8Introduction to the Second Edition

The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India:

Awadh and Punjab, 1707-48

Muzaffar Alam Print publication date: 2013 Print ISBN-13: 9780198077411 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198077411.001.0001

(p.xiii) Introduction to the Second Edition

Revisiting the Mughal Eighteenth Century†

THE CRISIS OF EMPIRE IN MUGHAL NORTH INDIA was a considerably revised version of my PhD thesis completed at Jawaharlal Nehru University. It returned to certain classic questions concerning the nature and timing of the decline of the Mughal empire that had long been debated in historiography, certainly from the time of William Irvine and Jadunath Sarkar, if not earlier still. When the book was first published in 1986, the idea of a crisis in the early eighteenth century Mughal empire had firmly been cast as an economic one, and one particularly concerning the problem of agricultural production in the context of peasant unrest. The most important articulation of this idea was of course lrfan Habib’s final chapter in his classic work, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, which had appeared a quarter-century earlier.1 The other important concern in academic debates surrounding the Mughal empire in this period was the shortage of jagirs, or revenue-assignments, for Mughal officials and its consequences (p.xiv) for relations within the court, which were explained in terms of the problems created by the expansion of the nobility after the conquests of Aurangzeb (r.1658–1707) in the Deccan. The best expressions of this strand of scholarship could be found in the work of Satish Chandra and Athar Ali. However, Satish Chandra later modified his position somewhat in a discussion on the crisis of the jagirdari system.2

My own intervention in these two lines of debate turned on the idea that the crisis was not one of production as such, but rather in the imperial control over resource production. In fact, in the provinces I considered—Awadh and the Punjab—I showed that production actually increased during the seventeenth century. Second, I sought to demonstate that the most consequent relationships within the polity did not solely involve the emperor and the nobility. Rather, the

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smaller local officials and revenue-grantees (madad-i ma‘ash holders), whose presence in the countryside was meant to buttress the reach of central authority, became increasingly indifferent to the demands of Delhi. This occurred in the face of the rise and increasing strength of local chiefs, landed magnates and other elite groups, including merchants, who were in many cases non-Muslims. Indeed, this rising power was fuelled precisely by the gains in production from the seventeenth century and manifested itself in ways that could be construed as emanating from religious differences. Whereas earlier scholarship had seen the imperial centre and its local agents as a unified whole, I sought instead to show the multipolar nature of the Mughal system, in which the emperor, his local agents and regional landowners and elites each had their own interests at stake. Thus, the crisis emerged from the increasing aspirations towards autonomy of the players at the regional level, both local elites as well as those charged with maintaining Mughal authority in these localities. In these complicated equations of power, the producing class continued to be controlled by one or the other of these elites and thus production itself remained relatively unaffected; rather, the objective of each of these elite groups was to wrest control of this productive base. In this game, it became increasingly clear to (p.xv) both local landowners as well as imperial agents that the path to this form of control lay not in fealty to the imperial centre but rather through the assertion of autonomy, as well as the attempt to establish stable means of sharing power at the regional level. The result was that over time it was not the centre that controlled the region but rather the region that exerted its authority over the centre, even as in most cases it largely remained within the Mughal social and cultural ethos.

At the time of its first publication, this book was welcomed in many quarters, in part because it sought to use sources in Persian which had normally been read as expressive of the perspective of the imperial centre in order to show the importance of locality and region. Furthermore, the work took its place in an emerging ‘revisionist’ historiographical movement encompassing a large part of the history of the non-European world, especially the Islamic world. This movement was unified above all by a rejection of the notion that the Asian (or more largely Islamic) polities of the eighteenth century had suffered a decline through a crisis in production which only highlighted the inherent weakness of these purely exploitative systems.3 My work, like those of other scholars in this period, sought instead to understand the dynamics and complexities of these political systems in their own right. In the context of South Asia, this period saw an efflorescence of scholarship on the eighteenth century, bringing with it a new set of forward-looking questions which were not preoccupied with the idea of proving the existence of a production crisis.4 Studies of this ilk continued after (p.xvi) the publication of my book, which allowed it to remain relevant in historiographical debates.5 My understanding of this period continued to influence the direction of some of my later research. While I found that my

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conclusions were directly applicable to some regions, in others such as the northwest frontier they required some qualification.6

I do not want to suggest that the reception of my work was uniformly positive: like all books, my work garnered both praise and criticism from its many readers.7 Still, for all its merits and drawbacks, I have been most gratified to find that the book has maintained a thoughtful readership so long after its publication. It is thus particularly meaningful to me that on the occasion of this edition of the work, Oxford University Press has provided me with an opportunity to revisit my ideas of that time and to reconsider eighteenth-century Mughal history in the light of my later career.

I do not wish to think of this work as a second edition, for I think it is better to let the book stand as it was when I first wrote it. Indeed, it is difficult for me to think of writing a second edition now, with the benefit of hindsight and many years of scholarship, I would approach these questions in a completely different way. While I do not wish to undermine (p.xvii) my conclusions regarding the importance of the regions in understanding Mughal history, I do believe that my approach, reliant on the then fashionable methods of political economy, was not capable of comprehending all the multifarious ways in which the region in this period flourished and manifested its own aspirations for autonomy with regard to the centre.

The Idiom of Decline

How then would I approach the problem of the ‘crisis of empire’ if I were to do it all again twenty-five years later? In the first place, my hypothetical work today would extend much beyond 1750, involving a significant expansion of the documentary base upon which my analysis depended. In my original work, I had shown that the discourse of decline which permeated the historiography of eighteenth-century Mughal India had its roots in the historical writings of the actors of the period themselves, as nobles, deprived of their expected revenues, translated their own disappointments into a broader judgement regarding the state of the empire. Then, this particular insight seemed of comparatively lesser importance than the agrarian documentation I had analysed to show how ‘in fact’ there was no decline, at least not in the narrowly construed sense of the decline of production.

Now, with the greater sensitivity to language itself which has come to me from my later scholarship, I would hope to revisit these texts to explore more fully the precise terms in which these views of the decline of the empire were expressed. To illustrate what I mean, let us consider one of the simplest questions that my earlier exclusive focus on political economy made me overlook. This concerns a set of writings related to the factional fights at the court of the emperor, Farrukh Siyar (r. 1713–19), which eventually led to his killing. I did not even bother to question in the set of texts written under the broad heading of ‘ibratnāma what

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exactly the author intended his reader to take ‘ibrat (that is, a lesson and warning) from. Was it the failings of the emperor himself that had led to his sticky end or was it rather a reflection of the evils of an unduly ambitious nobility that had brought about this (p.xviii) calamitous event? One text, Tarikh-i Shahadat-i Farrukh Siyar wa Julus-i Muhammad Shah (History of the Martyrdom of Farrukh Siyar and the Accession of Muhammad Shah), though written later by a major eighteenth-century historian, actually suggests its own interpretive paradigm of this event by referring to the slaying of the emperor as martyrdom. Only by considering these most preliminary of issues can one then ask the more important question of how one can relate these ‘lessons’ and ‘warnings’ to developments outside the court.8

Moreover, I would explore not only the historical writings of these actors but also the corpus of literary texts which they have bequeathed to us in order to see if this notion was specific to a particular genre or whether it was a sentiment that was generalizable across all genres. In other words, when a nobleman projected his disillusionment at the failures of his patron onto the general character of his age, was this a politic gesture or was it rather a broader statement which may reveal to us something about the extent to which the patron dominated the social imagination of the time?

For those who are familiar with developments in the scholarship of this period, the exploration of the literature of this time has been most welcome.9 My concern, however, is not as a literary scholar per se but rather with how literature can reveal the contemporary social milieu. This encompasses even that literature which appears to have no social-commentarial concerns at all. For example, Dargah Quli Khan who came to Delhi in early 1740s from Hyderabad and toured the city has left us a fairly detailed and vivid portrait of the city, including its dancers and singers, saints and notables, poets, many families of professional musicians, bazaars and fairs, and other places of interest.10 On the surface, the text seems to be written from a world completely unburdened (p.xix) by political or social problems. Yet, this account was written immediately following Nadir Shah’s sack of Delhi. My earlier interpretation would have read this text as further support of a claim regarding the lack of crisis in the productive capacity of the city. Today, however, I would not only ask if this picture might suggest that Delhi was so strong and vibrant by this period that it could recover so quickly from Nadir Shah’s attack but also why the author, hailing from Hyderabad, could be so unconcerned by Delhi’s recent misfortunes.

Whose Decline?

It strikes me too now that Dargah Quli Khan’s text reveals a social landscape which reflected the profound social changes at work in the contemporary Mughal system. The prominence of singers and dancers in this text reminds one of a wonderful anecdote about the short-lived rule of Jahandar Shah (March

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1712–January 1713). It is reported that the emperor once went with his queen, La‘l Kunwari (Imtiyaz Mahal), for a day of merriment, touring the city’s bazaars. The royal couple, accompanied by the queen’s best friend, Zohra, herself a vegetable-seller’s wife, whiled away the day and evening in drinking and eating from the roadside stalls (bhatyari-i nakhas). Upon their return, the inebriated queen stumbled out from the carriage back to her quarters, leaving the emperor behind in the coach in a drunken stupor. Even the driver of the coach was too drunk to notice the emperor behind him and parked the coach, along with the sleeping emperor, in the stable. Early in the morning, when it was noticed that the emperor was not in his quarters, panic rippled through the city as the emperor was declared missing.11 Order was only restored when the emperor was found, still sleeping, in the royal stables. Whether apocryphal or not, the existence of such an anecdote in the eighteenth century reveals something about the perception of the fading stature of the Mughal (p.xx) emperor in this period, at least among those of the old nobility. Such a story would not have been heard about Shahjahan or Aurangzeb.

The story is also important in another way. It encourages us to imagine the Mughal emperor drinking publicly not only with his queen, an upstart from a singers’ (kalawant) family, but also with a vegetable-seller’s wife (kunjri) and his own coach-driver (rathban ki ham-piyala-i badshah wa bibi bud). Another anecdote goes even further in destroying traditional expectations of imperial etiquette and behaviour. It is well known that Jahandar Shah was heavily resented by important sections of the old nobility (khanazads), particularly the Turanis, led by the celebrated Chin Qilich Khan (later, Nizam-ul-Mulk, the founder of the Hyderabad state). The son of the eminent noble Ghazi-ud-Din Khan who even after turning blind struck fear in the hearts of others, Chin Qilich Khan had once scandalously suggested that the most suitable offering to the emperor now was a tanpura (or musical drone). This same Chin Qilich Khan, passing through the bazaar of Chandni Chowk, ran into that (in)famous vegetable seller’s wife, Zohra. As soon as she saw him, she burst into a stream of abuse, exclaiming, ‘O you son of a blind man, can you not see? What do you think of yourself?’ Zohra was fully confident of herself as the queen’s best friend, whose acquaintance she had made when the queen, fully bedecked with jewels and accompanied by the emperor himself, would go shopping (sair-i bazaar wa Chandni Chowk wa kharid-i ajnas) even for groceries (sabzi wa tarkari ta kheyar wa kadu). Indeed, Zohra herself held court, as the greediest members of even the elites lined up at the door of her shop, not for the nefarious reasons the nobles intimated, but rather in the hope of gaining favour with the emperor.12

Such stories have since been used in some writings on Mughal India.13 I neglected them at the time considering them frivolous, but now I wonder if this tale does not stage a radically new order of power, (p.xxi) in which power is brokered not only in the royal court but also in the marketplace as new social groups rose and competed with the old established nobility. This sense of a

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radical change is evident in the texts of the time: Iradat Khan was moved to write a memoir of his days in 1126 H/1714 precisely because he felt that the changes he had seen in one year were equivalent to those witnessed in the previous thousand years as chronicled by books of history. The nature of this change was precisely the sudden rise of these new ‘base’ groups at the expense of a crumbling nobility and the old families (khwar shudan azizan wa aziz shudan zalilan), many of whom now seemed as if they were being buried and were even disappearing (nabud gardidan, bekhak khuftan).14 These stories, even as they were exaggerated and mixed with the chroniclers’ prejudices, call for attention to the perceptions and evaluations of the emperor and his court not only amongst the nobility and other elites, but also among the so-called common people of the city, represented with such odium in elite texts as ruffians of the market (aubashan-i bazar). Indeed, one may wonder if the resistance of this class to imperial authority and the latter’s incompetence and indifferent response to their appeals may not account in part for the popularity of an iconoclast like Ja‘far Zatalli, the author of the most scurrilous prose and verse which included a brutally sarcastic send-up of imperial newsletters (akhbarat-i darbar-i mu‘alla).15

Were I to rewrite a history of the eighteenth-century Mughal empire today, I would certainly attend to stories such as these, examining also the genre known as shahr-Ashob, that is, tales relating to city life. From even a cursory reading of these texts, it is apparent that decline, if it existed, was not one of society- or economy-wide proportions, but was rather confined to the traditional nobility and the court. In The Crisis of (p.xxii) Empire, and in some other works, I have shown how the merchant classes in this period flourished and indeed provided an important pillar for the empire in such cases as the Khatri support of the Mughals during the Sikh uprising as well as Raja Ratan Chand’s rise in Farrukh Siyar’s court.16 At the time, I had read this functionally, as befitting a study in political economy. However, re-reading these episodes in light of the evidence brought forth by shahr-Ashob, it seems rather that this period was witness to the birth of a new man in Mughal India: the self-made man, whose mercantile acuity and wealth made him worthy of the traditional titles and privileges of the nobility. Zatalli, in his usual mocking style, noted that while the cotton-carders, butchers and vegetable-sellers thrived, the holders of courtly office languished in penury. Yet another poet, Sa‘adat Yar Khan Rangin (1757–1835) later asks rhetorically how one could aspire to dignity if one did not first have wealth, suggesting that to acquire wealth it was better to engage in trade or agriculture rather than to work as a pen-pusher in the court.17 The resentment of the upper classes at this new topsy-turvy world can be gleaned from the bitterly sarcastic poems in which they portrayed the suddenly ambitious lower classes:

The person who earlier sold reed and whittled wood for matchboxes,

He is now the commander of the army, having hoisted a flag [upon

the reed].

