 112, 447 bairagi 38, 80, 127, 238
Adi Granth 63–66, 386 Bania 136, 155, 197–8, 210, 265
Adil Shahi dynasty 11, 12, 17, 47, 58, 76, Bernier, François 153, 442, 460, 473
103, 108, 357, 388, 400, 412 bhagat 64–5, 68, 78, 95
Ahmad Shah Durrani 29, 162, 219, 239, bhakta 38, 59, 68, 388, 393, 409, 428
244–5, 251–2, 318, 320, 323–4, 480 Bhakti 35–42, 44, 56, 59–62, 70, 79, 124,
Ahmad Sirhindi 53, 105, 121–2, 359, 126–7, 384–5, 389–9, 422–3, 484
370 bhang 36, 49, 59
Ahmadnagar Sultanate 11–12, 17, 20, Bijapur Sultanate 11–12, 17, 20, 47, 54,
114, 233, 260, 400, 295 58, 101, 103, 108, 183, 185, 215, 233,
Ain-i Akbari 112, 292, 411, 447 242, 249, 260, 339, 379, 387–8, 400,
Akbarnama 112, 335, 346–8, 350, 357, 407, 412, 433, 476–7
411–12 botany 429, 451, 466–8
akhlaq 77, 104, 148, 248, 275, 299, 340, Brahmanism 35–46, 56–7, 59–60, 63, 66,
435 70–2, 78–9, 84, 90–1, 97, 108, 315, 423
alchemy 76, 356, 428 Braj 376, 381, 386–7, 389–93, 417,
Amber (Jaipur) 8, 42, 138, 147, 215, 290, 421, 424, 431–2, 436, 439, 445,
291, 320, 337, 414, 455–6, 458 469, 479
amir 214, 229, 284, 290
Anand Ram Mukhlis 212, 214, 432 Calicut 85–7, 137–8, 141, 184, 403
apocalyptic thought 73, 119–21, 123–5, caste: origins and development of 42–6
460–1, 479 chahar-bagh 147, 333, 353, 398, 402
Aravidu dynasty 9–10, 12, 475–6 Chaitanya 41, 394
Ardhakathanak 167, 439 Chandar Bhan Brahman 116, 167, 284,
Asaf Jahi dynasty 142, 167, 288, 403 292, 298–300, 302, 304, 345, 349,
ashraf 88, 163, 170 353, 362, 367, 432, 438–9, 441, 478,
astrology 75–6, 128, 130, 147, 333–4, 344, 491
355–6, 360, 389, 444, 458–62, 464, 466, Chandi: deity 39, 91, 394
470 Chishtiya 52–4, 100, 106, 122, 345–9,
astronomy 76, 110, 426, 433–4, 444, 446, 354, 357, 371, 385, 388
453, 457–64, 470 climate 13–14, 35, 123–4, 133, 178–81,
atlas 361, 430, 452–4 201, 222, 244–6, 306, 326; see also
autobiography 68–9, 167, 276, 432, 435, Little Ice Age
438–9 coffee 130, 163–5, 183, 214, 433
542 Index
Columbian Exchange 164, 183 enslavement 93, 180, 191, 193–5, 201,
commercialisation 28, 31, 91, 125, 133–4, 207, 223–4, 233, 343, 463, 485; see also
163, 171, 181, 184, 186, 214, 218, 220, slavery
222, 273, 287, 320, 326, 478, 484–5 Estado da Índia 141, 155, 202–3, 220, 237,
commercial society 124–5, 178, 223, 225 265–6
consumerism 27, 162–6, 168, 171–2, 192, Euro-Asian trade 27–8, 135, 140, 182,
214, 223–5, 485, 489–90 202, 205, 209
Coromandel 30, 140, 165, 197–200, 202,
215 family 125–6, 170, 187, 192, 196, 204,
credit 21, 124–5, 127, 136, 156, 182, 196, 207–11, 215, 228, 233, 245, 251,
198, 206–7, 209, 221–2, 271 279–81, 289–91, 295, 297–8, 301–2,
314, 335, 349–50, 354, 360, 365, 368,
Dadu Dayal 60, 126 372, 410, 415–6, 432, 434–5, 440–1,
Dadupanthi 60, 70, 238 470, 475, 480, 491
