How do politics and emotion intersect? How might our understandings of sovereignty change if we account for feelings and emotions? How is gender mobilized in assertions of sovereignty?
Making the Pakistani state and Pakistan-based Taliban her objects of study, Shenila Khoja-Moolji (Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Bowdoin College) contemplates these questions in her award-winning book, Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan (University of California Press, 2021), by paying particular attention to state and non-state cultural productions that shape national publics.
Join us to hear more!
Zahra Ayubi (Religion, Dartmouth College), Marya Hannun (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University) will be joining the author for this conversation.
This event is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Kyle Gardner
> > Lhost (she/her): All right! Hello everyone and welcome to our March Conversations on South Asia event here at Dartmouth College. It’s wonderful to see so many friends and colleagues in the audience here, especially as we approach the very end of winter quarter on Dartmouth’s campus. I’m really excited to be hosting today’s conversation featuring Kyle Gardner’s excellent work on the history and indeterminacy of the India-China border.
For those of you who are new to the series or don’t know me, I’m Elizabeth Lhost. I’m a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of History at Dartmouth College and one of the organizers for this year’s series. And it’s really a great pleasure to be moderating today’s conversation, which brings together three experts on South Asia who have divergent, yet very comparable, backgrounds in the region.
Before we begin our formal program and discussion, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which hosts this series, sits on the ancestral, unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who are members of the Wabanaki confederacy. I would also like to thank our series sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth, the Department of History, and the Dickey Center for International Understanding for their ongoing support of the series.
I would also like to give a special thanks to Professor Douglas Haynes for all the work that he does on campus to support South Asian programming and the Conversations on South Asia Series. And I would also like to applaud and thank Sri Sathvik Rayala, our Bodas Family Fellow and current Dartmouth undergraduate student, who is doing a lot of work behind the scenes, promoting and publicizing the series. In addition to hanging flyers on campus, sending emails, and managing our Instagram and other social media accounts, he’s always thinking of new ways to promote our programs on campus and to grow our audiences. So thank you, Sathvik, for doing that.
Today’s conversation features three panelists with extensive, distinguished careers in South Asia, history, foreign policy and government. I will introduce all of them now in the order they’ll be speaking and then we’ll get the formal program underway. So to kick things off, Kyle Gardner will provide a brief introduction into his research and his book. Dr. Gardner obtained his PhD in history with distinction from the University of Chicago, where he also served as a lecturer in the Department of History and the Social Sciences Division. In addition to writing the Frontier Complex, Gardner’s scholarship has also appeared in the Historical Journal, Himalaya: The Journal for the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, The Atlantic, The Hindustan Times, and India-China Brief, along with other outlets.
In 2018, he received the Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for excellence in teaching at the University of Chicago, and his research has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program. Dr. Gardner is currently a non-resident fellow at the Sigor Center for Asian Studies of the George Washington University, a term fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a senior associate for India and South Asia practice at McLarty Associates in Washington D. C.
Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao will be our first discussant responding to Gardner’s work. Ambassador Rao spent four decades in the Indian Foreign Service, holding several important appointments during her long and distinguished career. I can’t possibly summarize all of her accomplishments in the few minutes I have here today, so I’ll just highlight a few details that I think are particularly relevant for today’s conversation. Specializing in India’s relations with China, Ambassador Rao served in the Ministry of External Affairs: East Asia Division from 1984 to 1992, visited Tibet with the delegation led by then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, spent time at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairsat Harvard, where she focused on Asia-, Asia-Pacific affairs. In 2006, she became India’s first woman ambassador to China before serving as India’s Foreign Secretary in 2009, beginning in 2009. In 2011, she became India’s ambassador to the United States. And following her retirement, she has since held several academic appointments and fellowships in the US, including positions at Brown, Columbia and UC San Diego. And recently Ambassador Rao has published The Fractured Himalaya: India-Tibet-China 1949-62. She is also currently affiliated with the Wilson Center, where our third panelist, Michael Kugelman, is based.
Michael Kugelman is the Asia Program Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he oversees the center’s research, programming, and publications on the region. With interest and expertise in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and the US, including US foreign relations with the three, with the region, Kugelman maintains an active profile, writing the weekly South Asia brief for Foreign Policy and monthly commentaries for War on The Rocks. His writings regularly appear in the Wall Street Journal‘s think-tank blog, and he has also published commentaries for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, CNN.com, Bloomberg View,The Diplomat,Al Jazeera, and The National Interest. He is regularly interviewed about South Asian affairs by major media outlets, including TheNew York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Guardian,The Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic, BBC, CNN, NPR, Voice of America, among others.
He has also produced a number of publications on the region, including the edited volumes Pakistan’s Interminable Energy Crisis: Is There Any Way Out?, Pakistan’s Runaway Urbanization: What Can Be Done, and India’s Contemporary Security Challenges. He holds an MA in International Relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts and a BA in International Studies from the School of International Studies at American University.
So, after Dr. Gardner’s introduction, each of the discussants will provide roughly 10 minutes of reflections of the book, followed by discussion questions and answers from the audience. So please use the Q&A feature through Zoom to submit your questions.
And now, Kyle
> > Gardner: Thanks, Elizabeth! Let me just go ahead and share my screen. Right, well, thank you, can, can everyone see that? Let me, uh, come to presentation mode. Is that clear for everyone? Great, okay, well, thank you for that very kind introduction, Elizabeth and for the invitation to speak to you all today. Thank you all for attending.
Particularly, particularly looking forward to our discussion and so we’ll keep my introductory remarks brief. And, given that this is a [series focused] on South Asia, I will assume the audience has a certain degree of familiarity with the places I reference. But I also know that Ladakh occupies a somewhat peripheral place in the geography of South Asian studies and really even Himalayan studies, especially prior to the unfortunate events of June 2020. So, please chime in with questions or comments if I’m referencing anything that is unclear.
My book provides a history of three interrelated subjects, the first is Ladakh’s encounter with the British Empire. Ladakh is often overlooked in studies of South Asian frontiers, particularly during the colonial period, because it was relatively quiet compared with the turbulent Northwest Frontier where Russian imperial encroachment produced greater concern than Qing or Tibetan encroachment.
The second topic, focus of the book is a history of imperial border making in the Himalaya, a history that reflects a broader transformation of political space and territory. And this is the, certainly the most global dimension of the book, given the proliferation of frontier and border making among imperial powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But this is also an ironic aspect in the case of the Himalaya because, while the massive mountain range was long described as an ideal boundary making object by so-called frontier experts, it failed in significant segments to yield a satisfactory or precise border.
And that gets me to the final aspect of the book and the one of greatest contemporary relevance, which is that it provides the colonial backstory to the border dispute between India and China, one of the most divisive issues between the two giant neighbors during the last 73 years.
The goal of the book is to show how the transformation of the historical crossroads of Ladakh into a disputed borderland reflected a broader transformation of political space, one that tied abstract ideas of sovereignty to concrete practices of geography. The British did this, I argue, through a range of border making practices and concepts. This assemblage, this assemblage of practices and concepts is what I call the frontier complex.
So, this is just an overview of, of, of the particular chapters. But each of these practices and concepts is detailed in individual chapters in the book, and these include the development of border making principles, road building and intelligence gathering, the development of standardized forms of official information that reflect what I contend is an emergent geographical episteme. And, above all, the creation of so-called frontier experts who would come to practice and promote a geopolitical view of the world that emphasized the importance of strong scientific frontiers and borders for the, for the survival of the state. Many of these practices and ideas extended past 1947 and can still be seen in India and China’s approaches to border areas.
Now, given that the Sino, that Sino-Indian relations are top of mind today and without going into too much detail, I’ll just highlight a few pertinent aspects of the, from my book that have a bearing on the roots of the border dispute in Ladakh, and I’d be happy to focus on other aspects in the Q&A whether Ladakh’s relationship with Tibet, the intellectual origins of geopolitics, or the important roles played by roads, frontier experts, gazetteers, and even goats.