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Why shouldn’t the breezes of the garden of the world cool his heart,

When the son of a chicken-seller, who was just a chick, has now

started laying eggs. In the presence of the nightingale we are now wailing.18

(p.xxiii) One might wonder if this radical social mobility was confined to the city of Delhi. Certainly, we have a wealth of anecdotal and literary evidence for the dynamism of the life of the city. The oft-cited verses of Mir Taqi ‘Mir’ composed after he was forced to migrate to Lucknow, find their echoes in the nostalgia of many other literary compositions about the city in this period:

The angels would come from heaven for shopping

So abundant were the shops of Delhi… The denizens of heaven would desire to live

In Delhi, whose houses were far better than even the palaces of

heaven.19

One must thus consider in this light the fact that so many nobles and princes of the period eventually abandoned Delhi for the greener pastures of other courts such as Lucknow and Arcot. One such prince abandoned not only the court but also his wife, leaving her lonely in Delhi. The princess sought comfort in yet another new character that acquired eminence in this period: the low-status ritual practitioner or soothsayer who now had unprecedented access inside the palace. A mystic of this ilk assured her that each night he could transport her to her husband on a magical palanquin. What is to be noted here is not the cheap romance but rather the ability of such a lowly religious figure to wield influence within the palace.20 As the author of Tarikh-i Shahadat-i Farrukh Siyar wa Julus-i Muhammad Shah notes, most of the princes in the royal palace in the eighteenth century consulted such lowly ritualists and maulavis through their consorts, which the author portrays as yet another sign of the moral decay of the Mughal dynasty. Even earlier, Iradat Khan Wazih tells another story of this sort of decay about Jahandar Shah and La‘l Kunwari, who visited a tank every week in the neighbourhood of the shrine of Khwaja Nasir-ud-Din Chiragh of Delhi to take a bath naked together under a single canopy in the hopes (p.xxiv) of bearing a child.21 Contrast these stories with the time of Shahjahan, who refused to dignify public mutterings that his beloved daughter Jahanara had suffered burns to her face due to his policies regarding the livelihood of pirs and faqirs, in which only the select of these religious figures were worthy of state support.22 These stories require serious consideration as evidence of the social and cultural transformation of this period, bringing to the fore characters of a sort who would apparently not have been worthy of royal patronage before.

If vegetable-sellers, lowly ritualists, musicians and dancers could upstage nobles in this period, then women too were coming into the limelight in a new way, a measure of a broader shift in terms of gender relations in the court. While imposing women had always had a place in the Mughal court, such as Nur Jahan

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or Jahanara, such figures had come from the most elite echelons of Mughal society and embodied certain qualities that reflected Mughal ideals of dignity or strength. By contrast, many of the women mentioned above were neither of unimpeachable social origins nor did they seem to embody the qualities so lauded in earlier paragons of Mughal femininity. Yet, they managed to wield considerable influence in the court. Though the most obvious examples are La‘l Kunwari and Zohra, it is important to note that it was the patronage of women in the palace that was crucial for the new access ritualists and lower levels of maulavis had to the Mughal nobility. Muhammad Shah’s mother Qudsiya Begam was one such woman. This is also the period which has bequeathed to us the first detailed portraits of powerful public women in Mughal society. Rahim-un- Nisa, popularly known as Koki Jiu (Madam Foster-Sister), the daughter of a converted thatcher turned geomancer, was commonly thought to wield too much influence over the emperor Muhammad Shah (r.1719–48).23 Dargah Quli Khan has left us a vivid portrait of the singer Nur Ba’i, who was not only praised for her unparalleled mastery of etiquette, her beauty and her talents, but was also noted for the fact that even the women who accompanied her had high-sounding titles, reserved for noblewomen, (p.xxv) like begam and khanum, instead of the more expected suffixes like ba’i or jan. We may list Mughalani Begam in the category of such powerful women.24 All in all then, we may see a subtle and interesting shift, both in terms of gender relations, and their articulation with social status and economic power. The earlier paradigm that one associates with the time of Akbar and Jahangir had now begun to give way to a new sense of both courtly feminity and courtly masculinity.25

The Upstarts and the Umara-i Jadid

The rise of the lower class to such positions of power was not confined to women alone: Koki Jiu shared her influence over Muhammad Shah with her acolyte, the low-born Hafiz Khidmatgar Khan, who Ashob describes as having been ‘among the slaves [ghulam] and eunuchs [khwaja-sara] of Aurangzeb’s time’.26 Again, it appears that court culture had been brought to the marketplace and all kinds of new social groups, including women, now had easy access to it. While in the mid-eighteenth century literary soirées for elite writers could be hosted by women such as Nur Ba’i, by the end of the century, literary culture had ‘democratized’ to such an extent that butchers, washermen and weavers were reputed to hold their own poetic soirées.27 A poet sarcastically immortalized these new-found ambitions:

In the past those who made balls of mincemeat for kebabs

Now prance around with tomes wrapped in silk (juzdan) under their

arms … (p.xxvi) Every son of a butcher now has turned a Gabriel and

begins to fly. Even the oil-pressers claim that they are the best of all,

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Since their oil lights the houses of Muslims and infidels,

And if the oil were not pressed then the houses of all would remain in

darkness. Be it a shrine or a mosque, or a graveyard or a temple

Everywhere is manifest the proof of their light.28

Though these poems attest to the rise of new social groups and a vocal demand for social recognition, the actual ebb and flow of political classes within the Mughal system is more complicated. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, it appeared that in the generation of Aurangzeb’s grandsons, one could discern the manifest presence of the aspirations of the indigenous elite. One need only look at the retinues of the princes in the time of Bahadur Shah I to perceive this. They included such notable indigenous figures as Khwaja Lutfullah Sadiq, Mir Musharraf of Lucknow, Shah Qudratullah, Bhupat Rai, Raja Daya Ram, Shaikh Ziyaullah of Lucknow, some Afghans of Lucknow such as Ma‘ali Khan, Mirza Abd-ur-Rahim, Raja Chhabele Ram, Daya Ram Nagar, Girdhar Bahadur and of course the kith and kin of the Sayyid Brothers.29 Even among the contingents of some important nobles such as Sarbuland Khan, one may find such indigenous elements in the top rungs.

Indeed, after the death of Aurangzeb’s favourite princes, Bidar Bakht in 1707 and ‘Azim-ush-Shan in 1712, there was a genuine opening for the incorporation of these indigenous—but not necessarily Hindu—groups in the Mughal court. When ‘Azim-ush-Shan’s son came from the east, he brought in his contingent not simply the well-known Sayyid brothers but a large group of easterners (sakinan-i mamalik-i sharqiya), who were traditionally looked down upon. Khush-hal Chand expressed the standard view of these people:

In the early years of [Farrukh Siyar]’s reign, many of them died in petty

skirmishes and various scuffles…. Some of them who aspired to become

nobles acquired the stature of khan and khawan. Still, the smell of

decrepitude and (p.xxvii) shamelessness clung to them, to the extent that

it is inappropriate to write it. Thus, some of them would go to the shops of

seal-makers in order to get their names engraved on seals for free.30

Despite these ingrained and well-entrenched prejudices, ‘Azirn-ush-Shan intervened in some important appointments of the Indian elements in and around the eastern provinces, as well as in the coterie he built at the court. It was a continuation of a trend evident in ‘Azim-ush-Shan’s own initiative to include these groups in his retinue, suggesting that of all the princes of the period he understood best the new currents within Mughal society and was seeking ways to channel it for his own ends.

The threat that this new sort of indigenous elite posed to the traditional nobility was profound. Even Khush-hal Chand could not dismiss all of them out of hand: he mentioned that among these easterners, there were some who were quite

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cultured and thus able to reach the higher ranks of the nobility. He mentioned in particular Sayyid Nur Khan, who rose to have the mansab of 2,000 and was appointed the caretaker in charge of (darogha, mushrif) of the private quarters of the emperor. Khush-hal Chand described him as a noble with the heart of a saint. Apart from absorbing the etiquette and culture of the traditional nobility, some of the newcomers were clearly injecting new modes of behaviour and culture into this class. Khush-hal Chand mentioned another easterner who was a master of Hindi science (‘ilm-i hindi) and patronized Brahmin pandits of Kashmir and Benares with whom he was able to interact knowledgeably. Moreover, it appears that this nobleman had some knowledge of the indigenous medical sciences.31 Even from such a critical perspective then, it is evident that there were able and talented men among these newcomers. Thus, one way of understanding Zu’lfiqar Khan’s attempt to isolate and defang ̓Azim-ush-Shan is to view it precisely as an astute response (p.xxviii) to his perception of the threat that these new groups could pose to their traditional control within the court. Zu’lfiqar Khan is thus better understood not as the vanguard of a new form of ‘oligarchy’ to replace Mughal monarchy.32 Rather, he is the best representative of the old guard, desperate to prevent the Mughals from accommodating and incorporating these new sorts of indigenous elites at the highest echelons of the court. Further, Zu’lfiqar Khan did not simply act in ways that were unprecedented for the nobility; in the end he was also all too happy to cooperate with the Sayyids of Barha and handed over the defeated sovereign to their charge.

Indeed, Zu’lfiqar Khan’s machinations to bring Jahandar Shah to power and then to consequently allow the almost farcical presence of the upwardly mobile kalawants at the court may be seen as a way to undercut these attempts to change the complexion of the nobility in more fundamental and unsettling ways. A famous anecdote illustrates Zu’lfiqar Khan’s knowing manipulation of these social classes perfectly: when Jahandar Shah asked why Zu’lfiqar Khan had not yet assigned a governorship he had promised to La‘l Kunwari’s brother, Zu’lfiqar Khan apparently responded that he would do so when he was given the fitting bribe of one thousand tanpuras. In another instance, he asked for a similar bribe of one thousand sitars. When asked what the use of such a bribe was, Zu’lfiqar Khan responded that now only the dexterous handling of such instruments would ensure high positions in the Mughal court.33 The deliberate reduction of the aspirations of indigenous groups and lower classes into this deeply sarcastic farce served to underline the dignity and thus legitimacy of the old guard in contrast with the upstart nobles (umara-i jadid). Thus, he conflated purposefully the emerging indigenous nobility with a group that had dubious social standing in all quarters, that is the kalawants. This becomes particularly clear when we remember that during this period figures such as Khan Jahan Kokaltash and Khwaja Husain Khan-i Dauran were also major players and representatives, in a measure, of the group Zu’lfiqar Khan and his ilk were trying to suppress.