Dakhni: language 13, 386–8, 391, 394, Fatawa-i Alamgiri 250–1, 310, 312
447 faujdar 154, 215, 284–5, 312, 316
Dakhni: class 13, 476 fitna 251, 277, 295, 319, 322
dallal 154, 205
Dara Shukoh 105, 112, 116, 250, 254, genealogy 68, 110, 170, 252, 331, 333,
280, 295, 312, 360, 441 335, 337–45, 369, 373–4, 409, 444, 470,
darbar: definition of 421 476
dargah 48, 55, 102, 127, 137, 163, 168, ghariban 13, 25, 335, 434
388, 403 ghat 157, 212
darshan 292, 348–9, 360, 369, 371–2, 438 ghazi 48, 54, 98, 247–9, 296, 324, 327,
Dasam Granth 68–9, 123, 389–90 369, 371
Deccan Sultanates 9–13, 44, 47, 102, 122, globalisation 22–31, 91, 133–4, 163,
130, 142–3, 145, 187, 193, 235, 243, 177–8, 181, 195, 201, 208, 213, 223–4,
278, 321, 329, 372–3, 384, 381, 403, 226, 363, 430, 452–3, 461, 480, 485,
447, 477, 488 492
deforestation 5, 92, 184 globe: cartographic 331, 349, 357,
Delhi Sultanate 6–9, 26, 53, 104, 106, 359–65, 453–5, 480
129, 134, 160, 193, 233, 247, 259, 276, Goa 4, 93, 95–6, 108, 138, 141, 155, 199,
281, 286, 292, 295, 301, 326, 345, 353, 202, 219, 262, 296, 367, 474
380, 385, 387, 393, 397, 409, 431, 489 Golkonda 4, 11–12, 17–18, 20, 101–2,
deshabhasha 386, 392, 424 215, 220, 242, 260, 289, 379, 400, 477
deshmukh 187, 232, 301 gosain 80, 127, 238–9, 244
dharma 43, 69, 122, 213, 309, 311 Great Divergence 30, 175–6, 179, 224,
digvijaya 253, 291 257, 428
din-i ilahi 80, 82, 107–8, 110, 356–7, 371 guilds 159, 169, 191–2, 196, 204, 210,
diwan 285, 298, 316, 319 216, 230, 410, 491
doab: definition of 9 Gujarat Sultanate 8, 17, 92, 108, 143,
dreams 121, 334, 355, 358, 363, 369 347, 398, 235, 307
Durga 39, 56, 68–9, 91, 125, 352 Gujarati: language 386
Durrani Empire 29, 144, 244–5, 251–2, Gurmukhi 386–7, 389–90, 436
320, 323–4, 480 Guru Angad 33, 65
Dutch East India Company see VOC Guru Gobind 67–70, 253–6, 479
Guru Hargobind 65–6, 70, 80, 253–4
East India Company see EIC Guru Nanak 33–5, 38, 60–6, 68–70, 72,
education 33, 115, 148, 246, 255, 298, 78, 125, 191, 386–7, 478
380, 385, 391, 426–8, 431–7, 490–1 Guru Tegh Bahadur 34, 254
EIC 27, 29–30, 146, 203–5, 207–8, 211,
217, 226, 265–6, 230, 237, 239, 258, Habshi 13, 193, 233, 476
268, 274, 442–3, 464 Hajj 140, 215, 354–5, 359; see also
End Times see apocalyptic thought pilgrimage
Index 543
Hanafi 85, 104–5, 186, 250, 309–10 kinship 29, 160, 197, 207, 228, 234, 236,
hasil 285, 301 242, 256, 291, 359, 491; see also family,
heresy 83, 98, 102, 107, 112, 122, 312, marriage
356, 359, 370, 430 kirtan 41, 63, 422, 437
Hindavi 380–2, 385–7, 390, 393, 432–3, kotwal 154–6, 161–2, 307, 312
436, 440, 444, 447; see also Hindi Krishna: deity 39–42, 60, 110–1, 389,
Hindi 38–9, 116, 201, 381, 387, 389, 390 391, 398, 415, 422
392, 424, 459 Krishnadeva Raya 12, 275