The book begins with precolonial Ladakh and draws on the Ladakhi sources to examine precolonial understandings of indigenous space and frontiers. It’s worth emphasizing that while Ladakh had long established historical border points, there was no historical sense of a single complete borderline encircling Ladakh. And this reflects the practical reality of a region defined by passes and trade routes, the name Ladakh, after all, literally means land of passes.
And here on this, this map, you can see, and I think if, if you can follow my cursor here, we have a number of, of sites that may be familiar to some who either know Ladakh or, or followed the dispute here, for instance, is Demchok. Over here in Kache or Kashmir, we have the Zoji Pass here. And so, this is a composite historical map that shows at, in some detail, the particular border points that, that we can discuss in the Q&A if, if of interest.
So, while linear borders are ubiquitous today, for much of the Himalaya and, indeed, much of the pre-modern world, there were not clearly defined linear territorial limits, and this, of course, proved unsatisfactory to the British. Soon after the British defeated the Sikh Empire in 1846, the governor general sent out boundary commissioners to survey its newly formed dependency of Jammu and Kashmir, which included Ladakh. The Rajas of Jammu, vassals of the Sikh Empire, had conquered Ladakh in the previous decade. And these commissioners were given instructions to use the limits of watersheds to guide their survey. The water parting line, the line of mountains or high ground that separated water flowing one way from water flowing another, became an ideal object to use for determining a border. Not just because [it] spared the use of artificial objects, such as pillars, but unlike rivers, water partings and mountain ranges generally tended to separate distinct communities, or at least this was the logic used by the frontier experts developing these principles.
The northern limits of the Indus became, by the end of the 19th century, the stated northern boundary of British India, despite the failure to survey and demarcate much of it. The water partying principle, as the theory came to be known, was eventually applied around the world and to many segments of India’s, India’s mountainous periphery reflected with some infamy, by the names of the administrators associated with them, for instance, Durand, the Durand Line in the Northwest or the McMahon Line in the Northeast.
And the principal cause of the failure to apply the water principle of, water parting principle in Ladakh was the complex topography of eastern Ladakh and the western Tibetan plateau. In this region, there’s no single mountain range to provide the guiding line for a would-be border.
Ladakh and the broader and Western Himalayan region is part of a topographical tangle of mountains hundreds of miles wide, and this complex of mountains and high plateaus are a far cry from the linear image of the Himalayas so often depicted on maps.
And the map that resulted from the first boundary commissions to Ladakh did not instill much confidence. The first map to do so, oh sorry that’s a detail of these border points, here’s the Johnson map. The first map to represent a northern and eastern border came from a survey in 1865 carried out by William Johnson, who would later become the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir’s appointed wazir-e-wazarat in Ladakh. The resulting map, published in 1867 and shown here, did not identify water partings nor did it sketch in more than a sort of rough perimeter of mountains. And, as it turned out, not only does the Indus watershed limit not coincide with the ring of mountains that formed the proposed eastern border here, but subsequent surveys and satellite images revealed that much of the sketched ring of mountains here did not even exist, as you can see from this Google satellite image of roughly the same, roughly the same region. Here is Pangong Tso in the bottom left.
Subsequent surveys, official memoranda and unrequited requests to the Qing Empire to agree to a border in eastern Ladakh and the Aksai Chin resulted in a range of conflicting border lines that were depicted on small scale maps, but never com- comprehensively surveyed on the ground. And I’d be happy to discuss comparisons to the McMahon line in the eastern Himalaya during the Q&A.
When India won its independence in 1947, it also inherited maps that were in many cases, literally borderless. Following China’s occupation of Tibet and the signing of the Sino-Indian agreement in 1954, Jawaharlal Nehru ordered India’s external boundary to be shown as definite.
This decision cemented India’s claim to the Aksai Chin, a region, it should be noted, that was never permanently inhabited by anyone. This is a an arid, high-altitude plateau, described in 1888 by one unfortunate Scottish trader weeks before his murder on the Karakoram Pass as a, and I quote, “howling desolate waste.”
So, the last point I should make before I stop is that the book provides what I hope to be a comprehensive prologue to the ongoing border dispute. It does not in any way assume that today’s dispute was predestined because of that imperial legacy. Many excellent histories, including Ambassador Rao’s new book, provide the greater geopolitical and diplomatic context in the years between the birth of the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China and the war in 1962.
And I would, I would also emphasize that there’s a, there’s a distinction to be made between the root causes of the border disputes and the causes of the war in 1962. They are of course related in many aspects, but the causes of the 1962 were also involved with different range of variables and dynamics.
My book aims to set the stage for that tragic drama, but it doesn’t seem to explain how or why those actors trust their parts, but I think I’m over my time so I’ll stop right there.
> > Rao: Shall I come on now?
> > Lhost: Yes, thank you Kyle. Ambassador Rao.
> > Rao: Thank you, thank you Kyle, and thank you Elizabeth. It’s wonderful to be a part of this panel discussion today. I’d like to first, congratulate Kyle on an extremely well researched and in-depth study of the subject of the making of frontiers in Ladakh. It’s the first of its kind in decades, and I believe deserves our very serious attention, especially since after the tragic events in Galwan in eastern Ladakh in June of 2020, this whole frontier land, this whole border area has been very sharply in focus. And, and we are talking, today, of a Line of Actual Control in the area where Indian and Chinese troops are in very close confrontation. The military commanders have been having frequent meetings in order to de-escalate and disengage. It had, that has been achieved in a few pockets, but there are other parts of the Line of Actual Control where this disengagement has yet to take place, so tensions run high. And, you know, the, the danger of a conflagration or a conflict, military conflict, remains very, very, very much a tangible possibility.
India and China have a relationship, today, that’s very low on trust, I would say completely absent on trust and mutual understanding. And, in many ways the, efforts made over the last three decades to build a management regime for this relationship that would control tensions along the border and maintain peace and tranquility which, indeed, it had succeeded in achieving, all that structure has, in a sense, dissipated, and we are pretty much at, with a blind slate at the moment, as far as dealing with the issue is concerned.
Now, when you talk with the border in Ladakh, this is where the border dispute between India and China really began in the late 1950s when the Chinese built a road in the area. That the famous Aksai Chin Highway, Highway 219 as its, as its referred to by the Chinese. And over the years, since the discovery of that highway, the Chinese engaged in an eastward expansion of their claim area, which finally amounted to more or less the line at which they are today, which I must say, the last two years, appears to be advancing once again.
So we really don’t know the motives for this. The line has never really been jointly defined by India and China. What the, what we say in India, when we talk about it in Parliament, is that the Chinese are in occupation of about 38,000 square kilometers of India’s territory in the Ladakh region. Now, I found Kyle’s book very fascinating for the reason that, of course, I’m very interested in the subject having dealt with it while in the Foreign Office, and I continue to to read about it and to follow developments in the area.
But his account of how colonial practices and ideas have helped to shape postcolonial borders, I think is extremely relevant and he, and he, he refers to the emotionally charged ideas that especially we in India have about frontier making and about the border lines as they exist today. The Ladakh region, as it were, is, is, is a bit understudied in, in all these, in all these accounts, we have of the frontier. But the human landscape and the physical landscape, both of which Kyle refers to really encompasses a once vibrant borderland, a contact zone between Xinjiang, between Tibet, and between Kashmir and of which Ladakh has been apart, at least in the last 150 to 60 years.
Today, of course, Ladakh, as again Kyle speaks of, is a marginalized kind of territory. It was once a busy meeting point of trade and cultural and religious and spiritual activity between India, Central Asia, particularly Turkestan, Afghanistan, and Tibet. And all that for many of the people of the younger generation remains shrouded in the form of history. Today we have the militarization of Ladakh, which occupies, occupies the spotlight and the frontiers of the mind, as Bérénice Guyot-Réchard puts it.