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We may thus read these literary representations of this topsy-turvy (p.xxix) world of the early eighteenth century as evidence not only of social mobility and the aspirations to power of new groups, but also of the deliberate propagandistic representation of these groups on the part of the traditional elite as farcical figures who could not therefore be genuine contenders for power. The power of such a discursive strategy can be seen in the case of one of the few kalawants represented with something approaching respect in elite circles of the time. Ni‘mat Khan, a brother of La‘l Kunwari, was later in Muhammad Shah’s time widely considered to be the best musician of his day, to the point where he seems to have transcended the status of an entertainer and had begun to command almost a religious respect.34 A noted poet of Muhammad Shah’s day, Muhammad Shakir Naji, described not only the power of his music, but also his piety and wisdom, noting that the best and most powerful people of Delhi would seek his counsel. Yet, even here, far from being imagined as someone who could claim to have a say in the management of social order, Ni‘mat Khan remains in the category of a kalawant. His respect and dignity did not translate into any sort of legitimate political authority.35

One may think that the death of Zu’lfiqar Khan and Jahandar Shah would have ended the controversy between the old and new guard, especially once the Sayyid brothers came to power in Farrukh Siyar’s court. Yet, though the Sayyid brothers have occupied a significant place in scholarship, one must note that under their aegis there appears to have developed a wider patronage network of indigenous elites, including several members of their own clan, who reestablished themselves in this period.36 These indigenous elites were not only extremely active but began to command military forces of a calibre that exceeded that of the conventional Mughals and Rajputs (dar haqiqat fauj-i wa dal-i ki ishan dashtand hichkas ra az Mughal wa Rajput muyassar nabud).37 Indeed, (p.xxx) there appears to have been a sense of real self-confidence among this group, which bordered on arrogance as in the case of Sayyid Husain ‘Ali Khan (‘ujub wa takabbur, az‘alam-i bandagi birun suluk). In response to their rise and this arrogant attitude, the traditional elite, in particular the group mentioned as umara-i Mughaliya and Turanis, continued to fight the rise of these groups in Zu’lfiqar Khan’s spirit, under the leadership of Muhammad Amin Khan and Mir Jumla.38 The position of this group (Turanis) was strengthened considerably by their ability to control Punjab after the death of Bahadur Shah. Indeed, the Sikh threat was ultimately contained by one of Muhammad Amin Khan’s relatives, ‘Abd-us-Samad Khan, a member of the family of the great Central Asian Naqshbandi saint, Khwaja ‘Ubaidullah Ahrar (d.1490), recently returned from the Uzbek territory.39 Their apprehension and hatred against the newly arisen indigenous groups was so intense that according to one report it was at their behest that the Sayyid brothers dared eliminate the emperor Farrukh Siyar. Describing the Sayyid brothers’ demonstration of power and the

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factional fight of the nobility that terminated in the overthrow of the emperor in 1719, Yahya Sirhindi writes:

It is said that as Muhammad Amin Khan entered the house of Sayyid

Husain ‘Ali Khan’, the later turned pale. If he [Amin Khan] were to kill him

at that moment, nobody was there to defend him. But since Destiny had

planned something else, Amin Khan shouted, ‘ONawab, why haven’t you as

yet done away with this son of a Kashmiri woman (kashmirni-zada); write

to the elder Nawab [Sayyid ‘Abdullah] to remove him and raise to the

throne some other prince.’ Having heard this, Husain ‘Ali Khan came back

to his senses. He welcomed the advice, and sent a message to his brother

inside the fort. The latter thereupon broke down the wall, forced entry [of

the private interior] with Najm-ud-Din Khan and the other Barha Sayyids

and special soldiers dragged out the poor emperor, kicking, humiliating

and bashing him mercilessly. They (p.xxxi) plundered and brought into

their possession all that was there in the palace and the royal karkhanas,

the cash, goods, cloths, the utensils made of gold, silver and copper,

jewels, precious stones, the slave girls and even the wives (haram-ha) of

the emperor. The emperor was [then] blinded, thrown into prison, and after

a few days was [finally] executed.40

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This controversy between the old guard and the aspiring indigenous nobility only ended in the early years of Muhammad Shah’s reign, when the young emperor purged almost the entire group of new nobles in his court in a bloodbath against the Sayyids that included the looting and razing of their mansions in Delhi and deployment of armed forces against their kith and kin who lived in and around Barha.41 Thus was ensured the unchallenged supremacy, for a time at least, of the traditional nobility. It is remarkable that after this purge one can find almost no mention of a Barha Sayyid holding an important Mughal office. One must remember that even though Nizam-ul-Mulk left the court because he claimed that the old nobility (khanazad) no longer commanded their due respect, his cousin I‘timad-ud-Daula and after his death his son Qamar-ud-Din Khan remained in power in Delhi, ensuring the continuity of the family’s dominant position at the court. Indeed, Zu’lfiqar Khan’s strategy of reducing the aspirations of the indigenous elements at the court to a matter of political farce appeared to have prevailed: it was figures like the eunuch Hafiz Khidmatgar and Koki Jiu who dominated Muhammad Shah’s court for over a decade and not people of the calibre of the Sayyid brothers, who may have been much better equipped to re-configure the empire in ways that could have accommodated the (p.xxxii) aspirations of rising groups, at the centre and in the regions. Indeed, the irony is that Zu’lfiqar Khan’s strategy of turning certain groups of upstarts into figures of fun, which had also then become part of public memory, eventually led to the transformation of politics into a theatre of farce. Thus, Mirza Muhammad Rafi‘ Sauda describes the nobility of his day:

The noble who is wise, this is his game: Upon seeing the state of the world, he withdraws to his home.

A quilted cloth is spread, the eunuch stands and waves the fan.

The lord is seated, with a couple of accomplished comparisons.

Before them is a spittoon and an ewer of water,

If someone comes to visit him, He may find an audience if the lord is in a good mood.

If that visitor mentions matters of governance in the course of the

conversation The noble will turn his head, and say, For God’s sake, change the subject.42

The emperor thus appears to be just an onlooker. We may note here that Muhammad Shah ascended the throne with no experience, with his advisors already chosen for him, and that by the early 1730s he seems to have tried a kind of restoration of the prestige of the throne. He removed Hafiz Khidmatgar Khan, Koki Jiu, Shah ‘Abd-ul-Ghafur and even Raushan-ud-Daula Zafar Khan from positions of power.43 He could not go ahead with it beyond a very narrow limit, probably because the fear of kicking, dethroning and even killing the emperor was still lurking. He was thus torn between the influence of strong independent figures such as Nizam-ul-Mulk, and the fact that society and politics were both becoming intensely commercialized. He was wise enough, perhaps,

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considering the fates of the later emperors. He failed as a ruler, however, not simply in controlling the regions, but also in coordinating the aspirations of the different segments of state officials.

(p.xxxiii) The Language of Power

The fight between the old guard and the new had ripples throughout the Mughal culture. Zohra, and the butchers and weavers with poetic aspirations, represented not only the rise of a new social order but also a linguistic revolution of sorts, in which matters of the court could be subject not only to new and irreverent modes of expression, but even to other languages. The trend can be traced back to the end of Aurangzeb’s reign: Muhammad A‘zam, was specially mentioned as one of the princes for whom Mirza Khan wrote the Tuhfat al-Hind, which began with the basic grammar and description of Hindi alphabet given in nagari script as well. The book ended with a detailed glossary of the words, phrases, idioms and similes in that language. The work, intended to help the Mughal princes appreciate current indigenous sciences (‘ulum-i mutadawilai Hindiya), may thus have represented an organized effort to encourage the Mughal elite to learn Hindavi.44

Such a development is even more noteworthy in light of the Mughal court’s historical relationship with Persian. The language of the Muslim courts in India, right from the beginning, was Persian. However, by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, under the Afghans, there was a brief opening in which local languages could also be vehicles of royal rescripts, as seen particularly in the court of Sher Shah. When the Mughals came to India, they insisted upon a purely Persianate court, bringing about a revival of the language’s exclusive dominion over all other indigenous languages. The result was an influx of a very large number of Iranian writers and poets, even while indigenous officials, whose mother tongue was not Persian, continued to write in Persian for official and literary purposes.45 Persian thus acquired the status of the court language, and one was required to be able to communicate in (p.xxxiv) Persian if one desired to have a meeting with the emperor, although the emperor had command over the other languages, including Hindavi.46

A debate then ensued regarding the usage of Persian in India, with Iranians contending that those whose mother tongue was not Persian could not produce poetry of the highest levels in that language. The Indo-Persian writers countered that it was a commonplace in India for writers to practice their literary craft in a language used almost exclusively for that purpose and differing from the common tongue used for everyday speech. From this notion, they developed the idea that there was a difference between poetic language (zaban-i shi‘r) and everyday language (zaban-i muhavra/zaban-i rozmarra). By the eighteenth century, however, this debate took yet another turn with the rise in importance of the famous scholar and lexicographer Siraj-ud-Din ‘Ali Khan Arzu.47 Despite his rigorous defense of Indo-Persian, eventually Arzu himself abandoned this line

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of argumentation in favour of embracing poetic expression in the vernacular language, Hindavi. His student, the writer ‘Ashiqi ‘Azimabadi, recorded Arzu’s changing views:

On account of my training and temperament, I was inclined to write poetry

in Persian. I used to go for corrections to Siraj-ud-Din ‘Ali Khan Arzu. One

day, Khan-i Arzu said to me: ‘The status of Persian poetry is very high

indeed. [But] Our language is Hindi. Even if people from Hind have raised

Persian to a great level, even so, before the Iranians and poets from the

past whose language this was, our efforts are like showing a mere lamp to

the sun. Until now there has not been any major master in rekhtagu’i

[Hindavi speech]. Therefore, if we make efforts in (p.xxxv) terms of this

[vernacular], we will also naturally become masters in this part of the

world.’

‘Ashiqi, by his own account, took this excellent advice to heart and began to compose exclusively in Hindavi, becoming a self-acknowledged master in that language. Similar sentiments were expressed by the poet Sauda in the following Hindavi verses:

Whatever the tongue, what counts is an idea’s excellence

Poetry is not confined to the language of Fars alone.

(Ko’i zaban ho, lazim hai khubi–ye mazmun/

Zaban-i fars par kuchh munhasir sukhan to nahin.)

How long will you strive to speak their tongue?

Compose colourful thoughts in your own language.

(Kahan tak unki zaban tu durust bolega Zaban apni mein tu bandh ma‘ni-ye rangin) While I have discussed these issues elsewhere,48 it occurs to me now that it is worth investigating if these linguistic developments were not connected to the social changes sketched above, as well as the changing contours of the Mughal court.

Though there was no rapid vernacularization of the court as such and Persian continued to be the primary mode of expression, there was nonetheless an important sub-current of other languages at work in Mughal culture. One may note that in the seventeenth century, Mughal patronage was largely confined to the compilation of Persian texts or the translation into Persian of local texts. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, as new nobles came to the court from the east, patronage patterns shifted as nobles now commissioned the composition of Indian texts.49 Several princes of the early eighteenth century are noted Hindi poets: to take but one example, Rafi‘-ush-Shan, whose sons Rafi‘-ud-Darajat and Rafi‘-ud-Daula were raised to the throne by the Sayyid brothers in 1719 after the execution of Farrukh Siyar, took the nom-de-plume Nyayi for his Hindi poetry.

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This tradition of royal Hindavi poets culminated in the outstanding poetry of Shah ‘Alam II. While Aurangzeb ended the tradition of the Persian (p.xxxvi) poet laureate (malik al-shu‘ara), at Farrukh Siyar’s court a Braj poet, Nawaz, was given the equivalent title of kabishwar.50

An even more telling anecdote comes to us from the late eighteenth-century Awadh court. The East India Company agent Antoine-Henri Polier wrote to the Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula on matters of business in Persian, explaining that he would be unable to communicate with the Nawab on these matters in Hindavi since he did not know that language.51 Is the idea that the Nawab’s preferred language was Hindavi and that even matters of courtly business began to be commonly treated in that tongue implicit in this letter? Does it mean that the hold of Persian had loosened in regional rulers’ courts, and that if even in matters of language the region began to aspire to autonomy from the centre? Of interest in this connection was a report sent to Bahadur Shah I (r.1707–12) about the Raja of Srinagar-Garhwal’s inscribing his (the Raja’s) name on the coins in Hindi script (be-khatt-i Hindi), and the subsequent royal reaction against this ‘innovation and audacity (bid‘at wa jur’at)’ of ‘that infidel violator [of the established rule] and arrogant ignoramus (an kafir-i mubtil wa bi-adab, jahil)’. The emperor wanted all these coins to be destroyed (nabud, zayi‘) and the Raja himself to be turned ‘upside down like the Hindi script (manind-i khatt-i Hindi-yi wazhgun)’.52

The spread of Hindavi among the elites of Mughal society was not confined to the courts alone. Consider, for example, the funeral celebrations of 1739 of Khwaja Sa’dullah Gulshan, a Naqshbandi saint and a (p.xxxvii) major poet. Many of his disciples assembled for days together to mourn his death and share anecdotes not only about his life but also other stories. Interspersed with these stories were also discourses on religious and Sufi doctrines, which marked the beginning of a Naqshbandi branch, the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya, that sought to ameliorate the exclusionary tendencies of that order. All these were compiled into a text available to us as Nala-i ‘Andalib. What is interesting to note here is that, though the written compilation is in Persian by the noted poet Khwaja Mir Dard, son of Khwaja ‘Andalib, it is stated in the preface that the conversations that resulted in this text were conducted in Hindavi, despite the participants’ evident familiarity with Persian.53 In other words, new currents in religious thought were discussed in a new medium.

Religion and the Demand for Recognition

This brings us to one of the major gaps in The Crisis of Empire—that regarding the realm of religion. Implicit in my relative silence on religious issues was a kind of dismissiveness towards religion common among leading scholars of the period who were preoccupied only with questions of political economy. While there were a few hints towards religious culture in this book, such as the imprisonment of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d.1624) in the time of Jahangir (r.

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1605–27) and Bahadur Shah’s claim to the position of mujtahid, my later scholarship has made clear to me that a serious consideration of the Mughal empire cannot dismiss its religious culture.