Humanism 82, 116, 120, 377, 428, 445, Kshatriya 43–5, 57, 68, 123, 253, 255, 479
453, 465, 483
langar 54, 66, 106
Ibn Khaldun 227–8, 240, 242, 248, law see Hanafi, legal pluralism, litigation,
326–7 qazi, qanunisation, sharia
Indic: definition of 25 legal pluralism 105, 311–2
Inquisition 75, 83–4, 88, 115, 462 litigation 156, 158, 308, 313, 485
Islamicate: definition of 25 Little Ice Age 13–14, 119, 124, 158,
istiqbal 400, 474 179–80, 239; see also climate
Lodi Sultanate 6–8, 15, 17, 33, 53, 101,
jagir 106, 130, 188, 219, 235, 280–6, 301, 109, 128, 244, 279, 324, 331–2, 397–8;
304, 306, 318, 320, 458; definition of see also Delhi Sultanate
280
jagirdar 182, 188–9, 279, 282–4, 301, 318, madad-i ma‘ash 106, 149, 186, 316, 318
320–1, 327, 350; definition of 282; and madrasa 103, 106, 149, 167, 303, 433–6,
place in theories of Mughal decline 441, 473
286–9 Madurai 11–12, 266, 295
Jai Singh II 147, 458–9, 461–2, 464, 469 magic 57, 72–79, 83, 356, 461; occult
Jains 1, 43, 62, 84, 107, 114, 117, 155, sciences 121, 460–1
167–8, 197, 208, 212, 348, 367, 369, Mahabharata 39, 42, 109, 115, 117, 329,
379–80, 409, 446–7, 479 359, 389, 409
jama 141, 285–6, 306–7 mahajan 136, 210, 312
jamadar 235, 237–8, 246, 271 mahalla 153–4, 156–7, 312
jati 42–46, 484 mahdi 120, 122, 334, 355; see also
Jats 3, 160, 252–4, 287, 321, 436 apocalyptic thought, messianism
Jaunpur Sultanate 6, 8, 17, 166–7, 385–6 mahzar 314–5, 393
Jesuits 1, 80, 94–5, 117–8, 266, 276, 350, majalis 163, 333
355, 405, 424–5, 431, 447, 453, 459, Majalis-i Jahangiri 80, 114, 309
461–2, 473 Malabar 85–7, 92, 140, 184, 198–9, 201,
jihad 249–53, 255–6, 324, 327 218, 249, 467, 474
jizya 101, 105–6, 119, 251 Malik Ambar 1, 13, 195, 233–4
Malwa Sultanate 8, 17, 101, 235, 302, 346
Kabir 38, 60–5, 70, 72, 84, 126–7, 389 mansab: definition of 188, 282; see also
Kacchwahas 8, 251, 337, 480 mansabdar
Kannada: language 376, 383–5, 388, 476 mansabdar 232, 235–7, 246, 248, 279–84,
Kayastha 127, 155, 163, 300–1, 305, 381, 286, 288–91, 306, 321–2, 327–8, 344
432 maps 118, 179, 450–6
kayastha 300–2, 432, 434, 436 Mappila 85–7, 205, 249
khalisa 156, 217, 282, 288 Maratha Empire: historical overview of
Khalsa 34, 65, 67–8, 238, 254–5 19–22
khanaqah 50, 54, 163, 347, 444 Marathi: language 38, 95, 376, 384–5,
khanazad 288, 290–1, 359 387–8, 393, 447
Khatri 33, 66, 68, 125–7, 163, 214, 253–5, marriage 43, 52, 54, 85, 107, 195, 208,
301, 305, 432, 436, 485 210, 228, 244, 258, 288, 291, 295,
khutba 102, 148 312–3, 335, 416, 437, 484, 491; see also
khwaja 47, 52 family, kin
544 Index
Marwar (Jodhpur) 8, 138, 144, 188, 291, Nasir al-Din Tusi 104, 148–9, 340
320, 470 Naths 39, 56, 58–59, 62, 428
masnavi 71, 169, 255, 299, 385, 426 nawab: definition of 29
math 36, 85 nayak: definition of 12