Now, again, Kyle’s book spoke to me in its definition of the birth of geopolitics, that marriage of geography and politics to serve the needs of empire and its expansion. And the border-making principles that were put in place by the British, particularly the principle of the watershed, continues to define in many senses our own approach in India to frontier-making, to the definition of border lines and the way in which the Indian border claims are defined vis-à-vis the Chinese. The Chinese have a different approach. You know, they would like to add to the concept of the watershed the issue of passes and river valleys, for instance, in the definition of boundary, boundary lines.
Again the, Kyle spoke in his remarks about the indeterminate, indefinite nature of the boundary in this area inherited by, by India in 1947. The British had been content with this ambiguity, but that vagueness was obviously not acceptable to the modern Indian nation state, which could ill afford that level of ambiguity in representing, again, something Kyle calls the country’s geo-body. And the details of the momentous decisions taken by India post-independence to show this boundary as firm and definite and not open to question are all well known to us. But the Chinese knew even less, I believe, of this expansive territory, and they proceeded on the basis of steadily and stealthily advancing occupation in the 1950s rather than historical evidence or principle in effecting possession.
Another aspect that spoke to me was the issue of connectivity and the tools of connectivity. Now, the roads, the Hindustan-Tibet Road, for instance, in the central sector of the boundary, was conceived as a free and unobstructed road to Central Asia and Tibet. But today, roads, far from linking peoples across borders, have become defense and security enhancers, enabling troop ability, first and foremost, and keeping out the foreigner and the transgressor. And I just referred to the Aksai Chin Highway, which is an instance of a communication artery that excludes rather than facilitates human contact, connoting a barrier, rather than a passage, not what roads are essentially meant to be.
And another issue which I thought I should highlight is the whole question of the Ladakhi consciousness, especially when today this talk of restoration, you know, there are lots of rumors and reports about a possible restoration of Article 370, and I wonder how Ladakh is going to react to that.
Ladakhi consciousness really has never wanted links with the Kashmir problem and is sensitive to the manner in which Ladakh is treated, and Kyle refers to it. He talks of Kushok Bakula [Rinpoche], that almost mythical figure, Ladakhi spiritual leader, whose voice was very much heard also in the geopolitical space. His eminence and stature made him a powerful spokesperson for his people, and he wrote the Prime Minister Nehru, Kyle refers to this, in 1951 how if Ladakh could not merge automatically with India in the event of a possible plebiscite in Kashmir, that could see the valley secede: “our people,” and I quote him, “our people will seek political union with Tibet, which, in spite of our political connection with Jammu and Kashmir state for the last hundred and twenty years, has continued to be the great inspirer and controller of our spiritual life and which, whatever our political affiliations, must be looked upon as our eternal and inalienable home.
You know rather weighty words, those. So this, again, illustrates, I think, the complex nature of Ladakh itself. We often focus on the Kashmir issue, but there is this whole, you know, contiguous problem, contiguous quests on the questions raised in terms of where Ladakh stands, what it status is, how it regards its future, and its own identity. So, the border, as Lord Curzon, said, is today, between India and China, is the razor’s, razor’s edge on which life suspended questions of war and peace, especially between nations, such as India and China, because both, both these Asian giants contend today to impose their own lines of control on these spaces and I’ll stop here. Thank you.
> > Lhost: Thank you, Ambassador Rao. Michael.
> > Kugelman: Well, thanks, very much Elizabeth. It’s great to be a part of this discussion, have great respect for Kyle’s scholarship and really honored to be part of this conversation. His book is a terrific contribution to the literature, and I think such a strong validation of that, that evergreen truism that history matters, understanding such a complicated issue as the India-China border crisis, border dispute really requires knowing the history of it. And his book really does a great job of providing that essential historical context, and I should say that Ambassador Rao’s book does as well, for that matter, in similar, albeit in somewhat different ways.
So I am, I have just one question for Kyle, stemming from his book if he cares to, to respond during the discussion before I provide some broader thoughts triggered by the book and Kyle’s comments this afternoon, and it’s a very specific question. So, the book refers briefly, as I recall, to two agreements, two treaties that had been used to help set boundaries for the border, the Treaty of Amritsar in 1846 and a much older, earlier treaty, the Treaty of Tingmosgang for the 17th century. So what is the status of these agreements, today, are they dead, how are they seen by the two governments, how are they seen by local, how are they remembered by local communities in the borderlands? Are they seen as relevant? Just curious if you have any thoughts about how those agreements are perceived today, if you choose to, to, to address that comment, that question.
So, being a, a South Asia regional analyst, someone who tries to keep an eye on all of South Asia, as difficult as that is to do, for obvious reasons I would think, thought I would just zoom out a bit and share some thoughts about the region on the whole that were triggered by by the book. Three three brief comments.
First, this idea of the India-China border being fraught and unsettled in present times because of the inability of colonial regime to properly demarcate the border or simply because of the actions, more generally, of colonial regimes, but this is clearly an idea an ocean that resonates beyond the India-China border and clearly the story of partition, the independence of India and Pakistan, the resulting crisis over Kashmir is really so interwoven with the actions of the British during the final period of the colonial era. And of course it has an incredibly different history from the China-India border, but as equally complex and contested. And it features the same basic reality of a disputed border, deep rooted disagreements over territoriality that have constituted a fundamental constraint to the broader relationship.
And certainly there have been dialogues at times, there’ve been ceasefires meant to manage tensions on the Line of Control. But these have not managed to address some of the core drivers of those tensions on the Line of Control separating India and Pakistan administered Kashmir.
And then there’s the, the Durand Line, which of course separates Pakistan and Afghanistan, and which, so far as I know, no Afghan Government has accepted as legitimate since the emergence of the state of Pakistan. The impact of colonial era on this border can be seen so starkly by effect that the very name of the border is that of a top British colonial official who was involved in negotiations to try to delimit the border between Afghanistan and colonial India. And you know we’ve seen this border heat up in recent months with the Taliban forcefully stopping Pakistani soldiers from building a fence along it, an indication that the Taliban, much like the governments that it has fought as an insurgency, rejects that border.
And this has become a notable tension point in a relationship between Islamabad and Kabul in the Taliban era, which many in Islamabad thought would be a relatively smooth one given the Taliban’s friendly relations and deep ties to, to Pakistan over the years.
I think it’s notable, just from a linguistic standpoint, that the term that is used to describe these fraught borders—line, the Line of Actual Control, Line of Control, Durand Line—it sounds like such a harmless term, such an innocuous term, but in fact it can be code for something so complex and indeed at times explosive.
A second brief observation is that this discussion of colonial Britain’s role in shaping the India-China border, as it is today, think amplifies the lasting legacy that the Raj continues to have in the neighborhood more broadly, India and also Pakistan. And I know that for, for this audience, which features a number of South Asia themed historians, this is no news, it’s nothing new, but I think it’s important to amplify nonetheless that we’re talking about an impact that goes far beyond borders and territorial disputes and extends into the realm of law and society.
And I think the two examples that come to mind, in particular, are the blasphemy law and sedition law. Of course, these are colonial era laws that were retained and, to a degree, toughened by free, postcolonial governments in India and Pakistan in ways that have oftentimes badly undermined rights and freedom. Pakistan’s blasphemy law, of course, was inherited from the British, it is today, it has been for quite some time exploited by religious militants and other hardliners to wrongly accuse religious minorities of offending Islam and this trend is particularly troubling today given that the new radical political parties embracing the blasphemy law as their main platform have emerged and become a part of the Pakistani political mainstream. And in India, that the sedition law, again something inherited from the colonial era, it’s used to target or frequently used to target peaceful critics of state policy.
So the irony here is that deep deeply nationalistic and proud governments on the subcontinent and many of their supporters have weaponized colonial era tools to target dissidents, state critics, and the vulnerable.