One area in which the religious sphere requires further investigation for this period involves the question of the relationship between the Mughal state and the non-Muslim community. Even after Aurangzeb, as (p.xxxviii) I have shown in this work and others, non-Muslim elites continued to cultivate and maintain relationships of alliance and convenience with the Mughal empire. The case of the Khatri association with the Mughals during the Sikh uprising is a classic case in point: the uprising, which was primarily agrarian in nature, threatened the trade routes so important to the Khatri trading community. They thus found their interests aligned with the Mughal state, even though they were close to the rebels ethnically.54 Though the slogan of dharma-yudha was raised during this early eighteenth century Sikh rebellion, Rajput princes continued to ally themselves with the Mughal power during this conflict and also during the Jat uprising. Of course, other problems emerged in this alliance, as shown by the discontent of the Jodhpur Rajputs; yet, one can certainly not impose a simple religious and sectarian reading upon this relationship.55

Still, on the other side, one cannot say that there were simply no questions of religious division at stake in this period between the Mughal state and its non- Muslim allies. Witness, for example, the back-and-forth over the issue of jizya in the post-Aurangzeb period: Bahadur Shah is reported to have issued an order for its abolition, though it remained unimplemented; Jahandar Shah too did so; then Raja Chhabele Ram Nagar, an important noble of Farrukh Siyar’s reign, made a special appeal to the emperor to have it repealed and though his request was honoured, the emperor later re-imposed it ‘to rally orthodoxy to his side’ and build ‘a bloc against the Sayyids’ in the wake of the factional fight at the court. There was thus prompted in Farrukh Siyar’s reign another round of appeals for exemption.56 Jai Singh’s articulation of his appeal against the jizya commands our particular attention:

(p.xxxix) In this land of Hindustan, there are two communities, Hindus

and Muslims. Hindustan had been formerly inhabited by the Hindus, but

later through the fight of the mujtahidan (mujahidan?), the religion of Islam

came into vogue. Your Majesty is the emperor of India (Hind) and both the

communities equally pray for you, nay the Hindus even more so for the

Muslims are co-religionists of your Majesty, whereas Hindus enjoy peace

and tranquility under the shadow of your protection, and offer their

prayers … for the stability of the empire and health and safety of the

Sacred Majesty. After the assassination of Husain ‘Ali Khan and Ghairat

Khan and before the conflict with Sayyid ‘Abdullah Khan, I, as a devoted

slave of the threshold, had issued a proclamation throughout the territory

of my zamindari and had summoned all the God-fearing Hindus from

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villages, towns and parganas, and made them each and all to offer prayers

individually for the victory of your Majesty and for the stability of the

empire. I then gave them solemn assurances that when your Majesty

should obtain the victory by the grace of God, I would, in the first place,

make my supplication and take Your Majesty’s order for the exemption and

remission of jizya and then secure daily allowance (yaumia) and revenue-

free grants (madad-i ma‘ash) for these men. Accordingly, a very large body

of the Hindus were occupied in praying day and night for the success and

victory of your Majesty’s arms…. By divine mercy, the prayers of these

people were answered and found acceptance at the threshold of God. Now

your devoted slave trusts that the jizya upon these people would be

remitted…. Thus, the promise of Your Majesty’s devoted slave would be

taken as honest and truthful.

Raja Girdhar Lal Bahadur, the Nazim of the Suba of Awadh, too, made a

similar request, and said Raja Chhabele Ram, the uncle of this devoted

slave (Raja Girdhar), had put forward a request to the martyred emperor

Farrukh Siyar before the battle with Muhammad Mu‘izz-ud-Din to the

effect that when with the help and grace of God His Majesty should gain

victory, in the empire the Hindus shall not be harassed by payment of jizya,

and the martyred emperor had accepted the Raja’s request…. Afterwards

when success and victory fell to the lot of the martyred king, acting

according to the request made by and agreement entered into with Raja

Chhabele Ram, he remitted the jizya upon the Hindus and thereby placed

the entire Hindu community under obligation to the said Raja for this

favour.

Now I, your Majesty’s grateful and faithful servant, hope that on the

request of one who is ever ready to sacrifice his life for your Majesty’s

cause, the jizya may be remitted so that this group of people may be bound

by obligation to me, and thus Your Majesty’s favours and bounties towards

this lowly person may be revealed to them.57

(p.xl) The immediate context of Jai Singh’s appeal was a complaint and protest lodged by the Hindu bankers, moneylenders and merchants of Delhi over the realization of jizya at the command of the wazir, Muhammad Amin Khan. Jai Singh interceded on their behalf in order to secure relief from this injustice and oppression (tazallum). His appeal however turns on two important points. First, he purports to show that non-Muslim subjects were equally loyal and invested in the empire, an especially important point in the post-Aurangzeb period. Even while drawing attention to the history of Islam and Islamic conquest in India, he makes it clear that the Mughal imperial compact was inherently multi-religious. Second, he displays not only a clear institutional memory of the Mughal imposition of the jizya but uses this history to show how the ability of non- Muslim Mughal nobles like himself to successfully appeal against the jizya

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cemented the loyalty of Hindu subjects both to the noble himself and to the larger Mughal system in which such a noble could operate successfully. The jizya, in this formulation, is cast as something inimical to the institutional logic of the Mughal empire. Despite the clear force of this latter argument, a significant section of the traditional elites continued to plead its restitution and is also reported to have been reimposed in 1725 though ‘to no effect’.58 In the reign of Muhammad Shah, however, the jizya was finally abolished.

In connection with the question of non-Muslim nobles in the Mughal system, the relationship with the Marathas is notable, even if it is not strictly from the period of primary concern. Although the Marathas undoubtedly were allied by the later eighteenth century with the Mughals, this relationship was not religiously neutral. An account by a Mughal apologist, Prem Kishor ‘Firaqi’, the author of Waqa’i‘-i ‘Alam Shahi, demonstrates how at least in certain quarters the rise of Madhavrao Sindhia in the Mughal court was read as the new assertion of Hindu dominance over a declining Muslim empire. One particularly revealing incident occurred after the rejection by the emperor Shah ‘Alam II of Madhavrao Sindhia’s original gift to his favourite (p.xli) daughter, a humiliation which apparently created significant tension in the Maratha camp. In response, Mendha Singh, the commandant of the Maratha troops, stopped the butchers from killing cows, ‘according to his own faith’ (tariqat-i khwud). When the butchers complained to the emperor, he referred their complaints to Madhavrao, demanding to know why his people had taken such an action. The Maratha chief responded with a very-well received witticism: ‘He is a Mendha [lit. sheep] and from fear of his own life, he tangled with the butchers for fear that they might string him up.’ The emperor, pleased with this response, responded with the following hemistich:

In the slaughterhouse of love only the virtuous should be killed.

The Mughal emperor’s response was conventional according to Indo-Persian aesthetic standards. What is far more interesting was the response from the Maratha camp. Firaqi reports that the singers of the Patel’s army were proclaiming the following quatrain that very day:

Shiva’s conch sounds out strong, A hundred thanks that the faith Of the Indians (din-i Hindiyan) has been renewed.

The heads of the mlecchas now crown the doorway

To the court of the Patel, the world’s support.59

Perhaps the most striking gap between the Maratha secular support for the Mughals and their own religious identity can be seen over the issue of the restoration of the Kashi Vishwanath temple of Benares, originally built at the time of Akbar (r.1556–1605) and destroyed by Aurangzeb.60 The temple and its

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associated Maratha Brahmins had emerged as an extraordinarily important source of authority and legitimacy for the Marathas, beginning right from the era of Shivaji (p.xlii) (d. 1680) in the seventeenth century. Indeed, it seemed that Benares was almost an extra-local centre of the Maratha state. Thus, a continuing strand in the discourse of Maratha leaders visible in this period was the desire to rebuild the temple.61 This desire, although it undoubtedly did not prevent the Marathas from continuing to look to Delhi for political recognition or even from supporting the weakened Mughal emperors of this period, was of prime importance to their self-presentation as kings in the service of dharma. The general development then happening was that the Maratha pandits were devising new ideologies of dharmic kingship: and notably also, that they were to be found at the courts of Rajput kings advising them on the conduct of new kinds of royal ritual.62 What is noteworthy is that, although the Mughal court retreated from the orthodoxy of Aurangzeb, the emperors of this period did not recognize sufficiently, let alone respond to such an important aspect of Maratha political and religious culture. This reflects particularly poorly on the political acumen of the Mughals of this era, given that significant groups of the Marathas were allies by this time.

Another noteworthy aspect of the story recounted above regarding the behaviour of Madhavrao Sindhia’s camp is regarding the status of the storyteller: Firaqi, as befitting a Mughal writer, is sarcastically dismissive, both of the issue of cow-slaughter as well as the sentiments expressed by these proponents of the ‘faith of the Indians’. Rather, he focuses on the indifference of the Mughal emperor, who allows Madhavrao Sindhia to retort to his earlier insult, albeit in a roundabout way, remaining unconcerned and ‘busy in his own enjoyment, until the time came to retire’. Firaqi’s account is suggestive of (p.xliii) the fact that an earlier Mughal neutrality regarding matters of religion in ‘secular’ life had continued into the eighteenth century after Aurangzeb. Yet, while Firaqi viewed this incident as merely a sign of the complacence and relative decline of Mughal authority, he as well as Shah ‘Alam proved curiously deaf to the new voices raised in the Maratha camp, which bespoke of a self-conscious public religious identity among non-Muslims. He remained ensconced in the earlier Mughal convention of leaving aside such matters in public life, even while new elites seemed intent on overturning precisely these conventions.

This record is particularly interesting for having been written by a figure like Firaqi, who as a Hindu with long-standing ties to the Mughal nobility stood in stark contrast to a new rising class of brash Hindu elites like Mendha Singh and his ilk. Firaqi was part of a tradition of Hindu nobles in Mughal service who had internalized the Mughal policy of restraint with regard to matters of religion in public life. Consider Nek Rai, for example, a scribe in the time of Aurangzeb, who has left us an intriguing record of his reaction to the destruction of the Keshav Rai temple in Mathura. Unwilling to criticize his imperial patron and yet saddened by the loss of this place of worship, he cites an oft-repeated verse

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attributed to an earlier Hindu official of the Mughal court, Chandrabhan Brahmin:

Look at the miracle of our idol-house, o Shaikh !

When it is ruined, it turns into the house of God.

Bebin karamat-i butkhana-i mara ay shaikh

Ki chun kharab shawad khana-i khuda gardad

Nek Rai then indulges in a discourse on a Sufi doctrine of Unity of Being (wahdat-ul-wujud), arguing that if one cannot see the unity behind the appearance of differences, then even followers of the same religion may find themselves in conflict. However, if one can perceive this unity, then peace would prevail even between Moses and the Pharaoh, quoting from Maulana Rumi in his support:

When colourlessness was trapped in colour

A fight raged between Moses and his own self

When you regain the colourlessness that you had

Both Moses and Faraoh live in peace.

(p.xliv) Chunki birangi asir-i rang shud Musa-i ba Musa-i dar jang shud Chun be-birangi rasi kan dashti Musa-o-Fir‘aun darand ashti 63

Nek Rai thus expressed his disapproval of Aurangzeb’s destruction of the earlier Mughal policy towards religion, not only by drawing upon a literary tradition of Hindu writers in Persian of which he himself was a part, but also by relying precisely upon the tenets of Sufism. In the same light, the reaction of the major eighteenth-century Hindu scholar, poet and Mughal official, Anand Ram ‘Mukhlis’, to his visit to Sambhal, where there had earlier existed a noted Shiva temple (sanamkada bud mashhur be-harmandal), and was still remembered in the following popular saying (from the Sikh Dasam Granth):

Great is the fortune of Sambhal Where Harji (Lord Shiva) will come to the Harmandal (Shiva temple).

Bhag bade Sambhal ke Ke Harji har mandal awenge

When Sambhal was given in the jagir of Humayun in the time of Babur, the temple was destroyed and replaced by a mosque. Mukhlis recounted this history, and then upon seeing the mosque, he writes: ‘Now the grand mosque of this city is the same dome [as the Harmandal]. In sum, earlier it was a worship-house (‘ibadatkada) and continues to remain so.’ Mukhlis thereafter cites seven verses of the chronogram describing the building of the mosque. He concludes his account with a description of a small semi-dry tank nearby which people still

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visited for a holy bath.64 The contrast of Mukhlis’s account with the quatrain sung in Madhavrao Sindhia’s camp could hardly be greater.

Still, this is not to suggest that such officials were eliding their Hindu identity; rather, as Nek Rai’s and Anand Ram Mukhlis’s subtle references to the pre- Islamic past suggests, Hindu scholars and officials (p.xlv) of the time sought to place the Mughal empire and its history within a broader current of the history of India. This is apparent also in the work of several Hindu chroniclers, such as Sujan Rai Batalavi, the author of Khulasat-ut-Tawarikh. The text, heavily influenced by Abu’l Fazl, is in many ways exemplary of a long tradition of Mughal historiography. Yet, after a conventional opening section describing the natural, topographical and anthropological features of India, the history proper begins with a summary of the pre-Islamic kings of India from the time of the Pandava king Yudhishtira, before turning to the age of Muslim rule. Even more importantly, in his discussion of the sources for his text, Sujan Rai mentions that he relies on ‘histories of India’ such as the Mahabharata, the Harbans Purana, Ramayana and Rajatarangini. What is fascinating in his generic re-description is that he not only includes court chronicles like the Rajatarangini but also texts which even today scholars are hesitant to characterize as historical texts.65 This tradition continued in the eighteenth century as Hindu writers wrote even longer sections on India’s pre-Islamic past. However, unlike brash new elites like the Marathas who were insistent on their Hindu identities in public, these Mughal writers sought to find ways to express their identity within traditional Mughal generic and ideological paradigms.

