Epilogue

The dynamic relation between enunciations of sovereignty and the rise of a popular politics that emerged over the course of the Mughal empire’s history was disrupted in the years after Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1739. Yet, even as the empire was reduced to a purely nominal entity, both the visions of sovereignty it engendered and the popular politics it enabled would persist for much longer. These concluding pages sketch the longer life of both conceptions of sovereignty and the workings of a popular politics, tracing their final manifestation in the great revolt of 1857.

Aurangzeb’s Law and Popular Politics

The discourse of sovereignty enunciated at the Mughal court had no place for the participation of its subjects. Yet, by the early eighteenth century, political protests had become visible in the cities of the empire across the historical record. How did this come to be? This chapter shows how Aurangzeb’s discourse of sovereignty privileging of the application of law (sharīʿa) set the terms of the relationship between the king and his subjects. While such legal intervention was designed to impose discipline on a society populated by unruly elites and commoners, an unintended consequence was the creation of new avenues through which urban communities engaged the state: Whether around questions of “justice” in urban disputes, or protests against the prices of food, or the imposition of the poll tax, the people of the empire’s cities began to increasingly demonstrate a capacity to challenge the king in the terms of his own discourse of sovereignty.

Poetry and the Public in Aurangzeb’s Delhi

In 1658, the emperor Aurangzeb began his long reign on the Mughal throne. This chapter shows how Aurangzeb’s vision of sovereignty diverged from that of his predecessors, in lessening the emphasis on the otherworldly gift of daulat and more on adherence with the law (sharīʿa). This process, which was accompanied by an increasing emphasis on Sunni piety at court and the broader development of a bureaucratic juridical infrastructure for the empire, was designed to subordinate the realm’s many Muslim communities into a unitary ‘Community of Muslims’ obedient to the emperor. But such interventions in Mughal society would also provoke a critical response, couched in the language of satire, and is apparent in the works of the poets Niʿmat Khan-i ʿAli and Mir Jaʿfar Zatalli, which are compared here. More broadly, this chapter argues, the forces of commercialization powered the circulation of the practices of satirical poetry between courtly assemblies and the wider world of the city, shaping an urban domain of public criticism that lay outside the control of imperial authority.

Sovereignty, City, and the People

In 1638 the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan embarked on his most ambitious architectural project: the building of a new Delhi in his own name. Beginning with a discussion of the development of a distinctly Mughal discourse of sovereignty centered on an ideal of the ruler’s heaven-granted fortune to rule (daulat), this chapter shows how the new city of Shahjahanabad was an enunciation of the discourse of sovereignty in bricks and mortar. A site of imperial power, Islamic piety, commercial prosperity, and urbane pleasure, the city was built to mediate an idealized relation between the king and the people. The second part of this chapter traces the unintended consequences of this act: the growth of a prosperous city, in which the forces of commerce caused the rise of new elites and the growth of a large and unruly underclass.

Islam as a Language of Popular Politics

By the 1720s, disorderly gatherings and protests appeared to have become an integral part of urban life in Delhi. This chapter shows how such tumults of the city marked acts of everyday political assertion by ordinary people. Relying on the gestures and practices of Islam to publicly demand “justice” in the face of “oppression,” such protests appropriated the ideal of the ‘Community of Muslims’ for their own ends. Accordingly this chapter examines a central gesture in such political protests: the popular interruption of the Friday sermon. Although it emerged in a moment of sectarian controversy in 1711, the act of interrupting the Friday sermon quickly came to serve as the key symbolic means by which the people challenged the enunciation of imperial sovereignty when it did not lend its support to them.

Daulat’s Flight

In 1719, a group of high noblemen from the clan of the Sayyids of Barha deposed the Mughal ruler Farrukh Siyar and replaced him with another prince. Such an act of unprecedented violence against the kingly body shook the established ideals of imperial authority. The regicide was understood, explained, debated, and justified in the admonitory histories that were written by observers of this moment of crisis, who vainly struggled to establish a new ideal of sovereignty. Yet the king and his nobility were not the only actors in this drama. For, as this chapter demonstrates, this convulsion of politics at the highest levels of the empire witnessed the forceful intervention of a new actor: the people of the city. While the popular action was dismissed by elite observers, these pages demonstrate how the city’s ordinary folk rejected the attempt by the nobility to change the structure of power.

Introduction

That the ordinary people were merely the passive objects of sovereign authority has long served as a chief axiom in the study of precolonial India. The following pages offer, by way of introduction, an argument to the contrary. While premodern urbanites in South Asia have received little historical attention, the common people of the city of Delhi—regarded as little better than animals by the imperial elite—nevertheless emerged as subjects in a regime that had no conception of their place in politics. Offering an analysis of the evolving relation between sovereignty and popular politics in the period, this book lays out in the starkest terms the heretofore-unrevealed potential of Delhi’s urbanites for concerted action in extraordinary circumstances. This introduction sets the stage in precolonial India and outlines the subjects of each of the book’s seven chapters.

The Shoemakers’ Riot and the Limits of Popular Politics

In 1729, a minor clash between a group of Muslim shoemakers and a Hindu jeweler in the streets of the city spiraled into an extraordinary urban tumult that led to fierce fighting and much bloodshed in the courtyard of the city’s congregational mosque. Offering a detailed study of the shoemakers’ riot, as the event came to be known, this chapter explores the possibilities—and the limits—of everyday popular politics in the Delhi of the early eighteenth century. Despite their artifactual nature, accounts of the riot offer invaluable insight into the actions and intentions of the city’s lowest inhabitants at a moment of urban crisis, and the goal of the historical reconstruction in this chapter will be to illuminate the tangled happenings of March 1729, while still preserving the multiplicity of meanings assigned to them. The shoemakers’ agitation cannot be neatly subsumed into the standard categories of economic conflict or sectarian hatred that have given us the conventional understanding of the period. Instead of closing the meanings of the event in narratives of “larger significance,” this chapter attempts to behold the city of the eighteenth century from the eyes of the shoemaker.

Anatomy of a Massacre

In 1739, the Iranian ruler Nadir Shah spearheaded a rapid invasion of the Mughal realm, which culminated with his occupation of the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) and the extraction of a vast tribute from the Mughal king Muhammad Shah and his nobles. While Nadir Shah’s brief time in Delhi is remembered for his sanguinary massacre of the city’s inhabitants, this chapter demonstrates that Nadir Shah’s violence was driven by a forgotten but large-scale popular uprising against his troops. Through a close analysis of the uprising and its aftermath, this chapter shows that by 1739, elites and commoners in Delhi had developed divergent views about Mughal kingship: While the nobility were happy to cooperate with Nadir Shah, the ordinary people of the city would not consent to any ruler other than their own.