Third and final observation, getting back to the issue of borders, is that in, in South Asia, it seems that everywhere, nearly everywhere, borders are fraught and not just borders that came about, uh, as a result of colonial era machinations. It seems that there are relatively few quiet frontiers in the region. Disputes of various intensity are seemingly baked into them all. India and Pakistan both have multiple contested borders. The India-Nepal border has seen trouble in recent years. India-China border disputes in recent years have drawn in Bhutan, as we saw with the Doklam standoff some years ago. Bhutan’s border with China has had some issues. And it’s not just territory that is the cause of these tensions along borders in the region, terrorism, cross-border terrorism, cross-border insurgency, violence, this has been a long standing issue on the India-Pakistan and Afghanistan-Pakistan borders and also on the borders that serve as gateways to other regions, the Pakistan border with Iran, the India border with Myanmar.
Another trigger for border tensions, particularly in more recent years, is migration. We’ve seen this on the India-Bangladesh border with India having built a border fence in Assam to deter illegal immigration from Bangladesh. Afghan refugees coming to Pakistan and to Iran have caused tensions in these countries as well.
And I would argue that a third, particularly significant trigger of tensions along borders in South Asia has been water, and this is going to become even more pronounced. It’s quite striking that many of the region’s transboundary rivers pass through or originate in contested or disputed areas. So the Tibetan plateau, where four key rivers, including the Indus and the Sutlej, they spring to life here, providing water to 1.5 billion people downstream. The Tibetan plateau is controlled by China and abuts the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which, is of course, claimed by China. The rivers of the Indus basin flow through Kashmir. So no wonder that many of the riparian pairings of South Asia, so to speak, reflect troubled relationships in the region. The Indus River flows from India to Pakistan. The Kabul River flows from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Of course, the Brahmaputra flows from China to India.
And, more broadly, many people in, in South Asia depend on water supplies that originate beyond their borders. They are dependent on others. 91% of Bangladesh’s water resources come from beyond its borders, which is remarkable, and that figure is 75% for Pakistan. So two countries totaling nearly 400 million people depend so heavily on water resources that originate elsewhere. And also, aside from the relative success of the Indus Waters Treaty, many of the region’s water, trans-boundary water treaties have not been properly implemented or have been the source of disputes.
The Teesta River Accord between India and Bangladesh has been in draft form for decades. The Ganges River Accord is constrained by a dispute over the Farakka Barrage between India and Bangladesh. And I think the water issue could prove to be an increasingly serious source of border related tensions in the decades ahead. South Asia is one of the world’s most climate change vulnerable countries. Water scarcity is really all but inevitable in many parts of the region. And so, with river water becoming increasingly scarce, the stakes could rise with transboundary water disputes, meaning that the risk of people resorting to the use of violence to address these disputes in the coming decades could go up.
And you know to wrap up the border tensions of South Asia, I think, amplify what I think is one of the most long standing challenges for the region, one that has constrained development and prosperity for many years, and that is a lack of connectivity and integration. Intra-regional trade is rife with potential, but in reality is woefully low. The lack of regional engagement and commerce in South Asia as a product of various factors, bad infrastructure, for one, a lack of effective regional organizations for another. But poor political and diplomatic relations are a big reason too. And these bad relations are in many cases rooted in these long standing border disagreements.
So to go back to Kyle’s book, I think one can argue that one can perhaps draw a line, no pun intended, a meandering line, perhaps, but nonetheless a line, extending from colonial era rooted drivers of territorial disputes to the contemporary struggles of one of the world’s most populous regions to achieve more prosperity and well being. So I’ll end there, thank you.
> > Lhost: Wonderful! Thank you, Michael.
Kyle, would you like to respond to any of those comments and questions while we gather input from the audience? And audience members, please use the Q&A feature to submit your questions.
> > Gardner: Yes, well, I’m happy to. Thank you, both, first and foremost, for those very thoughtful, very, very eloquent comments on, on both my book and the larger context that, that it, that it rests in. Conscious of Elizabeth’s plea to keep my response somewhat succinct, I’ll just touch upon a few of them, and maybe move, move sort of backwards, starting with Michael’s comments first.
I think your point about water is, is, is very well taken and, and in the fact that, that the Tibetan plateau and Himalaya is Asia’s water tower and indirectly feeds nearly, nearly half of the world’s population—47%, if you extend all of those rivers from, from source to sea—as it were—and, and the point about water, lack of water sharing agreements as well is taken. Although it is, although it’s seen its fair share of problems, it is notable that Asia’s one really long-standing successful water sharing agreement is between India and Pakistan and has managed to survive multiple wars.
I don’t think you would in an audience that has several historians and historians of the British Empire, I don’t think anyone would dispute your point, Michael, that, that the legacy of the British Empire, is still very much in play today.
To, to your question about the legacy of the treaties mentioned, so in, in, in fact, there are, there are really sort of three notable historical treaties worth mentioning. The first, the Treaty of Tingmosgang in in 1684, was, was noted, notable in so far as it established, it established a, one of these border points which is represented actually on the map that I showed near Demchok. And it the, the description is, is quite brief. It, it basically marks, it says in the, in the Tibetan Ladakhi that the, the, the sum–the border—rests near the Lha-ri stream, which is near Demchok. So to the point about border points existing in the kind of premodern world, this, this is not a particularly detailed description, but it did establish among many notable long lasting dynamics between Tibet and Ladakh a reciprocal trade and tribute mission that lasted, actually, well, technically, the last trade mission of the lopchak was in 1950, although there were only four, four traders participating at that point, indicative of a long slow decline in the Ladakh-Tibet trade. That is, I would argue, is is somewhat [the] responsibility of of the British and some of the, the practices and restrictions that they, they attempted to enforce, albeit very, very imperfectly.
But that Treaty established this first sort of relationship and vague idea of a border. Subsequently, that was reaffirmed in the Treaty of Chushul in 1842 between the Sikh Empire and the, the Llama guru of Lhasa, aka the Dalai Lama. And that, again, did not provide any more detailed description of the border, except saying that sort of such as it was so will it be.
Then the Treaty of Amritsar, which you referenced, which was the result of the end of the first Anglo-Sikh War, which created the state of Jammu and Kashmir, that in turn kind of created this new state which, which was an assemblage of both Ladakh and the Kashmir valley and Jammu given to the Dogras Rajas of Jammu for effectively siding with the the the British during the war against their, against the Sikh empire.
These were respected, and in fact when and as Ambassador Rao notes in her book, these, one of the assertions that Nehru and others made following independence was that the boundaries, the customary boundaries ought to be respected. And, of course, this then raises a problem of well if the customary boundaries were you know, like the Treaty of Tingmosgang in referencing you know, a specific point, then there really was no detailed, detailed complete borderline and this gets to, to the broader problem of you know, the, the British insistence on a linear mapable borderline in a region that that never had those articulated.
And you know, as ambassador Rao, mentioned in her, in her comments that the Chinese did know even less, and in some sense, it is, this whole undertaking of unilateral border making was destined, in some sense, although historians don’t like to use that term, was destined to produce problems because it takes two sides to make a border, and when you have the British going out and insisting on a, a concept of a border that was distinct from what existed, then you run into trouble too.
I am so glad Ambassador Rao that you raised the, the Kushok Bakula Rinpoche because you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to extend the scope of the book beyond 1947 was because I wanted to emphasize that for Ladakh, there was this, you know, intense period of uncertainty following 1947. And, you know, there were, there were, I mean some very, very strongly worded statements from Bakula Rinpoche or those supporting him, you know, preference to, you know, we would rather, we would rather join Tibet than be thrown into the fiery hell of Pakistan or you know these rhetoric that you know, in part, was, I think, meant to to get Nehru’s attention and the government’s attention.