Mukhlis and his ilk were not writing in a vacuum; their literary productions were reflective of some measure of tolerance that continued both in the larger society and at the court. A mosque in Lahore is reported to have been repaired and renovated with the generous donations of one Raja Khush-hal Chand.66 Even more interesting is the fact that when Hindus and Muslims joined forces under the banner of the local Mughal officials and the ‘ulama to quell the Sikh rebels, seen widely as rabble-rousers, the conflict was described as jihad. At the court too, such instances of religious accommodation can still be found: for example, when Anand Ram met his Hindu spiritual (p.xlvi) preceptor, Dargahi, on his way back to Delhi from Garh Muktesar, he conveyed on behalf of the royal harem a request for prayers.67

Yet, such a benign attitude was hardly universally popular and some Muslim elites were by no means nostalgic for the earlier Mughal accommodation. One chronicler is concerned over the slackness in shari‘a, and projects it as the primary reason of the Mughal failure against the Jat rebels, suggesting the removal of the Hindus from state service, the closing of ‘idol-houses’, and the appointment of principal senior officials for the shari‘a’s strict enforcement in the territory across Delhi, Agra and Gwalior.68

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In this context perhaps we can also appreciate the development of other genres in Arabic. After a long hiatus, we find in the mid-eighteenth century an Arabiclanguage history, Subhat-ul-Marjan fiasar-i Hindustan (‘The Rosary of the Pearls in the Historical Vestiges of India’), by the noted scholar of the time, Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami. Bilgrami devoted an entire chapter to the significance of India within the Islamic imagination, drawing upon the Prophet’s traditions relating to this land, as well as a long account of Indian scholars, highlighting their contributions to the domain of Islamic science.69 As this suggests, the conversation with the Arabic world was not one-way: Indian authors not only increasingly recognized the authority of the Arab world, but sought to make their mark within it, which is manifested in the career of Murtaza Zabidi in particular. Born in 1732 in Bilgram, Zabidi travelled extensively in the Arab world, finally settling in Cairo, which would be his resting place. He compiled in several volumes a commentary, Taj al-‘Arus, on arguably the most authentic and popular Arabic dictionary, Al-Qamus al-Muhit.70

(p.xlvii) Thus, there seems to be a new turn in the imaginary of Indian Islam, which did not appear to have been accompanied by a definitive response from the Mughal court. In earlier times, Akbar had overseen the indigenization of Indian Islam. Aurangzeb, in contrast but also in continuation of this tradition of Mughal initiatives in this matter, had sought to promote a brand of universal Islam in India. In the eighteenth century, this re-imagining of Islam in India and the place of India in Islam was directed by Muslim scholars themselves, with little or no control by or direction from the court. It is perhaps only in such a vacuum that scholar like Shah Waliullah could articulate, from the outside, a complete revision of the notion of the Muslim state in India.71

This vacuum may also account for why Tipu Sultan would eventually seek help from the Ottomans in his campaign against the Europeans rather than the Mughals.72 It was a damning recognition of the fact that the Mughal response to the Europeans was now a matter of convenience. Whereas Shahjahan and Aurangzeb repeatedly showed their unwillingness to entertain European territorial ambitions along the coasts, Farrukh Siyar was commonly thought to have sold off important rights to trade, at the expense of Indian merchant communities, in exchange for a cure for a venereal disease.73 Tipu’s actions were a particularly acute insult to the self-image of the Mughals who had traditionally refused to accord the Ottomans the recognition of the status of a caliphate. In fact, Mughal tradition asserted that their ancestor, Timur, had subjected the Ottomans to a humiliating defeat and kept the sultan Bayezid Yildarim imprisoned in a golden cage for quite some time. Indeed, the idea that the Mughals had diminished in stature in the larger Muslim world, particularly with regard to the Ottomans, may have been echoed by (p.xlviii) the lament of the Mughal prince Azfari, who bemoaned that the Mughals had based their rule on the effeminate Persian language as opposed to the masculine Turkish.74

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These new currents in Islam were not confined to the realm of elite scholars. In a well-known episode, which I examine at length below, the associates of Rumi Khan, a Constantinople Turk, and ‘Arab ‘Ali Khan, a Baghdadi, who worked for the imperial arsenal, actively encouraged a riot of Muslim shoe-makers in the Jama Masjid against the forces of certain Mughal noblemen accused of protecting a Hindu jeweller held responsible for killing one of their members. Binawa Sunami, the Hindavi poet projected this incident as a matter of the protection of Islam:

What sort of tyranny is this, o vile, frivolous heavens?

Mars has again sharpened the edge of the dagger…

The pious Muslim shoe-selling man Has been killed unjustly by Subhkaran the jeweler

He crushed the glittering ruby with the stone of injustice

Cobblers and ruffians gathered, remembered Allah,

They went around appealing to the Qazi and the Kotwal.

They say, ‘Bring us justice from the emperor,

Together lets gather our strength to wage holy war upon infidelity

Until the day of judgment, let the faith of Muhammad stand firm.’

(Ye kya sitam hai ay falak-i harza nabakar

Mirrikh phir se tez kiya hai khanjar ki dhar…

Juti farosh mard-i musalman-i dindar Subhkarn jauhari ne liya hai sitam se mar

Sang-i jafa se chur kiya la’l-i abdar

Mochi-o-luchche ek’the Allah kon karke yad

Qazi-o-kotwal son karte phire faryad Kahte hain badshah sen dilao hamari dad Ek’the ho jor band kufr par kare jihad Ta hashr din din-i Muhammad ho barqarar)75

(p.xlix) The interpretation of local sectarian conflict as an assault on Islam was evident in yet another incident in 1713 in Ahmadabad, when Da’ud Khan Panni was the governor of Gujarat. A Muslim notable, despite the protestations of his Hindu neighbours went ahead with the sacrifice of a cow. In response, the inflamed neighbours took the son of the butcher in question and in turn slaughtered the boy at the same place. Riots ensued and the furious Muslim community presented its case before the governor, seeking redress. The governor, Da’ud Khan Panni, who had a Hindu diwan and also had a Hindu wife, responded with a typically Mughal aloofness, hoping that the incident would blow over. The Muslims then took their case all the way to the central court in Delhi, where at this time the wazir was advised primarily by the Raja Ratan Chand. Again, the wazir responded in the same manner. As a matter of fact, the Muslim delegates were put in prison, were released only when Khan-i Dauran,

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advised by his brother Ja‘far, interceded on their behalf.76 The disappointment of the deputation in Delhi was considered a direct result of the dominance of Hindus in the Mughal system. This echoed the interpretation given to another incident in which the Rathore chief, Ajit Singh, took his daughter, who had earlier been married to Farrukh Siyar, back from the Mughal palace to his homeland. Commentators of the time read this not only as an insult to the Mughal emperor and the state but rather as an insult to the dignity of Islam itself.77

A more generous reading of such incidents would view them as evidence of a departure on the part of the Mughal court from Aurangzeb’s attempt to impose orthodoxy and to promote a policy for the favoured treatment of Muslim subjects. However, while distancing itself from (p.l) Aurangzeb’s policies, the Mughal state had not effected a successful return to an earlier strategy of principled and active detachment from matters of religion in public life. Instead, in the eighteenth century, the court’s response, despite its intentions, appeared more to be one of passive indifference rather than a matter of active policy. It was yet another manifestation of the vacuum of leadership in religious matters displayed by the court.

This vacuum had extremely serious consequences in at least one instance, according to a chronicler of the campaign for the battle of Buxar. The Mughal forces had made a camp along the way from Allahabad to Munnugunj, where Muslim soldiers had slaughtered some cows. The chronicler reports that the incident led to a serious conflict between the Hindu and Muslim soldiers in the camp, which we can presume must have caused directly the low morale and desultory fighting of the army against the East India Company’s forces.78 Although the Mughal indifference to religious aspirations applied to both its Hindu and Muslim subjects, what is more important was the extent to which the court failed to respond to the increasing and generalized demand within society for public recognition of religious identities. In incident after incident, the Mughal court proved unable to intervene proactively to direct the religious imagination of traditional elites, to defuse inter-religious conflicts, or to accommodate the religious aspirations of new elites, who were not steeped in the manner of Nek Rai in the earlier Mughal tradition of religious accommodation.

Nek Rai, as shown above, had been able to draw support for this Mughal policy from a Sufi tradition that had acted as an ideological bulwark for the state. In the years following the publication of The Crisis of Empire, my research has included some work on the Sufi reception of Akbar. I have shown that the enduring image of Akbar as a bad Muslim was the legacy of one particular order, the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi, while another, less-researched order, the Chishti, viewed him very differently. I have shown elsewhere how these Sufi debates were intimately related to the legitimacy and nature of Mughal power in India.

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This tradition of debate undoubtedly suffered a major shock (p.li) when Aurangzeb made a radical break with the religious schools of thought that were more likely to identify with the philosophies of rule of figures such as Akbar or Dara Shukoh. Yet, as writers like Anand Ram ‘Mukhlis’ suggests, this tradition was not forgotten in the eighteenth century.

An example of this comes from a suggestive incident that took place in the Sufi khanqah of Ghulam ‘Ali in the presence of the important mystic figure, Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan. Someone recounted a dream he had had in which he saw Krishna burning in the middle of a fire, and Rama also suffering at the edge of the same fire. When someone proffered the interpretation that the dream indicated that Krishna and Rama were burning in the fires of hell, Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan rejected it outright, claiming that the fire was symbolic of love. Krishna was thus shown to be burning right in the middle of it, while the more ascetic Rama was somewhat distant from its effects.79 Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan was not a Chishti and thus not a direct inheritor of the seventeenth-century tradition mentioned above. Moreover, as the foundation of the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya indicates, even among the Naqshbandi there were intimations towards a more accommodationist position. These currents are visible even in the literature of the time.80

This leads us to ask why this tradition has been virtually absent from our imagination, both popular and academic, of the eighteenth century. One reason may have been that some powerful members of the traditional nobility, the umara-i Mughaliya mentioned above, continued to maintain strong ties to the Naqshbandi order. To take but one example, ‘Abd-us-Samad Khan, who rose to power during Farrukh Siyar and Muhammad Shah’s reign, virtually establishing his hereditary control in Punjab and Multan to the extent that this area would be referred to at times as Balkh and Bukhara, was a direct descendant of the noted Central Asian Naqshbandi saint Khwaja ‘Ubaidullah Ahrar.81

(p.lii) The Emperor Has No Clothes

From the earlier discussion, it appears that in society in general and in the religious establishment in particular, one can discern the presence of contradictory currents with regard to religion. Then, we must ask why it is that Shah Waliullah (d.1763)—who provided such a strong ideological counterpoint to Mughal accommodation—has so exclusively dominated both later popular imagination and scholarship and memory of the Mughal eighteenth century.82 In fact, this lacuna might be indicative not of the absence of other religious currents in Shah Waliullah’s day but rather of the court’s inability to channel and promote these currents for its own purposes. This was exacerbated by the increased authority figures like Shah Waliullah could claim in the larger Islamic world, which was not counteracted by effective Mughal support for his opponents in India.

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A similar mechanism might be operative with regard to the genre of political writing known as akhlaq, which I have discussed elsewhere. This genre did not melt away in the eighteenth century, as versions of such texts show up even in the far-flung provinces like Bengal in the hands of local officials. A text based on Nasir-ud-Din Tusi’s akhlaq, the Akhlaq-i Muhsini by Mulla Wa‘iz al-Kashifi was first translated in India as The Practical Wisdom of the Mohammadans under the aegis of the East India Company in the late eighteenth century, suggesting that even the British recognized the importance of this genre. These texts which propounded a particularly Mughal world-view continued to be read, revised and disseminated in this period. Yet, it is unclear if the court was able to draw upon the support that this literature could have provided for its policies in any meaningful way.

These were manifestations of the same phenomenon: the general crisis of Mughal authority, stemming right from the early years of the period. Zu’lfiqar Khan’s attempt to capture the kingship to ensure the continuity of the old guard of the nobility against the rise of new groups, eventually undercut the Mughal king himself. Zu’lfiqar Khan deliberately conspired to give the kingship to a man generally seen as the weakest possible claimant for the throne amongst the Mughal (p.liii) princes. Jahandar Shah was not only beholden to him as a result but was so weak that it was reported that when Farrukh Siyar was coming from the east to fight for the throne, he not only tried to save himself by putting all the blame on Zu’lfiqar Khan but eventually ran away from the battlefield in disguise and took shelter in Zu’lfiqar Khan’s father’s house. Moreover, the weakness of the king was not only evident to the court but to the general public itself: one can only think of the shocking desecration of Jahandar Shah’s body, paraded throughout Delhi in parts, hung upside down on two elephants. The same emperor who had reportedly been so ignominiously lost after a night of public drunkenness and then found in the royal stables thus suffered his ultimate defeat in the most humiliating glare of the public eye. The mystique of the emperor was thus beginning to erode from these earliest days of the eighteenth century. Moreover, there was increasingly less control over who made the image of the Mughal king as the king became an increasingly available figure for public scrutiny. Thus, it was possible by Shah ‘Alam’s time for such a poem to be publicly composed about the king:

Do you know, o pimp, dirty man and ass Who had suffered this injustice and who plundered the wealth?