mathematics 77, 110, 424, 426, 429, nirguna bhakti 38, 60, 62, 126
433–4, 444, 452–3, 457–62, 470 Nizam al-Din Awliya 52–3, 127, 344, 346
mawas 264, 283, 287, 292 Nizam Shahi dynasty 11–12, 55, 387, 400
medicine 76–77, 377, 418, 429, 434,
439–44, 451, 462, 466–70; see also padshah: definition of 20
Ayurveda Padshahnama 337, 350, 352, 404
mehfil 163, 255, 418 panch 158, 312–3
mercenary 13, 156, 216, 236–8, 244, Panchatantra 69, 109, 409
252–3, 257, 259, 265, 271, 324 panth: definition of 60
messianism 73, 75, 79, 119–23, 202, 334, Paravas 93–5
341, 353–60, 369, 430, 460, 479 pargana: definition of 145, 301
Mewar (Udaipur) 8, 22, 45, 100–1, 168, pastoralism 3, 26, 31, 92, 118, 122, 179,
188, 251, 320 185, 227, 240–45, 271, 280, 324, 341,
Military Revolution 256–62, 265, 268, 374, 386, 449
465 Persian cosmopolis 25, 376–83
milkiyat 157–8, 213 peshwa 21, 46, 233, 296, 323
millenarianism 35, 119–24, 273, 304, pilgrimage 54, 60, 127, 139–40, 155, 157,
334–5, 355–7, 359, 367, 369, 479–80 215, 239, 291, 346–7, 349, 354, 371,
Mirabai 38, 68 374, 385, 400, 437, 448, 445, 462
miracles 33–4, 48, 53, 71–3, 79, 90, 95, pir: definition of 50, 355
330, 355, 369 Polyglot Bible 117, 405, 430
Mirharban 65–6, 254 portfolio capitalist 136, 216, 220, 225,
mirza 248, 327, 362 279
monastery 106, 238–9, 353, 375, 436 Powindas 185, 243
moneylending 125, 187, 198, 213, 239, Prithi Chand 34, 65–6
284
monk 36, 85, 102, 114, 159, 168, 213, qalandar 50, 52, 80, 253
231, 246, 253, 356, 375 qanungo 154, 286, 300–2
monsoon 85–7, 92, 153, 180, 201, 240, qanunisation 136–7, 139, 145, 170–1, 445
246, 264, 449 qasbah 85, 154, 157–8, 161–2, 227, 251,
Mughal Empire: definition of its classical 311–4, 328
age 22; historical overview of 15–20; qazi 85, 154, 157–8, 161–2, 227, 251,
successor states 19, 27, 47, 55, 103, 311–4, 328, 490
144, 171, 289, 304, 315–24, 323, 326, queenship 69, 294–8
328–9, 376, 400, 421, 423, 442 Qutb Shahi dynasty 11–12, 17, 102, 121,
Mughal idiom 328, 372, 395, 400 387, 400, 477
mujaddid 120, 122, 334, 355, 357, 359,
370 raga 61, 388, 418–22
munshi 298–9, 345, 432–3 ragamala 414, 418–21
murid: definition of 50, 355 Raghunath Ray Kayastha 116, 432
music 48, 61, 64, 168, 291, 330, 374, 379, rahitnama 65, 67, 255
386, 388, 394, 404, 416–23, 428, 478 Rajputisation 5
Ramayana 39, 100, 112, 168, 255, 329,
Nadir Shah Afshar 29, 75, 152, 160–2, 359, 409
214, 269, 318, 320, 322–3, 489 rasa 385, 418
Nanak Janamsakhi 63–4, 69, 478 Ravidas 38, 60, 65, 126
Nanakpanth 33, 60, 65–6, 70 Razmnama 359, 409, 110–3; see also
Naqshbandiya 52–3, 105, 122, 345; Mahabharata
see also Chishtiya, Sufism Roberto Nobili 95, 447
Index 545
Roe, Sir Thomas 115, 454 Tarikh-i Alfi 77, 357, 367, 370
Roshaniya 80, 273–4 tariqa 50, 52–4, 62, 106, 342, 345, 354
tazkira 435, 444, 478