But, but, it also, I think, reflects the sheer indeterminacy of that, of those early years and, of course, for an audience familiar with South Asian history we don’t need to detail, just the, the upheaval, the integration of princely states, the violence, massive displacement of partition, and so forth. But, but I think one of the, the real reasons that I did want to extend to 1962, even though it, by doing so, it brings in all of these sort of additional geopolitical variables and nationalism was because I really did want to touch upon the you know the, the, the challenge faced by Ladakh and Ladakhis and its leaders and the, the, the final imposition of an actual, effective border only coming with the Line of Actual Control following the the war in ‘62.
Lots more points to respond to and including the, my total agreement with both of you on the points about the lack of connectivity. I think that is, that is absolutely, you know, a, both, both the result of the, the, the problem of borders being enforced and, and used, I think, as really a front line for more aggressive nationalistic states, but also in the practical sense of roads no longer connecting but, but actually being used to to divide people, but I should stop there and see what questions we have.
> > Lhost: Yeah, thanks Kyle. Your, your, the book, but also some of Michael’s discussions about water and rivers, got me thinking about the boundary markers that separate the state of New Hampshire from the state of Vermont and the boundary markers are located on land, at least some of the ones that are by a trail that I walk along, on the Vermont side of the Connecticut river, but they actually refer to the the line being off the boundary marker. And so, if you go to Google maps, you get just a neat line down the middle of the River, sometimes it’s right on the bank of Vermont showing like who controls the river, whose space that is, and it just seems to bring together a lot of the discussion that you have in a book about the way that representing space also reflects certain ideas about how the space is either owned, occupied, or possessed, or used. Just sort of bringing that home to New England.
However, we have a lot of questions coming in, so I won’t blather on anymore.
Benjamin Hopkins asks if you can say a bit about how your work fits within the burgeoning field of frontier discussions within the framework of British India but also perhaps frontier studies more broadly. And if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe also borderlands studies, if you’d like to engage with those ideas.
> > Gardner: Yeah, thanks! Thanks, Ben and also a plug for Ben’s award winning book, which I’m blanking on the title, but it involves the savage periphery, savage in scare quotes, I think. Why am I blanking on Ben’s book? But it just won the Coomaraswamy Award from the, from the AAS. So, congrats, Ben! The, wait, Ruling the Savage Periphery, there, sorry.
So I would situate, well, A, I think that Ben, this is a somewhat leading question because you are, one of, I would, I would say, one of the leading figures of what has been a real revival, a revitalization of frontier history, particularly in a more comparative context and, and I think the, there are sort of two points that I hope my work sort of addresses. One is in a, in a sort of sense in, it fills a gap, which is not the most inspiring argument to make necessarily for, for one’s research, but I think, in this case, it really does fill in an important absence in the study of colonial South Asian frontiers, precisely because the Ladakh frontier was very much a sort of relatively pacific frontier when compared to some of the more volatile ones in the Northwest frontier, which Ben’s work has focused on, as well as the Northeast where work by Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Thomas Simpson, and, and others, has, has really, really opened up new and exciting of avenues of inquiry.
To the question of borderland studies, I think one of the, one of the contentions that I make is that borderland studies can in some sense be a, a vague and imprecise catch all, and I think the, the, the hope that I sort of offer in my book is that if we focus borderlands a little bit more specific, on the specifically, on the, the, the defining object of a borderland, i.e. the border, then we, I think, have a better, a better means of examining those dynamics particular to what we might call borderlands because I think there’s always the, right, with terms like frontier and even borderland, I think there’s, there’s an inevitable risk of replicating the imprecision of the category by, by sort of falling into the kind of polysemic character of these, of these terms. So I hope at least that my work offers maybe one way of, of a maybe slightly more objective approach to borderlands studies and frontiers by looking at exactly how they’re made.
> > Lhost: Yeah, thanks Kyle! [We have] a question that I think really gets to the first couple of chapters of the book and asks whether you can say a bit more about precolonial understandings of Ladakh and how precolonial sources envision Ladakh as a territory and maybe say a bit about whether there are any continuities between those precolonial imaginaries and what happened to the colonial and the postcolonial period in terms of thinking, thinking about Ladakh as a region.
> > Gardner: Yeah, so one of the things I outline in, in my, in my first chapter is the, the multiple ways in which precolonial Ladakhis conceived of space, that in some sense were not there when- in the imperial vision that the British imposed. And this includes, you know, the really rich and very cosmological dimensions that, that tied- to get- tied Ladakh not just to the greater sort of Tibetan Buddhist world, but also really shaped local conceptions and understandings of space. So, you know, for the British who are primarily looking at mountains, from the perspective of a kind of boundary object, I wanted to emphasize that, that, of course, when people look at a mountain, they see, those who are able to see, see a mountain, but the, the fact that Ladakhis also had very kind of rich cosmological associations with the deities inhabiting mountains and those mountains, and the deities associated with them, being sources of water for, for villages and connecting village level cosmological space.
Also, to the point about you know passes and again emphasizing that you know, Ladakh is literally, the name, defined by its passes, speaks also to you know, a concept of space connecting networks of, of, of trade routes that were very much seasonally dependent. People moved when the snow cleared on the passes, and people were, were frozen in place during, during the winter months.
So I think that, the one of the, one of the things that I, that the book tries to do is really emphasize the, that the competition between different visions of space and how the imperial project was an imposition of a particular kind of political, territorial conception of space that that overlooked a richer and more diverse assortment of of understandings.
> > Lhost: Thanks, Kyle. We have a question from Galen Murton, who asks whether you might be willing to reflect on the other part of the India-China border, so looking eastward, and whether, to what extent do you consider recent Chinese border village development around Doklam to be a repeat performance and part of an ongoing Chinese strategy of making and claiming territory [through] settlement in the building of infrastructure, how is what’s happening in sort of eastern India, along that region, different from what happened in the Aksai Chin in the years leading up to the 1962 war, and maybe and how other, in what other ways is it different from what happened in the, in the Northwest versus the Northeast?
> > Gardner: Well, conscious of the, the time here, I, I probably won’t attempt to address each of those and, in fact, would probably do, do better passing that, that question off to Ambassador Rao here, but since I am, I suppose on the hot seat here, I can, I can take kind of take a bit of a stab at it.
You know, I think the, the Northeast, on the one hand, it has a, there is a clearer sense of a, of a border line. That is to say, not that the Chinese agree with the use of the term but and refer to it as the illegal McMahon Line, but there is a clearer and less varied conception of, of a would be border that, that up until I would say the last decade appeared to be respected by both sides, even if not officially agreed to. And, in part, that’s because it more successfully applies the water parting principle, although there are some noticeable, notable segments where that is not the case in the Northeast.
But recent, and in recent years, with, with some of the things that Galen noted, the appearance of, of Chinese villages, either potentially within claimed, within the claim lines or very close to [them], I think there is a sense that we are now seeing a more, I think the diplomatic term is assertive behavior, on the part of, on the part of the Chinese to, you know, to, to push India on those.
If that becomes the primary zone of contest I, I will just say that I think there are substantially more variables in play in the Northeast than there are in Ladakh and Aksai Chin, uninhabited except for the unfortunate soldiers stationed there. The Northeast, its populace, diverse populations, it also brings into play the politics around the Dalai Lama, particularly in the case of Tawang.
And so, if, and, of course, with water, as Michael noted, with the Brahmaputra moving through there and, and occasional concerns being raised about the possibility of, of the Chinese diversion on the great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo, as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet, that could incorporate it, it could incorporate some of those waters into this great sort of South-North diversion project that, that China has been working on for some years.
So, I think the Northeast is a very, it’s a concerning potential zone of, of conflict and certainly one that I think you should be paying close attention to.
> > Lhost: On that note, I would like to invite everyone to, to thank our discussants and panelists for joining us for this discussion. I would like to invite all of you to join us for our next event which will be on Tuesday, April 12 featuring Jessica Namakkal’s Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India, and you can register for that event, using the link that Sathvik just put in the chat.
So, thank you, Kyle, for sharing your work with us, and thank you, Ambassador Rao and Michael [Kugelman] for joining us for this discussion today. We hope to see you all back here next month.