The human being discriminates between good and bad but

You with the grace of God the scion of that father

Who had the title of the king with whom stupidity has taken refuge

(shah-i himaqat panah) Your grandfather suffered from the disease of La‘l Kunwari

Who had even ordered boats to be drowned for her sport

The stupidity continues in this dynasty

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How can I blame you alone? After all their asinine qualities are your excuse.83

The erosion of the image of the king was not confined to the literary sphere. One may note it even in the paintings of the time. Muhammad Shah revived the earlier tradition of court painting, providing patronage to several important artists of the day. The paintings depicted him playing Holi, celebrating Diwali and sitting with one or two of his prominent nobles, showing that to some extent he continued the (p.liv) Mughal tradition of promoting sectarian accommodation. Yet, these representations of his court pale in comparison to the earlier scenes from the seventeenth-century court, in which the emperor presided over a vast array of people, representing not only all the constituents of the empire itself, but also supplicants from around the world, including European Jesuits and commercial agents. By contrast, Muhammad Shah and his servants are represented as portly and sedentary; he is frequently shown with the high ranked nobles, suggesting that the empire is now run by a council and shared authority rather than the personal leadership of an emperor on horseback. One may also compare a painting depicting a meeting of Nadir Shah with Muhammad Shah, in which the latter, far from presiding over a grand court in which the Persian king is merely a supplicant, is shown seated at the same level as his counterpart. After Nadir Shah’s victory in the battle of Panipat, the painter undoubtedly had little representational choice. Still, the painting encapsulated a remarkable reduction in the global vision of the Mughal empire from the seventeenth century.84

Such an image of the king corresponded closely to the political reality of the time. Perhaps the most representative illustration of the extent to which the mystique of the empire had crumbled in the period can be found in a Maratha decree, couched self-consciously in the Mughal style, if somewhat crudely and forcefully:

(p.lv) Be it known to the subadars, qila‘dars, faujdars, zamindars,

merchants, money-lenders (sahukars), mahajans, and all the residents of

the countries of Hindustan, being they between fear and hope (bain al-

khauf wa al-raja), that of the monies belonging to the honourable, gracious,

mature in wisdom, young in fortune, the claimant of the crown and throne

which conquers the whole country and gifts it away [to the others], the

Maharaja (emperor?) whose stature is as high as the heavens, and is the

refuge of the world, Raja Sahu, may God keep his power and country

forever, one quarter of the revenues of these countries have been bestowed

upon and approved for the expenses of the lion-like young warriors; this

slave of the exalted court has been deputed to carry out this service. This

is written in accordance with the high-statured command [of the Raja],

that they carry the carpet of obedience and submission upon their

shoulders and enter the circle of unquestioning loyalty and devotion, and

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in all honesty and rectitude, indicate to my agents in every district

wherefrom this one-fourth of revenue should come. In this way, their life,

property and dignity will remain safe and secure. Otherwise, they expect

the victorious army to raze in a moment the entire country to the ground in

such a manner that not a single trace of the population will be found

[thereafter] and men, women and children, captured and slaughtered in

the hands of the [soldiers] carrying the arrow and the spear will be

completely destroyed. If they deviate from the path of obedience, thinking

in their arrogance that the [Mughal] emperor will help them, they will

taste the sherbet of death and see the consequences. Several times [in the

past] the country of Gujarat and Malwa, nay even several districts and the

forts of the rajas of Hind have been trampled under the hooves of the

horses of the victorious army. Shuja‘at ‘Ali Khan in Gujarat and Raja

Girdhar in Malwa, along with their huge armies and innumerable weapons,

came to contend [with us]; they could not bear the power of the victorious

army. In the blink of an eye they all were eventually captured and

slaughtered. What revenge and what compensation could come from your

emperor from Akbarabad, which they had thought to be an impregnable

fort? The fort there is nothing more than an ordinary wall. With the force

of thundering battering rams and fire-hurling cannons, I will destroy the

stones of that fort so that they will blow away like cotton of a cotton-carder

and will be destroyed completely and get extinct.85

Falling just shy of rhetorically rejecting the legitimacy of the imperial structure, the decree made abundantly clear to what extent the power and mystique of this structure had dissipated in the post-Aurangzeb (p.lvi) period. It is true that Abdali’s invasion and the subsequent defeat of the Marathas at Panipat broke definitively the possibility for the emergence of an independent Maratha empire, unencumbered by symbolic subordination to the Mughals. Yet, this same defeat did not restore the Mughal emperor to a position of genuine political prominence.

A remarkable feature of this period was that the person of the emperor, or rather control over him, continued to be a much sought-after political prize. The Marathas themselves eventually came to Shah ‘Alam’s rescue, restoring him in his capital. One may speculate that the precarious balance between the different warring regional and sub-imperial factions made it necessary to seek some form of external political authority, in this case in the grand old tradition of the Mughal empire represented now in the sadly reduced form of the emperor Shah ‘Alam. Alternatively, it may have been the very different imagining of political power and territoriality that was at stake for these players, in which the ultimate goal was not the dynastic take-over of the Mughal empire itself. Rather, these various locally based polities sought not only autonomy from the Mughal centre but eventually to expand within certain sub-imperial parameters. These parameters may have been defined by the administrative provinces of the

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Mughal system (as in the case of the East India Company in Bengal), or by other considerations, as in the case of the Marathas.

In any case, the emperor continued to exist as a symbolic presence in the north Indian political landscape. The irony, of course, was that, even as his actual political power waned, he continued to rely upon and use an over-inflated rhetoric inherited from his forbears, perhaps the most important political capital he still possessed. One may note here the style of the proclamations of Shah ‘Alam in this connection and in particular the brief note or special letter (shuqqai khass)he sent to the governor of the East India Company, upon receiving word of the defeat of Shuja‘-ud-Daula at the battle of Buxar. The contrast with the Maratha decree is stark:

The high noble endowed with the exalted and valiant stature, a special of

the special servant of mine, who had been honored and are proud with the

highest of imperial graces, may you know: I am thankful and grateful

(p.lvii) to God that Shuja al-Daula had met with resounding defeat at the

hand of the English community who are in my servitude and are

undoubtedly the well-wishers of my power. He has got the punishment and

revenge of his (mis)deeds and acts. Since this victory was manifested as a

sign of divine help and is due to the effort of the fortunate warriors

(ghazis), I considered it in reality my own victory and prostrated to

perform thanks to the court of God the Great who is kind to all, who has

endowed you, the devoted servant of mine and the whole English

community with blessings and fortunes.

According to the letter of my special servant, Raja Shitab Rai, I have now

moved my standards in the direction of the capital and whatever

resentment that I bore from Shuja-ud-Daula will be clear from the Raja to

you, o my special servant, o the well-wisher of the state. At present, until I

receive the reply to this shuqqa, I will remain in the neighborhood of

Benares according to the request of the agents of the Raja. Write to me

about whatever is good and useful to the Company and the English

Community; it will be carried out accordingly by this exalted and august

person. Carry out the imperial matters according to the stipulated

agreement. You will know the details from Raja Shitab Rai. You will receive

from Rai Suchit Rai and Khayali Ram, the agents of the said Raja, the gifts

and graces that I have sent for you. Endowed with these gifts and having

performed prostrations of gratitude to God, and having paid due respects

to the imperial graces, keep making full efforts for the benefit of the

people. Consider me attentive to your fortunate condition, and keep

sending to the illumined person of mine letters containing your favorable

accounts without any break.86

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Conclusion

Let me conclude with a summary of the story of the Delhi shoe-sellers’ riot,87 which I briefly mentioned above and on which chroniclers of the time spilt considerable ink. We shall presently see its significance for our broader argument.

During the reign of Muhammad Shah, on 8 March 1729, at a time of Muslim festivities, the Hindu jeweller Subhkaran was returning home from the house of the eunuch Hafiz Khidmatgar Khan, an official hailing from the lower rungs of the society, in whose thrall the emperor was popularly said to be. On his way, Subhkaran passed through the shoe-seller’s area in Chowk Sa‘dullah Khan, where the Punjabi Muslim artisans were lined (p.lviii) on both sides of the roads, engrossed along with their Hindu neighbours in letting off fireworks in celebration of the Muslim festival Shab-i Barat. The embers from a firework landed inside Subhkaran’s palanquin and burnt a hole in his clothes. His retinue started arguing with the shoemakers and though the former were armed, the latter were outnumbered by them. In the scuffle, a shoemaker wrested the shield and sword of one Subhkaran’s servant. When the jeweller finally returned home, incensed at his humiliation, he sent the servant who had been disarmed back to the market to punish his assailants. Subhkaran’s men returned to the Chowk, where they proceeded to grab and beat a young boy in revenge. When an elder of the area, Haji Hafiz, intervened, the men wounded him mortally. At dawn, the shoemakers found the corpse and a large group of lower class Muslims gathered to carry his body to Subhkaran’s door, shouting ‘Faith! Faith!’ all the while.

The jeweller in the meanwhile had sought refuge in the house of Sher Afgan Khan Panipati, the Khan-saman or Lord Chamberlain, to whom Subhkaran was connected through his mentor Zafar Khan Raushan-ud- Daula of Panipat, a great favourite of the emperor. Unable to exact revenge upon Subhkaran, the mob left the corpse upon his doorstep and went to the court to make their complaint. The emperor had just returned from a tour of the gardens with his mother, Qudsiya Begam. Muhammad Shah ordered the wazir, Qamar-ud-Din Khan, to look into the matter, who according to one report sent a warrant for the arrest of the accused but Sher Afgan Khan refused to comply.

The following day, a Friday, the shoe-sellers gathered an enormous crowd of Muslims and assembled in the Jama Masjid, thus interrupting the prayers. The loudest group were those led by the Arabs, the Abbysinians and the Constantinople Turks in the service of Rumi Khan and the Baghdadi, Sayyid ‘Arab ‘Ali Khan, who were mostly employed in the imperial artillery. They led the rowdy mob, who were unsparing in their ire, cursing and beating even the qazi and his son for supporting the

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unbeliever, beating them half dead, while others dragged the expounder

and the leader of the prayer from the pulpit.

Upon news of the riot, at the emperor’s orders, the wazir arrived on the

scene with troops. He promised redress for the Muslims, but the mob

turned more resolute in their purpose and were doubly inflamed as

Raushan-ud-Daula, with his Afghan retinue, and Sher Afgan Khan, who had

been trying privately to convince Subhkaran’s heirs to pay a blood-price,

arrived. Calling the nobles infidels and hurling shoes at them, they threw

themselves upon the Afghan troops, as the wazir held aloof. The Afghan

troops reacted rashly, and turned their swords upon the rabble, who would

have been left defenseless were it not for the support of the artillerymen,

who were armed with fusils and European guns. When an Abyssinian fired

from the pulpit upon the nobles, a melee ensued, in which the wazir’s

Mughals also joined in, disregarding his orders. Other Mughal troops who

had been posted outside also burst into the mosque. Many rioters lost their

lives and eventually the (p.lix) Afghans began to lose ground—Sher Afgan

Khan was wounded and eventually he and his retinue, many of whom were

wounded or dead, began to retreat, forcing Raushan-ud-Daula, who had

thus far been protected behind them, to follow. The fat noble, unable to

run, was carried to safety outside the mosque. Eventually, he and Sher

Afgan Khan sought refuge in the nearby house of the latter’s elder brother.

The Afghans inside the Jama Masjid, now sure of their masters’ safety, also

left for the same mansion. The rioters, disregarding the wazir, wished to

carry the fight there and were only persuaded to desist at the last moment.

The remaining nobles had hidden themselves in the nooks and crannies of

the mosque. In the confusion, one noble in Raushan-ud-Daula’s train, had

fallen through the thatched roof of a nearby shop while trying to beat a

retreat and was stuck, his legs dangling above the enraged shopkeeper.

The wazir, who had done precisely nothing, emerged as a popular hero, a

defender of the faith. Muhammad Shah, delighted that he had not been

forced to make any decisions, retired happily for the night. The murdered

shoemaker was buried on the site of Subhkaran’s house, which had since

been razed by the crowd.

The affair, commemorated in many Hindavi and Persian poems, strikes me now as exemplary of many of the social and political currents I have laid out above as characteristic of this period of Mughal rule. The marketplace asserted itself forcefully over the court, and a slew of lower class characters, from Punjabi shoemakers to Abyssinnian artillerymen, made their demands and aspirations loudly and violently known, disregarding the intimate power-sharing arrangements of the Mughal nobility and their hangers-on. The upper nobility itself is a new breed: they were not the scions of Delhi’s traditional elite, but

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hailed instead from non-Turani or non-Irani families, or from distinctly lower class backgrounds or from places outside Delhi. While Hindus could continue to make their place within the Mughal power structure, this official policy had little impact on the increasingly raucous public assertions of religious identity. The emperor and his greatest representative, the wazir, are conspicuous largely by their absence in the action of this story. Indeed, the shoeseller’s violent death, according to an eyewitness account, was just one among the many crimes witnessed during the reign of Muhammad Shah for which the people who suffered got no justice. On the contrary the emperor, ‘oblivious to the bitter sighs of the oppressed (shah-i (p.lx) bi-khabar az asar-i ah-i mazlum), hoped the Panjabi Haji’s slaying like the other every day violence (manind-i khunha-i harruza khun-i in Haji-yi Panjabi paposh-farosh ra khwast) to be trampled under the foot of forgetfulness and stamped out from memory (ki pamal-i nisyan wa lakadkub-i faramushi sazad).88

If the crisis in the Mughal empire of the eighteenth century was not one of production, as The Crisis of Empire and other works of its generation showed, then of what did it consist? Was it merely a reflection of a general decadence in the society or culture of this time, or as Athar Ali once wrote ‘a cultural failure, shared with the entire Islamic world’?89 I am doubtful of such a hypothesis: as this story, and so much other evidence suggests, this was a period of marked cultural and social efflorescence, of the dynamic rise of new social groups and new forms of cultural expression, in new languages and modes.