sahib qiran 331–5, 341, 355, 357, 360, Telugu: language 97, 275, 376, 387–8,
366, 369 424, 476
sampradaya 41–2, 59, 422, 479 thanadar: definition of 154
Sangama dynasty 9–12, 53, 243 tobacco 164, 180, 183, 217, 225
sangat 126–7, 436 tribal breakout 29–30, 244, 323–4
Sanskrit: language 25, 32, 35, 39, 57, Tughluq dynasty 6–9, 53, 55, 92, 101,
64, 69, 97, 109–15, 117, 350, 369, 374, 128, 142, 300, 346, 387
376–87, 389–96, 409, 415–23, 431, 439, Tukaram 39, 385
441, 443–7, 457–9, 463, 468–9, 476–7, Tulsidas 39, 61
479, 483, 489 Turkish: language 210, 341, 380, 394,
sannyasi 36, 80, 95, 127, 238–9 432, 439, 444, 457
selfhood 215, 410, 412, 428, 438–9, 471,
484 ulama 78, 103–7, 118, 121, 161, 250, 359,
shaikh: definition of 47–50 370
Shaivism 36–37, 39, 48, 56, 62, 84–5, 102, ulus 243, 279–81
254, 447 universal sovereignty 31–32, 112, 117–20,
Shaktism 39, 48, 56–8, 62, 69, 254 250, 277, 323, 327, 331, 352, 354,
sharia 104–5, 158, 161, 250, 310–11, 313, 360–89, 443, 451, 453, 455, 485
322, 360 upanayana 45, 62
Shattariya 52, 345, 356 Urdu 75, 170, 387–8, 394
Sher Shah Sur 15, 17, 70, 235, 244, 281 ustad 411, 422
Shi‘ism 47, 55, 77, 102–3, 254, 282, 284,
341–2, 354, 368, 400, 433, 476 Vaishnavism 36–42, 48, 56, 61, 68, 72, 85,
Shudra: definition of 43 102, 126, 197, 238, 254, 390, 394, 415,
Sikhism 33–4, 46, 60–70, 72, 79, 82, 96–7, 422–3, 447, 479
123–7, 155, 163, 213, 238, 252–6, 287, Vaishya 43, 197
314–5, 318, 320–3, 373, 381, 387, varna: definition of 43–46
389–400, 436–7, 478–9, 483–5 Vijayanagara Empire: historical overview
Sisodiya 8, 100, 373 of 9–12; successor states 12, 295, 326,
slavery 140, 177, 193–5, 201, 223, 232–5, 372
485 VOC 27, 29, 146, 182, 192–3, 195, 197,
suba: definition of 285 203–5, 207–9, 215, 217, 220, 226, 237,
subadar: definition of 285 265–7, 295, 413
Sufism 8, 33, 47–56, 59–60, 61–65, 68,
71–2, 78, 80, 85–92, 100, 104, 106, 108, waqf 106, 149, 186, 342, 347
127, 129, 168, 213, 238, 244, 249, 253, watan jagir 188, 236, 283, 320
273, 276, 305, 330–1, 341–2, 345, 347, wazir 245, 285, 298–9, 318, 362
354–6, 365, 369, 371, 385–8, 393–403, women 36, 55–8, 63, 68–9, 78–9, 130,
418, 426, 447, 478, 484 158, 163–4, 167, 191, 195, 212–3, 215,
sulh-i kull 77, 97, 115–9, 365–7, 434, 491 230, 205, 208–9, 294–8, 313, 388, 412,
Sunnism 46–7, 68, 71, 80–1, 96, 98, 468–70, 490
102–5, 107, 112, 115, 117, 254, 284,
309, 334, 345, 359, 368, 370 Yavana 97, 459, 484
swarajya 21, 45, 373, 384 yoga 56–9, 62, 70–2, 238
Yogini 56–9, 91
Taj Mahal 128, 157 347, 360, 396–7, yuga 42, 45, 69, 122–3, 479–80, 483–4
399–400, 473
Tamil: language 38–9, 376, 379, 384, 439 zamindar: definition of 186–7
Tantra 39, 56–7, 62, 72, 376 zamindari: definition of 186–7
Tantrika 57, 59, 70 zortalab 264, 283, 319