With all of the attention given to Britain’s interventions in India, France’s colonial projects in South Asia are often ignored and overlooked.
In Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Columbia University Press, 2021), historian Jessica Namakkal (Duke University) uses French India’s scattered territories to draw attention to the problematic discourses of “good” and “bad” colonialism and examines settler-colonial spaces like ashrams and utopian communities to show how experiences of decolonization linger after the end of imperial rule. Join us to learn more!
Sana Aiyar (History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Ananya Jahanara Kabir (English Literature, King’s College), and Jayita Sarkar (International Relations, Boston University) will be joining the author for this conversation.
This event is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
For decades, India and China have been uneasy neighbors, wrestling over shared claims to the region of Ladakh. From the war in 1962 that established the line of actual control (LAC) to a recent skirmish in summer 2020, questions over how to draw the India-China border continue to plague national interests and international security.
Join the author, in conversation with Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao (former Indian Foreign Secretary) and Michael Kugelman (Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center), to learn more.
Elizabeth Lhost (Dartmouth College) will moderate the discussion.
This event is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | the Dickey Center for International Understanding | and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
For centuries, mosques have been a site for Muslim worship, study, socializing, and so much more. They have also been hotly contested, fiercely guarded, and debated with great animosity.
What can legal disputes tell us about the history of Muslim worship? How did battles over mosques and endowments redraw the lines of sectarianism—and secularism—in South Asia?
Following a series of court cases and legal contests involving congregational sites from across the subcontinent, in The Mosques of Colonial South Asia: A Social and Legal History of Muslim Worship (I. B. Tauris, 2021), historian Sana Haroon (University of Massachusetts Boston) shows how mosques became sites of social influence and control across the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.
Join us on Tuesday, February 8 from 12:15–1:15 pm ET to hear more.
Archaeologist Mudit Trivedi (Anthropology, Stanford University) and legal scholar Adnan Zulfiqar (Rutgers Law School) will be joining as discussants.
Elizabeth Lhost (History, Dartmouth College) will moderate the conversation.
Event attendees may use the following discount codes when purchasing a copy of the book from the publisher MCSA35UK (for UK and Europe orders) and MCSA35US (for US orders).
The Conversations on South Asia Series is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian, Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
For those who weren’t able to join us for this event, here’s the recording and transcript. Enjoy!
Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Abhishek Kaicker
>> Lhost: All right, hello everyone and welcome to the first event in the Conversations on South Asia Series for the 2021 academic year here at Dartmouth College. I am Elizabeth Lhost. I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College and also a historian of modern South Asia, and it’s really my pleasure to be moderating this conversation today. I imagine that it will be a very stimulating and productive conversation since Abhishek has written such a wonderful and detail-filled book The King and The People, which was published with Oxford University Press in 2020.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which is the host of this series, sits on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who are members of the Wabanaki Confederacy. I would also like to thank our series sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages program, and the Department of History for supporting this program.
And I’d especially like to thank Bruch Lehmann and Britny Town for their support with logistics. I would also like to thank our series co-organizer Professor Douglas Haynes for his tireless support and also to acknowledge the support and assistance we’ve received this year from two of our undergraduate Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund Fellows: Sri Sathvik Rayala and Bryanna Entwistle. They are working with us this year to make the series more accessible and also more successful, we hope.
We have a fantastic lineup of authors and books, who will be joining us for this series this year. Our next event in the series for those who are anxious to put it on the calendar and also to get registered will be Tuesday, November 9th with Mytheli Sreenivas’s Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India.
If you’d like to get a jump start, registration for that event is available at the link https://dartgo.org/conversations-sreenivas and very soon, we should have that link in the chat for all of you.
And then, in December we’ll be hosting Nicole Karapanagiotis for a discussion of her book Branding Bhakti:Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement.
And so we’ll have those links in the chat for you so that you can access them more easily.
Today we have Abhishek Kaicker, who is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of History there, and he’s a historian of Persianate South Asia from roughly 1200 to 1900, with a focus on the history of the Mughal Empire. Interested in intellectual history, the history of concepts, early modern global history, religion, politics, and continuities in pre-colonial on post-colonial South Asia, Kaicker has recently published his first book, which is the subject of our discussion today, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi. He has also written essays concerning the Mughal Empire, including “The Little Conquest of the Red Fort,” “Petitions and Local Politics in the Late Mughal Empire: The View from Kol,” and “The Promises and Perils of Courtly Poetry: The Case of Mir ‘Abd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in the Late Mughal Empire.”
So, once we get started, the author will spend about 10 minutes introducing the book and its central claims to all of us, and then following his conversation, we’ll have commentary, questions, and reflections from two discussants. Tiraana Bains will be our first discussant. Tiraana is the Modern Intellectual History Postdoctoral Fellow in Dartmouth’s Department of History. She is a historian of South Asia, Britain, and the British Empire, and her research focuses on questions of empire, statecraft, labor, and political economy as it concerns both South Asians and the British. Her recent publications include “Thinking the Empire Whole” and “Reconnecting the Global British Empire: Response to Critics.” She is currently working on her book Instituting Empire: The Contested Makings of a British Imperial State in South Asia, 1750-1800, which looks at the growth of British imperialism in and around the Indian Ocean basin.
Our second discussant then will be Fariba Zarinebaf, who is a Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. She primarily researches the Middle East, particularly the social and urban history of the Ottoman Empire and Iran from the early modern to modern periods.
Professor Zarinebaf [has] published several books, including Mediterranean Encounters: Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata and Women on the Margins: Gender, Charity, and Justice in the Early Modern Middle East. Her Crime and Punishment in Istanbul, 1700-1800 book filled a crucial gap in Ottoman Studies and is directly connected, I think, in part, to the discussion of urban politics and the the rise of cities in this time period that [we] will be talking about with Abhishek’s book today. She has also published numerous articles, including “Capitulations and the Rise of an Ottoman Bourgeoisie: A Command Economy in Transition?” and “Policing Morality: Crossing Gender and Communal Boundaries in an Age of Political Crisis and Religious Controversy in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul.” So, once the three panelists have shared their comments, we will then open the floor to questions from the audience.
You should have access to the Q&A feature at the bottom of the webinar, and we will do our best to make sure the author and the commentators have a chance to answer your questions. And now, without further delay, please welcome Professor Kaicker.
>> Kaicker: So, shall I begin? Great well, thank you so much Elizabeth for the invitation to virtually visit Dartmouth. I wish it were in-person and am very sorry not to be in a beautiful campus in the fall. And thank you to Fariba and Tiraana for your responses that I’m eager to hear, much more eager to hear than my own very soon scattered comments. And, just a quick welcome to all of the people who are attending today. I see many familiar names, ranging from the entirety of my academic career from college, from the very beginning of college, to the world of Twitter. So I’m very glad that you’re all here, and I hope that what follows will be stimulating discussion, so let me just say a few words about this book, which began, I think, as all first books do as really an undergraduate question or a question that you know began to appear to me at the beginning of graduate school, which was simply this you know, can there be a history of ordinary people in the Mughal Empire. Is this something that is possible? Where are the people in the history of the Mughal Empire?
And, in some ways, of course, this is you know a self evident question that has been answered extensively in the Marxist historiography of South Asia. So I would you know only like to remind you of the just immensely important work of historians, such as Irfan Habib, who has shaped our fields completely in talking about the mass of the population of South Asia, the peasantry and their importance and that history in the Mughal period. And yet it always seemed to me that there was something crucial missing from the treatment of the agrarian landscape of South Asia. Surely it is true, of course, the South Asia, then, and even to some extent now it’s predominantly an agricultural region. Yet at the same time, we were always told the cities, such as Delhi and Lahore and Agra, were among the largest metropolises in the world. So what was the nature of urban experience and the nature of urban politics in these places in the 17th and 18th centuries? And this is not merely an idol question simply because of the fact that, on the one hand, over the last 20 or 30 years there’s been an increasing emphasis in the history of a global and connected and in modernity in which cities have appeared as absolutely central nodes of the kind of political transformations, preceding the kind of political transformation, so by the end of the 18th century would constitute the structure of the modern world as we know it. I mean the two great revolutions, and particularly the aura or the shadow of the French Revolution hangs temporarily in both directions across from 1789, and it’s something for all of us to grapple with, those of us who are interested in questions of modernity and politics in other parts of the world.