The true crisis of the Mughal empire of the eighteenth century was one of political style. This is evident in much of the writings of the period, whether in a memoir of a noble like Iradat Khan bemoaning the terrible changes he had witnessed in one year, or the vicious caricatures of Ja‘far Zatalli, in which the most solemn of Mughal ceremonies of the akhbarat-i darbar-i mu‘alla was reduced to an obscene parody. Everywhere, it appeared, from every quarter, there was a raucous for the recognition of the sweeping social changes of the day as well as an appropriate response to it from the Mughal emperor. The earlier dynamism of Mughal political culture was absent in this period. If earlier generations of Mughals had been deeply aware of their status as Muslims and even foreign rulers in India, and had sought through a variety of ways to forge a political culture to respond to this challenge, the Mughals of this period seemed unable to either grasp the most pressing social and cultural changes of their day, or to formulate an appropriate and principled (p.lxi) response to it. It was necessary for the Mughals to formulate a policy that was not simply a return to Akbar or Dara Shukoh as a rejection of Aurangzeb’s policies, but they had to elaborate a radically new vision of political culture to deal with all the changes both internally and internationally. (p.lxii)

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Notes: (†) In the writing of the introduction for the present edition I have received valuable help from Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Seema Alavi Rajeev Kinra, Ananya Chakravarti, Abhishek Kaicker and Hasan Siddiqui. Abhishek Kaicker has also been generous to give me copies of some important texts from his personal collection. I am grateful to them all.

(1) Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, second revised edn, Delhi, 1999 [1963], pp. 364–405.

(2) Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court 1707–1740, Aligarh, 1959, pp. xvii-lii; Satish Chandra, Essays on Medieval Indian History, Delhi, 2003, pp. 128–42; M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Bombay, 1966 (reprint, 1972).

(3) From the point of view of political economy, see for instance, Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800, Cambridge, 1981; Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540–1834, Cambridge, 1997; and Ariel Salzmann, Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State, Leiden, 2004. From a more discursive perspective, see Cemal Kafadar, ‘The Question of Ottoman Decline’, Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review, Vol. 4, 1997, pp. 30–76. Also see the broad overview of trends in Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914, Cambridge, 1994.

(4) André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth Century Maratha Svarajya, Cambridge, 1986, for instance; C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion,1770–1870, Cambridge, 1983, though primarily concerned with a later period, was still greatly valuable.

(5) See for instance, Burton Stein, ‘State Formation and Economy Reconsidered’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1985, pp. 387–413; Dilbagh Singh, The State, Landlords and Peasants: Rajasthan in the Eighteenth Century, New Delhi, 1990; Jos Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c. 1710-1780, Leiden, 1995; Meena Bhargava, State, Society and Ecology: Gorakhpur in Transition, 1750-1830, Delhi, 1999; Seema Alavi, ed., The Eighteenth-Century Debate in India, Delhi, 2002; Peter Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution?, Delhi, 2003. A more recent work on these lines is Munis Faruqi, ‘At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2009, pp. 5–43.

(6) Muzaffar Alam, ‘Eastern India in the Early Eighteenth Century Crisis: Some Evidence from Bihar’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1991; Idem, ‘Aspects of Agrarian Uprisings in North India in the Early

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Eighteenth Century’, in S. Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar, eds., Situating India History: Essays in Honour of S. Gopal, Delhi, 1996, pp. 146–70; Idem, ‘Trade, State Policy and Regional Change: Aspects of Mughal-Uzbek Commercial Relations, c. 1550–1750’, in Scott Levi, ed., India and Central Asia: Commerce and Culture, 1500–1800, Delhi, 2007, pp.64–92.

(7) C. A. Bayly, for instance, wrote a positive review in the Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1988, pp. 521–3, while Athar Ali, ‘The Eighteenth Century: An Intrepretation’, Indian Historical Review, Vol. 5, Nos 1– 2, 1978–1979, pp.175–86, was rather dismissive.

(8) For a somewhat comparable situation, see the analysis of Ottoman historiography in the context of the assassination of Osman II (r. 1618-22) in Gabriel Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play, Berkeley, 2003.

(9) For some examples, see Ishrat Haq, Glimpses of Mughal Society and Culture: A Study based on Urdu Literature in the Second Half of the 18th Century, New Delhi, 1992; Tabir Kalam, ‘Aspects of Religious Tradition and Culture in Eighteenth Century Northern India’, unpublished phd thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2002.

(10) Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa‘-i Dihli, edited with an Urdu translation by Nurul Hasan Ansari, Delhi, Department of Urdu, 1982. See also Muraqqa’-e Dehli: The Mughal Capital in Muhammad Shah’s Time, English translation with an introduction and notes by Chander Shekhar and Shama Mitra Chenoy, Delhi, 1989.

(11) Mubarakullah ‘Wazih’, Tarikh-i Iradat Khan, ed. Ghulam Rasul Mehr, Lahore: Idara-i Tahqiqat-i Pakistan, Punjab University, 1971, pp. 129–30. See also William Irvine, Later Mughals, ed. Jadunath Sarkar, 2 Vols., reprint, Delhi, 1971, Vol. 1, pp.193–6.

(12) Tarikh-i Iradat Khan, p. 129.

(13) Cf. C. M. Naim, Urdu Texts and Contexts: The Selected Essays of C. M. Naim, Delhi, 2004, pp. 225–49 for popular jokes and the political history of Akbar’s time. See also, Rajeev Kinra, ‘Infantalizing Baba Dara: The Cultural Memory of Dara Shukoh and the Mughal Public Sphere’, Journal of Persianate Studies, Vol. 2, 2009, pp.165–93.

(14) Tarikh-i Iradat Khan, pp 2–3. Wazih’s is a careful political statement. He was about sixty years of age at the time and although he does not mention his previous life at all, he had opposed every winning candidate for ruler. He thus had good reason to be concerned for his own skin in the early reign of Farrukh Siyar.

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(15) Zatal-Nama (Kulliyat-i Ja‘far Zatalli), ed. Rashid Hasan Khan, Delhi, 2007, pp. 53–76; see also Kulliyat-i Mir Ja‘far Zatalli, ed. Naim Ahmad, Aligarh, 1979, pp. 45–68. See Raziuddin Aquil, ‘Culture of Immaturity and Other Propositions’, in S. R. Chakraborty, ed., The Eighteenth Century in South Asia: New Terrains, Kolkata, 2012, pp. 236–60 for a study of parts of the text.

(16) On connections between trade and political authority in this period, see C. A. Bayly and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1988, pp. 401-24; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Of Imarat and Tijarat: Asian Merchants and State Power in the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 37, 1995, pp. 750-80; idem, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, Delhi, 2005, pp. 45-79; Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘Exploring the Hinterland: Trade and Politics in the Arcot Nizamat (1700-1732)’, in R. Mukherjee and L. Subramanian, eds., Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta, Delhi, 1998, pp. 113-64; Alam, ‘Trade, State Policy and Regional Change’.

(17) Cf. Amir Arifi, Shahr-Ashob: Ek Tajziya, Delhi, 1994, pp. 47-8, 70-71.

(18) Qalandar Bakhsh Jur’at (d. 1810) cited in Naim Ahmad, Shahr Ashob ma‘Muqaddama wa Hawashi, Delhi, 1968, p. 133.

(19) Cf. Naim Ahmad, Shahr Ashob, p. 371, and also pp. 311, 369.

(20) M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, ‘Power in Prison: A Mughal Prince in Shahjahanabad, ca. 1800’ in V. Bouillier and C. Servan-Schreiber, ed., De l’Arabie à l’Himalaya—Chemins Croisés: En hommage à Marc Gaborieau, Paris, 2004, pp. 303–34. See also M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, ‘Of Princes and Poets in Eighteenth Century Lucknow’, in Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude, eds. India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, Los Angeles, New York, 2011, pp. 187–97.

(21) Tarikh-i Iradat Khan, p. 130.

(22) Cf. Shaikh Abdur Rashid, ‘Suyurghal Lands under the Mughals’, in H.R.Gupta, ed., Essays Presented to Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Hoshiarpur, 1958, pp. 313–22.

(23) Cf. Mirza Muhammad Bakhsh ‘Ashob’, Tarikh-i Shahadat-i Farrukh Siyar wa Julus-i Muhammad Shah, British Library, London, Ms. Or. 1832, ff. 45b-47b.

(24) Tahmas Beg Khan, Tahmas-Nama, ed. Muhammad Aslam, Lahore, 1986.

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(25) These questions would certainly repay more detailed analysis. For an exploration, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1999, pp. 47–93. Prasun Chatrerjee, ‘Gender and Travel Writing in India, c. 1650–1700’, Social Scientist, Vol. 40, Nos 3–4, 2012, pp. 59–80.

(26) Cf. Tarikh-i Shahadat-i Farrukh Siyar wa Julus-i Muhammad Shah, ff. 44b– 45b. The poet Shah Mubarak Abru (d. 1733) mentions him in following terms: Yaro Khidmatgar Khan khwojon ke bich/hain to mustasna wa lekin munqata‘. cf. Mazhar Mahmud Sherani, ed., Maqalat-i Mahmud Sherani, Vol. 2, Lahore, 1987, p. 135.

(27) Muhammad Umar, Atharahvin Sadi mein Hindustani Mu‘asharat: Mir ka ‘Ahd, Delhi, 1973, pp. 267–78; Farhat Hasan, ‘Forms of Civility and Publicness in Pre-British India’, in Rajeev Bhargava and Helmut Reifeld, eds., Civility, Public Spheres and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions, New Delhi, 2005, pp. 84– 105.

(28) Naim Ahmad, Shahr Ashob ka Tahqiqi Mutala‘a, Aligarh, 1979, p. 161. For some more references, see also idem, Shahr Ashob, pp 133, 146, 171, 173.

(29) Muhammad Qasim ‘Ibrat Lahori, ‘Ibratnama, ed. Zohuruddin Ahmad, Lahore, Punjab University, 1977, pp. 61, 62, 109, 117, 154, 157, 166, 174, 198.

(30) Khush-hal Chand, Nadir-uz-Zamani, British Library, London, Ms. Or. 3288, ff. 11a-113a. The adjectives Khush-hal Chand deploys to describe the easterners is deeply revealing: ‘shameless’, ‘disloyal’, ‘inconsiderate’, ‘hurtful’, ‘narrowminded’ and in appearance ‘frail’ and ‘decrepit’. For some other references to the easterners, see Muhammad Ahsan Ijad, Farrukh Siyar Nama, British Library, Ms. Or. 25, f. 65a; Tarikh-i Shahadat-i Farrukh Siyar wa Julus-i Muhammad Shah, f. 75b.

(31) Khush-hal Chand, Nadir-uz-Zamani.

(32) Compare Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics, pp. 84–5.

(33) Muhammad Hashim Khafi Khan, Muntakhab ul-Lubab, 2 Vols., ed. Maulavi Kabir al-Din Ahmed, Calcutta, 1869–1874, Vol. II, pp. 689–90; William Irvine, Later Mughals, Vol. I, pp.193–4.

(34) Muraqqa‘-i Dihli, p. 175

(35) Shakir Naji, Diwan-i Shakir Naji, ed. Iftikhar Begum Siddiqi, Delhi, 1989, pp. 405–6.

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(36) These included several persons termed ‘wicked’ Afghans (qaum-i bad qiwam), members of the extended Barha Sayyid clan grouping like Sayyid Muzaffar Khan, Najm-ud-Din ‘Ali Khan, Saif-ud-Din ‘Ali Khan, ‘Alam ‘Ali Khan, Dilawar ‘Ali Khan, numerous other Sayyids and Shaikhs like Mir Musharraf, Mir Ashraf, Shaikh Qudratullah Khan, Raji ‘Ali Khan Purabiya, and notables from the eastern (sharqi) districts.

(37) Qasim Lahori, ‘Ibratnama, pp. 179, 188.

(38) See also Tarikh-i Shahadat-i Farrukh Siyar wa Julus-i Muhammad Shah, f. 73a, in the context of the author’s remark about Khan-i Dauran’s relationship with the Turanis and his patronage to the Hindustanis (Hindustan-parwari khwah Musalman wa khwah Hindu).

(39) Asrar-i Samadi, ed. Muhammad Shujauddin, revised by Muhammad Bashir Husain, Lahore: Idara-i Tahqiqat-i Pakistan, Punjab University, 1965, p. 3; see also The Crisis of Empire, below p. 80n, citing Warid, p. 290 and Tarikh-i Shahanshahi, f. 21a, for his political and administrative career.

