Mughal Authority: The View from Below

This chapter views Mughal authority from below, in terms of the entangled relations between the state and social forces. It looks at the state as an activity, ceaselessly reproducing itself in and through complex layers of relations with the local power relations. Looking at the state from the vantage point of the localities, it argues that the state was largely undifferentiated from the networks of social relations. State–society relations were molded by the use of pen and paper, but scribal literacy was intertwined with oral tradition and performative practices. Literacy was not just an instrument of state control, but was also appropriated by social actors to participate in the rule structure. The ordinary subjects negotiated with the state, and incessantly modified the system of rule through such devices as petitions, complaints, handbills, etc. that were routinely presented at the local qazi’s courts.

Refashioning Paradise on Earth: Mughal Governance in Kashmir

This article unravels the complex political, economic, and narrative relationship between the Mughal Empire and its Kashmir province. Contrary to scholarly and popular opinion regarding the devastating and exploitative nature of Mughal rule on Kashmir, in which Kashmiris had little say, the article illustrates that Kashmiris at various levels of society worked with the Mughals to bring the empire and Kashmir closer together through matrimonial, administrative, trade, and literary links. At the same time, Kashmiris resisted the Mughal incorporation of Kashmir into the imperial imagination—through the celebration of its natural beauty, complemented by the building activities of the Mughal rulers on its landscape—as paradise on earth. By drawing on local and more universal historical and literary ideas, Kashmir’s narrative tradition went beyond the confines of the Mughal imagination to reclaim Kashmir’s individuality and autonomy within the empire.

Narratives of Earliest Hindu–Muslim Encounters

This chapter makes two broad claims. The first is to incorporate a longer history of statecraft in north India into our examination of Mughal regime. The second is to take medieval Indian Ocean texts as critical source material for understanding forms of state-making, negotiation of difference, and encounters between social actors. Toward these claims, the chapter reads a set of ninth- and tenth-century narratives linking Sindh and Gujarat to Aden and Cairo. Within these texts are representations of various forms of encounters between those understood as Arabs and Muslims and those labeled Hindi or Sindhi. The chapter explicates accounts of embeddedness of Islam in India, of crime and punishment as modes of statecraft, of everyday gendered lives, and of networks of exchange in order to provide a longer history of understanding pivotal concerns of the Mughal regime in the sixteenth century.

Commercial Linkages with Central Asia and Iran

While it may seem counterintuitive, the increase in Mughal India’s maritime trade contributed to a tightening of overland commercial connections with its Asian neighbors. The primary agents in this process were “Multanis,” members of any number of heavily capitalized, caste-based family firms centered in the northwest Indian region of Multan. The Multani firms had earlier developed an integrated commercial system that extended across the Punjab, Sind, and much of northern India. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Multanis first appear in historical sources as having established their own communities in Central Asia and Iran. By the middle of the seventeenth century, at any given point in time, a rotating population of some 35,000 Indian merchants orchestrated a network of communities that extended across dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and villages in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran, stretching up the Caucasus and into Russia.

Millennial Sovereignty and the Mughal Dynasty

A distinguishing feature of the Mughal (or Timurid) Empire is that several of its most powerful rulers styled themselves not only as temporal sovereigns but also as sacred beings, and claimed authority over matters of religion. This aspect of Mughal sovereignty was institutionalized by Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) when he publicly proclaimed his spiritual lordship close to the turn of the first Islamic millennium and protected all religions and sects under a “universal peace” (sulh-i kull). This article connects and compares this style of Mughal sacred kingship to religious developments in Iran and Central Asia after the Mongol conquests led by Chinggis Khan. There the destruction of the caliphate and the strengthening of Sufi orders had given shape to saintly and messianic forms of sovereignty as exemplified by the Safavid dynasty of ‘Alid and Sufi origins. Less tolerant than the Mughals in India, the Safavids forcibly converted Iran to Shi‘ism.

Mughal India: Economy, Resources, and Governance

The Mughal emperors were legendary for their wealth. Foreigners marveled at it. Leading economic historians like Irfan Habib have attributed it to their government’s capacity to exact almost the entire economic surplus from the countryside, thus suppressing all possibility of the emergence of capitalism. This chapter argues that this vision of Mughal omnipotence and the consequent absence of an independent market economy is flawed by an overreliance on imperial sources. Using ideas from the new political economy of information, it shows how regional and local elites collaborated with corrupt officials to subvert Mughal power and extract a large share of the gains from a new boom in international trade. But they had no incentive to publicize this. It is therefore only from Maratha sources—from estimates developed by the only serious challengers to the Mughal Empire, that we can glimpse the dimensions of this parallel economy.

Turks, Warriors, and Conquerors: Narratives of Hindu–Muslim Encounters between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries

This chapter examines Indian narratives about non-Muslim kings who were conquered by Muslims, in search of any distinctive features that could be characterized as a Hindu response to Muslim might. The main focus is on two North Indian rulers who were later considered Rajput heroes: Prithviraj Chauhan of Ajmer, defeated by Muhammad of Ghur in 1192, and Hammir Chauhan of Ranthambhor, defeated by Ala al-Din Khalji of Delhi in 1301. Stories about Prithviraj and Hammir, and also Kakatiya Prataparudra from South India, often stress the bravery of local warriors, betrayal by a trusted ally, and the hero’s hubris. Since these themes are also found in martial narratives that do not involve Muslim enemies, it appears that the religious affiliation of the foe was not as important as the fact that he was an outsider of some sort.

Sufism and the Growth of State Power in Northern India and the Deccan

This chapter surveys the political and socioeconomic foundations of South Asian Islam in the precolonial period. It examines the relationship between Sufi Islam and political and economic power across a series of Muslim-ruled states. After contextualizing Sufi expansion, and its links to state formation, in South Asia amid a wider set of Eurasian Islamic norms, the chapter turns to the religious institutions (shrines, lodges, pilgrimage centers) that, through royal and aristocratic land grants, assured longevity and resources to Sufi Islam. It then turns to the dynamics of exchange between religious and political elites, showing how royal patronage saw Sufi Islam shape imperial culture at the same time that imperial tastes shaped the architecture and rituals of the Sufis. Finally, the chapter turns to the realm of religious ideas by contextualizing doctrinal circulation into the material and ideological dimensions of Mughal power.

Warriors and Zamindars in Mughal Punjab

This chapter will build on recent insights into the social history of peasant-soldiers in the Mughal province of Punjab to examine why Punjab became a center for military entrepreneurship by the mid-eighteenth century. Although Sikhs and Afghans were the most visible and enduring of these new warrior groups in Punjab, the presence of other clusters suggests that relationships forged in rural revenue collection, access to kinship networks, and the vast demand for military talent throughout the Mughal period created a nexus of opportunities for military entrepreneurs in eighteenth-century Punjab. This chapter will show why factors such as the embrace of new martial skills or ideologies cannot explain by themselves, the efflorescence of warrior groups that emerged in eighteenth-century Punjab. The dramatic changes wrought on rural Punjabi society by an expanding economy in the seventeenth century, along with the emerging cross-caste and cross-regional alliances that nourished political collaborations between groups, fostered new forms of military entrepreneurship.