So this this question, you know, lay at the heart of my inquiry, and I was inspired, of course, by the work of professors, Zarinebaf, for instance, you know who could answer and address these questions in very direct ways and very impressively by recourse to a large extent powerful archives. And when I looked through, for instance, Fariba’s bibliography, I could only stare with envy at these large number of administrative records of the city of Istanbul of the kind that simply don’t exist for very particular historical reasons for Delhi and presumably for other places in South Asia too.
So, one of the main problems was that there was no archive as such to answer the question and that I had to constitute my archives. And when I started constituting the archive, when I turned to the sources that were available to me, I was confronted with an immediate problem, because these were literary sources. And they did not necessarily address the questions that I was interested in. They were written almost invariably by elites, and for these elites, there was an absolute and implacable condescension and dislike for what they referred to as the [inaudible] bazaar right, “the people of the market and the street.” And so the question was basically an interpretive question. In what ways and how could I possibly use these kinds of sources to talk about urban politics, about people’s lives in the city? When I started reading these sources, I discovered also the uncomfortable fact that they were absolutely filled with instances of political violence, but political violence that was expressed almost always in a religiosity and so what looks like extreme religious bigotry and warfare litters the pages of accounts of urban life in the 17th and 18th century. And this is something of which I think historians have long been aware in South Asia, and it’s something that makes them uncomfortable, but the cause of the discomfort, really is the present political circumstances of South Asia, not the historical realities themselves right. And so again, you know, turning to the historiography of my former colleague [Dwinelle?] Hall, Natalie Zemon Davis and her just absolutely brilliant essays from the 1970s made it possible for me to start thinking more seriously about the kinds of religious violence I was seeing in these pages and to begin to recognize that this was in fact not merely religious violence, but it was political violence and as I did this, the very question of what is the religious, and what is the political became increasingly confounded for me.
A second question that became immediately apparent to me was that a lot of this violence, when it is expressed in archival sources, addresses the figure of the king and Delhi, of course, is a peculiar city because the king lives in the city of Delhi, but it’s never done it became clear to me that there was a kind of organic tie-up in elite conceptions, but perhaps also to some extent in popular life, between the figure of the king and the figure of the people. And the people here are, of course, a literary artifact in our texts that I think they also correspond to a reality that I hope that I’ve been able to uncover to some degree in this work. And one way, of course, to get at the reality of these literary artifacts was to focus on the space of the city where even literary artifacts begin to acquire a kind of highly concretized reality in spatial context. So thinking about space became a way to ground the literary in particular kind of things.
And, in looking at the figure of the King, I realized that the question that created the basis for the working and the emergence of the people as political subjects was the act of sovereignty itself, the performance of sovereignty. And again, I think, in South Asia, we have long suffered from a poor historiography on questions of sovereignty, and so we use the word very, very loosely. I’m guilty of it myself, and we have not thought sufficiently about what it means to talk about sovereignty when we talk about politics, and this is of course a larger problem of the question of etic and emic concepts as they come from the historiography of Europe to the rest of the world and are applied here and Mughal historians have, and I think again I include myself in this criticism you know, particularly, particularly careless in the importation of concepts from European historiography to South Asia. But it occurred to me that thinking more seriously about sovereignty in the case of the Mughal Empire, in its own terms, raises important problems.
And one of the problems was that there is no such physical object as sovereignty, rather, there is a discourse. There were ways in which Mughal authors talk about the emergence of the constitution of political power, and the people were always part of this vision in some way. What’s interesting about the 17th and 18th centuries, is the economic transformations of the Mughal empire mainly the pouring in of new world silver created new material conditions in which assertive urbanites could actually begin to address the king. And as a discourse of sovereignty shifted, particularly in the 17th, in the second half of the 17th century, towards a kind of Islamic formal legalism which again has many parallels in the Ottoman empire the people began to assert themselves in new and complicated ways, so you know the book then traces the emergence of the arc of these people into political subjects [inaudible] and begins and ends with two major acts of political violence. That, I think, outline and lay out the possibility broadly of the historical journey of a populace into a people right, of a group of people, of, uh, you know the masses as such into political actors. In a world in which there was no formal conception of that possibility and I think this is something that speaks more broadly to questions or historiography in Asia, in Europe, and elsewhere, so I’ll stop here.
>> Bains: Alright, so I’ll go ahead, then and I’ll begin by quickly thanking Elizabeth and Douglas and the student assistants for helping put this together, and, of course, Professors Kaicker and Zarinebaf for agreeing to participate in this conversation. So I will begin my speaking briefly about where we can locate this important new book The King and the People in historiography of the Mughal Empire, but also South Asia, more generally, and then I’ll pose a few questions, of course Abhishek you should feel free to pick up on whatever you might find interesting and for those of you who haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, some of these questions might point in the direction of the range of themes that are discussed so as many of you will be familiar. In recent years, in the past decade there’s been a wealth of new literature on Mughal South Asia and the Mughal empire. And really innovative efforts to try and expand the ways in which we usually conceptualize Mughal political authority. These include works by Munis Faruqui, who has really thought through the ways in which we can think beyond the person of the Mughal Emperor himself and think about princely households as important political institutions, and particularly the role to play outside imperial capital, especially when they’re waging succession battles, wars of succession, across various Mughal provinces.
Equally, Supriya Gandhi’s work, her recent book has focused on the figure of Dara Shikoh and how a princely figure who will never end up becoming Emperor, how he participates in Mughal intellectual and cultural life. Others such as Audrey Truschke and Rajeev Kinra can have turned to more middling figures, including that of say a Hindu munshi or a scribe Chandar Bhan Brahman, who, nevertheless, are able to participate in the project of Persianate literary sophistication as well as a projection of Mughal imperium. And in many ways The King and the People is also building on this attention to cultural and intellectual history to this attention to literary texture and how Persian poetry and other forms of discourse are circulating, both in the Mughal court but also outside. That being said what this book is doing is also fundamentally different, which is rethinking Mughal state formation by really taking popular politics and everyday conversation seriously.
One could say that the traditional or more conventional way of doing Mughal history would be to really see the way the Mughal states sees people and the way the Mughal state envisions the countryside. The introductory chapter in The King and the People is titled “Seeing the People.” But this book is really going beyond just seeing the people. It is also attempting to demonstrate how the people, how Mughal subjects themselves might have conceptualized and challenged or defended the Mughal state so really how is it that people see the state how is it that the denizens of Delhi imagine the figure of the Mughal Emperor and the connection with their own lives and livelihoods between imperial authority and themselves.
So what you, and of course I guess the reason why it hasn’t been done is really due to the limitations of the archive, and as Abhishek has just outlined for us what he really had to do was reconstitute a fragmentary archive. Those of you who are familiar with Nandini Chatterjee’s recent work Negotiating Mughal Law, you will see in that particular piece of scholarship another model for how we might try to bring together a Mughal archive to think through the question of agrarian economy and zamindari landholding in a space such as Malwa. What Professor Kaicker has done is really read official chronicles against the grain, drop on fleeting bits of poetry and even look at materials such as imperial newsletters or akhbarat that have survived in unlikely places such as Sitamau in Madhya Pradesh and so really it’s an act of recovery bringing all this material together, and if you haven’t read the book yet one of the bits that I enjoyed the most is this book’s attention to 18th century jokes and the art of telling a joke across multiple languages, one that operates across Persian and Hindi which might seem very crass but, in fact, contains a kernel of political critique at its heart. In doing all of this, Professor Kaicker is also, in many ways, addressing some of the biggest, weightiest questions at the heart of South Asian historiography. For a long time historians of the subaltern studies collective have asked the question of what is the place of the people, how can ordinary people be constituted as historical subjects.