India and The Early Modern World

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India and the Early Modern World

Jagjeet Lally is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and

Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives

Britain in the Wider World: 1603–​1800

India and the Early Modern World

List of Maps viii

7 The State 275

2A A Prince and Attendants Visiting Shaiva Holy Men

3E Cosmic Fire Hurled at the Pandavas, from the Razmnama

8B Ancestors of Chingiz Khan at their Court, from the

squarely at the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, over a broad range of themes,

1.1 India after Timur: Indian States, c. 1400–​c.1600

four divisions of the erstwhile Mongol world empire of Chinggis or Genghis

1.1.1 Landscapes and Populations

4 Darwin, Tamerlane, 4–​6.

7 Kolff, Naukar, 71–​74.

1.1.2 North India: the Delhi Sultanate and its Successors

Generally, population density increased downstream, and was greatest on the

1.1.3 South India: Vijayanagara and the Deccan Sultanates

22 Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, 1–​8.

Map 1C Vijayanagara at its Zenith

Map 1D The Deccan Sultanates and the Nayaka Kingdoms

1.2 Timur Redux: Mughal Rule to c. 1707

1.2.1 Climate and the Little Ice Age

Geography and environmental factors have been important to the scholarship

34 Jenkins, Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith, 90.

1.2.2 The ‘Great Mughals’

The Mughal Emperors, 1526–​1748

Map 1E The Mughal Empire at Akbar’s death, 1605

Although the Mughals exploited their Timurid inheritance in time (§8.1),

Map 1F The Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb’s death, 1707

Map 1G The Maratha and other Mughal ‘Successor States’, c. 1760

1.2.3 The Marathas and Late Mughal India

43 Habib, Agrarian System, 228–​29.

court erupted following the death of Aurangzeb’s successor, Bahadur Shah

1.3 Early Modern Empires and Globalisation

1.3.1 Situating Early Modern India

India’s so-​called ‘Persianate age’, as so magisterially surveyed by Richard

53 Eaton, Persianate Age.

Why have these terms obtained such currency among historians of

1.3.2 Occidental Breakout and Seaborne Empires

72 Vink, ‘New Thalassology’, 53.

74 Paquette, Seaborne Empires, 8, for citation, and 31–​37.

1.3.3 Tribal Breakout and the Eurasian Revolution

78 Kaicker, The King, 20–​21. See, also: §4.2.4.

proclaimed a subordinate of the Afghan leader. News of yet another assault

‘We must generate better integrated, multidisciplinary historical research in

their respective followers. This is to say nothing, furthermore, of individual

2.1.1 Brahmanisation and Bhakti

What is Hinduism? Often described as an ancient religion, such character-

8 On each of these points, Oberoi, Religious Boundaries, is instructive.

dedicated to Vishnu as Lakshmi-​Narayan (his supreme form) or one of his

14 Grewal, Sikhs, 21–​24.

Fig. 2B A Monumental Shiva Linga in Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre

Fig. 2C Vishnu as Narasimha from Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre

roughly contemporaneous Krishna devotees deserve mention: Chaitanya (c.

What today is known as caste describes a hierarchical and highly stratified

four-​fold moral order known as varna, comprised of Brahmans (priests and

40 Ibid, 9, for citation, and 8, 13–​14.

Britain in the Wider World: 1603–1800

1.1 India after Timur: Indian States, c. 1400–c.1600

4 Darwin, Tamerlane, 4–6.

7 Kolff, Naukar, 71–74.

22 Sohoni, Deccan Sultanate, 1–8.

Map 1C Vijayanagara at its Zenith

Map 1D The Deccan Sultanates and the Nayaka Kingdoms

The Mughal Emperors, 1526–1748

Map 1E The Mughal Empire at Akbar’s death, 1605

Map 1F The Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb’s death, 1707

Map 1G The Maratha and other Mughal ‘Successor States’, c. 1760

43 Habib, Agrarian System, 228–29.

India’s so-called ‘Persianate age’, as so magisterially surveyed by Richard

74 Paquette, Seaborne Empires, 8, for citation, and 31–37.

78 Kaicker, The King, 20–21. See, also: §4.2.4.

dedicated to Vishnu as Lakshmi-Narayan (his supreme form) or one of his

14 Grewal, Sikhs, 21–24.

Fig. 2B A Monumental Shiva Linga in Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre

Fig. 2C Vishnu as Narasimha from Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre

four-fold moral order known as varna, comprised of Brahmans (priests and

40 Ibid, 9, for citation, and 8, 13–14.

63 Fischel, Local States, 104–91.

multi-faceted as a result.70 A cult formed in eighteenth-century south India

Fig. 2D Dancing Dervishes (watercolour and gold; Mughal artist; c. 1610)

96 Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 33–58.

2.4.1 Caste and Anti-Clericalism

Fig. 2F Washerman listening to a Singer and Musician (watercolour by the Mughal

‘remembered’ (constructed?) in the Nanak Janamsakhis – biographical-cum-

170 Singh, Heterodoxy, especially 82–109.

Fig. 2G The Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar

234 Thomas, Religion, 223–31, 267–77.

242 Robinson, Muslim History, 66–121.

9 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 32–54, for primary sources.

31 Eaton, ‘Introduction’ [2]‌, 9–14.

52 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 243–57.

Fig. 3B St Francis’ Church, Kochi

Indo-Muslim rulers held sway over a majority non-Muslim population and

They might continue to patronize pre-existing structures in the manner their

Ordinary justice was dispensed in sharia courts, of which non-Muslims also

Akbar. Akbar had briefly styled himself as leader of Muslims (badshah-i

133 Richards, Mughal, 47–48.

3.3.3 Translation and Cross-Cultural Encounter

143 Khafipour, ed., Empires, 456–7, for excerpts.

153 Ibid, 65, 81–88.