(40) Yahya Sirhindi, Tazkirat al-Muluk, f. 125. The emperor’s Kashmiri attribution (kashmirni-zada) alludes to his excessive favours to I‘tiqad Khan Kashmiri, who rose to a high rank and was also rumoured to replace Sayyid ‘Abdullah Khan as the wazir during the last days of his regime. Kashmiri claimed that he was related to the emperor from his mother’s side and the emperor too repeated this false claim of his (rishta-i khweshi-yi ja’li) to his grand nobles in the court. Ibid., f. 123b. See also Khafi Khan, Muntakhab, Vol. II, pp. 791, 841; Ghulam Husain Tabataba’i, Siyar-ul-Mua’akhkhirin, Urdu translation by Yunus Ahmad, Karachi: Nafis Akademi, 1968, p. 98. Zu’lfiqar Khan’s machination thus acquired a new life in Amin Khan’s instigation, the truth or untruth of Kashmiri’s claim apart.

(41) Shakir Khan, Tarikh-i Shakir Khani, British Library, Ms. Add. 6585, f. 33.

(42) Naim Ahmad, Shahr-Ashob, pp. 62–3.

(43) Irvine, Later Mughals, Vol. II, pp. 263–75.

(44) Cf. M. Ziauddin, A Grammar of the Braj Bhakha: The Persian text critically edited from the original Mss, with an introduction, translation, and notes, together with contents of the Tuhfat-ul-Hind, Calcutta, 1935. See also Mirza Khan ibn Fakhr-ud-Din Ahmad, Tuhfat al-Hind, ed. Nurul Hasan Ansari, Tehran: Buniyad-i Farhang-i Iran, 1354 Shamsi/1975. This edition unfortunately did not print the letters in nagari script.

(45) Alam, ‘The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 32, 1998, pp. 317–49.

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(46) Thus the noted Pranami saint Prannath was advised to have with him a Persian interpreter, when he sought an audience with Aurangzeb to argue about the truth of his mission: kau kahe hindvi mein inhau likhe kalam/bata to var haq hain par hamein rava nahin is tham/ tab ek mulla parsi ka hukam hua Daya Ram/ bulai leyao ten ko likhen parsi mein kalam/tab ladke Qayem ko bulai laya Daya Ram/rakha chakar de mahine waste likhne in kam. Cf. Swami Laldas, Bitak, ed. Matabadal Jaiswal and Dev Krishna Sharma Shastri, Allahabad, 1966, Section 37, verses 52–53. For a discussion on Prannath and his Nijananda Sampradaya, see Sandhya Sharma, ‘Society and Culture in Northern India as Reflected in Riti Poetry during the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century’, PhD dissertation, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2000, Chapter 5, pp. 186–244.

(47) Muzaffar Alam, ‘The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’, in Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, Berkeley, 2003, pp.177–88.

(48) Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India, Delhi, 2004, pp. 179-86.

(49) Khush-hal Chand, Nadir-uz-Zamani, f. 112a.

(50) Cf. Muhammad Hadi Kamwar Khan, Tazkirat-us-Salatin Chaghata, ed. Muzaffar Alam, Bombay, 1980, p. 157; Shah ‘Alam II, Nadirat-i Shahi, ed. Imtiyaz Ali Khan Arshi, Rampur, 1944. For an excellent discussion of Hindi and Braj in the Mughal court, see Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, New York, 2011; Sandhya Sharma, Literature, Culture and History in Mughal North India, 1550–1800, Delhi, 2011; see also, Masud Husain Rizvi Adeeb, ‘Nawaz aur Shakuntala Natak’, Nuqoosh, Lahore, June 1963. The noted Muhammad Shahi noble, Amir Khan Anjam also composed dohra and kabit masterfully (betarzi ki mahiran-i in anjuman angusht-i hairat bedandan mi gazidand). Cf. Tazkira-i Mushafi, British Library, London, India Office Ms.4013, f.2a.

(51) Cf. I‘jaz-i Arsalani (Persian letters of Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier), Bibiliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Ms. 713.

(52) Danishmand Khan, Bahadur Shah Nama, British Library, London, Ms. Or. 24, f. 144b. The newsletters at Awadh court and Faizabad Deorhi however continued to be written in Persian.

(53) Khwaja Muhammad Nasir ‘Andalib, Nala-i ‘Andalib, Bhopal, 1894, Preface. The Tariqa-i Muhammadiya mentioned here is different from the better known order of the same name founded by Sayyid Ahmad Shahid and Isma‘il Shahid in the nineteenth century. In a forthcoming article, ‘The Cry of the Nightingale: Mourning, Power and Revival in an Early Eighteenth-century Sufi Text’, I explore

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the significance of these stories and the foundation of the new Sufi order, which appeared to ameliorate the exclusionary tendencies of the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi. This trend is then reversed by nineteenth-century revivalism.

(54) Ganesh Das Vadehra, Char Bagh-i Punjab, ed. Kripal Singh, revised by Dewan Singh, Amritsar, Sikh History Research Department, 1965, pp. 284–5; English translation by J.S. Grewal and Indu Banga as Early Nineteenth-Century Panjab, Amritsar, 1975, p. 24; see also below p.150.

(55) Cf. Shail Mayaram, ‘Mughal State Formation: The Mewati Counter- Perspective’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1997, pp.169–97. For a different perspective, see Suraj Bhan Bhardwaj, ‘Migration, Mobility and Memories: Meos in the Processes of Peasantization in Medieval Period’, Indian Historical Review, December 2012 (forthcoming).

(56) Satish Chandra, ‘Jizyah in the Post-Aurangzeb Period’, in Satish Chandra, Essays on Medieval Indian History, Delhi, 2003, pp. 346–53.

(57) Shivdas Lakhnawi, Tarikh-i Farrukh Siyar wa Awa’il-i Muhammad Shah ma‘ruf be-Shahnama-i Munawwar Kalam, ed. Syed Hasan Askari, Patna, 1974, pp. 97-9. See also the English translation, Patna, 1980, pp. 112-15. See also Irvine, Later Mughals, Vol. II, p. 103.

(58) Satish Chandra, ‘Jizyah in the Post-Aurangzeb Period’.

(59) Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics, New York, 2012, pp. 411-23.

(60) Cf. Saqi Musta‘id Khan, Ma’asir-i ‘Alamgiri, English translation by Jadunath Sarkar, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1947, p. 55; Sri Ram Sharma, The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors, revised and enlarged edition, London, 1972, p. 172.

(61) Cf. Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Letters Home: Banaras Pandits and the Maratha Regions in Early Modern India’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2, 2010, pp. 201–40. See also Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, p. 137; Stewart Gordon, The New Cambridge History of India, II.4: The Marathas, 1600–1818, Cambridge, 1993, p. 146; A.L. Srivastava, Shuja-ud-Daulah, reprint, Delhi, 1961, pp. 27–8.

(62) See Monika Horstmann, Visions of Kingship in the Twilight of Mughal Rule, Amsterdam, 2006. Interesting here is also Cheyt Singh’s endeavour to transform his zamindari in Benares into a ‘Hindu Raj’. Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, Delhi, 1995, pp. 30–5.

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(63) Nek Rai, Tazkirat-us-Safar wa Tuhfat-uz-Zafar, Salar Jang Museum and Library, Hyderabad Ms. no. 7, Accession no. 4519, f. 18. For the Rumi verse, see Masnawi-yi Maulana-i Rum, ed. and transl. in Urdu, Qazi Sajjad Husain, Delhi, 1974, Vol. I, p. 264. See also Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, pp. pp. 319–36, for Nek Rai and his Tazkirat.

(64) Anand Ram Mukhlis, Safarnama, ed. Sayyid Azhar ‘Ali, Rampur, 1946, pp. 47–9.

(65) Sujan Rai Bhandari, Khulasat-ut-Tawarikh, ed. Zafar Hasan, Delhi, 1918, pp. 5-6. See also Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, pp. 396-410, for a discussion on this trend in Persian historiography.

(66) Cf. Qasim Lahori, ‘Ibaratnama, editor’s note on the author, pp. 11-12.

(67) Anand Ram ‘Mukhlis’, Waqa’i‘-i Sair-i Ganga, f. 13a, British Library, India Office Collection, Ms. I.O. 1612. See also Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Acculturation or Tolerance?’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 33, 2007, pp. 427–66.

(68) Risala-i Muhammad Shah wa Ahwal-i Khan-i Dauran, British Library, Ms. Or. 180, ff. 24b-25b.

(69) Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami, Subhat-ul-Marjan fi Asar-i Hindustan, ed., Muhammad Fazlur-Rahman Nadvi Siwani, Aligarh, Muslim University, 2 Vols., 1976–1980: Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 7–57 for a description of India in tafsir and hadis; and Part 2, pp. 58-309 for biographical notices of the ‘ulama.

(70) Stefan Reichmuth, The World of Murtada al-Zabidi (1732–91): Life, Networks and Writings, London, 2009. For shift to Arabic in medical learning, see Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, London, 2007, pp. 43–53.

(71) For a discussion, see S.A.A. Rizvi, Shah Waliallah and His Times: A Study of Eighteenth Century Islam, Politics and Society, Canberra, 1980, pp.287-316.

(72) Cf. Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 313-27.

(73) Cf. Abdul Karim, Murshid Quli Khan and His Times, Dacca, 1963, pp. 143-191; S. Bhattacharya, The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal (From 1704 to 1740), Calcutta, pp.19-26.

(74) Cf. Sayyid Abdullah, ‘Mir ‘Ali Sher ki ek Dilchasp Kitab’, in Sayyid Abdullah, Farsi Zaban-o-Adab: Majmu-a-i Maqalat, Lahore, 1977; Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, pp. 437-9.

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(75) Cf. Mazhar Mahmud Sherani, Maqalat-i Mahmud Sherani, pp. 142-5.

(76) Khafi Khan, Muntakhab, Vol. II, 755-7 and 964-5; Tabataba’i, Siyar, Urdu translation by Yunus Ahmad, pp. 65-6 and 81-2. Najaf Haider, ‘A Holi Riot of 1714: Versions from Ahmadabad and Delhi’, in Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy, eds, Living Together Separately: Cultural India in History and Politics, Delhi, 2005.

(77) Khafi Khan, Muntakhab, Vol. II, pp.791. The marriage has been ceremoniously described both in prose and verse by several writers of the time, and we also know in this case that it was solemnized with a formal nikah in keeping with the shari‘a (qazi ra talbida ba dastur-i shari‘a nikah bastand). On the other hand, the Rajputs too insisted on their rituals and practices, including the distribution of a special drink mixed with opium. No wonder then if the princess’s departure finds special mention in the chronicles. Yahya Sirhindi, Tazkirat al-Muluk, f. 123b; Khush-hal Chand, Nadir al-Zamani, f.103b.

(78) Ghulam Husain Khan, Zikr-us-Siyar, British Library, Ms. Or. 6652.

(79) Alam, Languages of Political Islam, pp.175–6.

(80) Ibid., pp.185–6.

(81) For some discussion of Naqshbandi Ahrari views and Mughal politics, Alam, ‘The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2008, pp. 135–74. For Punjab and Multan as Balkh and Bukhara see below in this book, pp. 296–7.

(82) Even in Shah Waliullah’s writings, one can discern evidence of this other current of religious thought. Cf. Alam, Languages of Political Islam, pp.171–3.

(83) Naim Ahmad, Shahr Ashob, p. 81. We may also note that the poem was written by Qayem Khan Chandpuri, an Afghan bitterly angry at the compromise the emperor had made with the Marathas vis-à-vis Zabita Khan.

(84) Some such paintings are reproduced in Yuthika Sharma and William Dalrymple, eds, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, New Haven, 2012. Malini Roy’s essay ‘The Revival of the Mughal Painting Tradition during the Reign of Muhammad Shah’ in the same volume (pp. 17-25) shows that eighteenth century witnessed some innovations: Delhi first saw, for example, depictions of the raga-malas and barah-masas during this time. The rise of this genre was perhaps a sly representation of the presence of the kalawants at the court. Still, this intimation of a new visual style did not correspond to the full elaboration of a new political culture to accommodate such groups. Indeed, the history of painting at Muhammad Shah’s court actually illustrates many of the centrifugal tendencies of power more generally: the painters at Muhammad Shah’s court eventually abandoned Delhi for more lucrative and dynamic

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positions at regional courts, such as Lucknow and Murshidabad. They continued a pattern seen in the post-Aurangzeb period when court painters like Bhavani Das and Dal Chand left Delhi for Kishangarh and Marwar, beginning the renowned regional schools at these courts. Madhu Trivedi, The Making of Awadh Culture, New Delhi, 2010.

(85) Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Paris, Ms Supplement Persian 478 (Blochet Catalogue 710), f. 1a.

(86) Ibid., ff. 33b-34a.

(87) For details, see Irvine, Later Mughals, Vol. II, pp. 257–63.

(88) Muhammad Shafi‘ ‘Warid’, Mir’at-i Waridat, British Library, Ms. Add. 6579, f. 172.

(89) M. Athar Ali, ‘The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1975, pp. 385-96 (citation on p. 390, emphasis in original).

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