In his classical essay, “Prose of Counterinsurgency,” Ranajit Guha has discussed the ways in which we can take popular resistance seriously and not simply treated as mindless action akin to a natural disaster and the King and the People is very much engaging with that. There’s also engaging with a very difficult and I suppose inevitable question of imperial transition. How do we explain Mughal decline and the establishment of British colonialism in the subcontinent? And Professor Kaicker is responding to this by really arguing that we need to turn the pre-1757 moment to the pre-Battle of Plassey moment and take seriously the so-called lesser Mughals who are often consigned to a single chapter in South Asian textbooks, though I’m not sure what is being taught in India anymore. And again what this book is really doing is arguing for taking seriously this rich Persian archive as well as archive of vernacular languages which, even for the scattered nevertheless gives us a great wealth of detail about how ordinary people might conceptualize questions of political authority.
So I’ll now turn to some of the questions that I have and I guess my first major question is really the question of geography and region. This book for obvious reasons, as Abhishek has explained, focuses on Delhi. It is the imperial capital, it is where the emperor himself is located. And we do get brief snippets, of course, of what’s happening in Lahore, Surat as well as Ahmedabad, but I’m curious about how popular politics is in those cities and the sort of second cities of the empire, or even smaller, more provincial towns might be unfolding in a slightly different way, due to the absence of the emperor. And the book makes the case that, outside of Delhi, much of the nobility had already managed to create a firmer hold in some of these other places and other regions of the empire, so how is it that this is playing out in different places, is there a slightly different vocabulary that gets deployed outside of Delhi in other regions and equally in terms of thinking about the peasantry in the countryside, how do conflicts in a space, such as Delhi, inflict those in rural spaces and vice versa? Um my second question really speaks to the theme of commerce and economic transformation in the early modern world at large, but in Delhi and South Asia in particular, especially since intensifying commerce is really at the heart of the causal story in this book. It is how, it is how you, explain why the population of Delhi, when Mughal subjects are becoming more assertive, you note the consumption of new commodities, such as coffee, as well as how the consumption of such commodities is creating new spaces for sociability as well as political critique. Commercial prosperity is clearly producing new tensions and ideas. Poetry itself has become a commodity that has a market value during this time period.
In some ways, it seems the Delhi in the 1720s is quite like London in the 1720s, but what I was hoping for was perhaps more discussion of how Mughal subjects and officials during the period are managing and reflecting on commercial transformation and increased commercial vitality. What are the financial mechanisms and innovations that are coming into being at this time of the new relationships of credit and debt? And really what are some of the new economic ideas that are emerging, and how are these economic ideas or economic ideologies reframing social relations, creating new solidarities based on say, trading networks, even creating new alliances across elite and non-elite groups? Are there forms of association of life that diverged from more traditional patterns of communal belonging and kinship? And again, I suppose, on the team of commerce and economic transformation, I think this book can also serve as an excellent resource to rethink the history of labor, especially in urban settings. This book is already providing great detail about various professional communities, caste groups as they operate in Delhi, and the labor that they provide to keep the city running. And, in most of the instances and case studies discussed in the book, many of these communities, such as the shoemakers, come together to invoke the justice of the king and make demands based on particular violations in particular moments, but I’d be curious if there’s a broader discourse about laboring conditions about economic change. Even concerns about their own place in Delhi’s economy and the wider economy of Hindustan and the Mughal empire. And I’m sure the sources don’t really lend themselves to this, but I’m curious if you could excavate more of this or pick out some of these things. And finally, I’ll close with a question of selfhood and self-fashioning.
There’s a rich literature on earlier periods on how ideas of gender and imperial masculinity and femininity are constructed say during the reign of Akbar, for instance, and I’m curious how changing political realities and socioeconomic relations in the late 17th and early 18th century are producing similar changes. And the book already provides very rich insights into how non-elite women are participating in political life, but I’m curious about how discourse around gender might be shifting if at all. And finally, especially given all the recent work on conceptions of the Persianate, I’d be curious if you see these non-elite actors as participating in the same kind of Persianate world that elite bureaucrats participate in as they move across Central Asia, Iran and Hindustan.
Or are these non-elite actors participating in a very different version of the Persianate world or do you think the category of Persianate or Persianate itself I mean, of course, invoking Mana Kia’s recent work here might not apply in quite the same way. So I’ll stop there, and I look forward to the discussion after but many thanks. This is, of course, an excellent book, and I’m really delighted to have had the opportunity to engage with it.
>> Zarinebaf: Okay, thank you so much for all those wonderful comments, so I’m going to provide my own feedback from a very different perspective, you know, one that is outside Mughal India. But I first wanted to thank Dr. Elizabeth Lhost and Dartmouth for inviting me to take part in this very interesting book workshop and conversation and offer my own feedback as a non-specialist and a historian of Ottoman and Safavid urban life. The book contributes in an important manner to the city of Delhi and its social transformation in the 18th century.
It begins with the occupation of Nadir Shah of Iran, his plunder of Delhi and the brutal treatment of the populace, causing a major rebellion in 1739. He used a systematic event to weave together the changing political dynamics and notions of legitimacy and justice to shed light on the relationship between the ruling class and the populace of Delhi. He argues that this period witnessed frequent reshuffling of the power structure. The long 17th century that is sometimes quite violently at the hands of a more assertive nobility or a faction within it, as well as the populace at large. He reads chronicles against the grain and avoids explanations solely based on social and economic factors, I think in part as he himself admitted due to the [inaudible] of archival material for this period, but I may be wrong. Let me now shift to to my own specialty as a historian of early modern Safavid and Ottoman Empires and see whether we can see some connections.
The 18th century has long been the black hole of Ottoman and Safavid studies and viewed as the height of Ottoman decline and Safavid collapse. Marshall Hodgson in his, in the third volume of his Ventures of Islam referred to this era, as the period of deluge, decline and the rise of the West, which he observed in these in all these three gunpowder empires. As he noted, and I agree with him in general, in all the three gunpowder empires, he observed a growing factionalism within the court circles dominated by grand wazirs, the haram and the palace guards. This was also an age of pleasure and peace after long wars and territorial losses, particularly for the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century. In Istanbul, Sultan Ahmed III, who reigned between 1703 and 1730, and his ground wazir Nevşehirli Ibrahim Pasha loved organizing tulip festivals in their newly built waterfront mansions called sada bad and it’s really interesting that all these names, you know, are very familiar for these spaces. In Isfahan, Shah Sultan Husayn built the Farahabad suburb for his pleasure and preferred the company of women and the cup to the working to working with his soldiers and bureaucrats.
I think similar things were going on in Delhi. Though these could simply be gossip and gripe by chronicles, in all three empires, we also observe the growing power of the nobility, what Abhishek calls an assertive nobility, the pasha and ulema households, who enriched themselves at the expense of peasants and artisans and took advantage of the growing weakness of the central government. According to many observers, foreign and local, corruption was rampant in both empires. We also witness the rise of puritanical, some would call fundamentalist, Islamic movements, led by preachers who called for the persecution of minorities, Jews and Christians, Shiites and Sunnis. And Sufi tariqas, imposing sumptuary laws on women and minorities and ordering the closing of taverns and coffee houses. This was an age of social, economic, cultural and religious prices characterized by climate change, famine inflation, unemployment, as well as urban upheavals. But new research in the Ottoman archives has shown that this was also a period of urban growth, expansion of trade, building activity by the ruling elites, migration, and the settlement of Europeans in port cities. The size of the three capitals, Isfahan, Istanbul, Isfahan, and Delhi exceeded 500,000, and our cities expanded beyond the walls into new suburbs. However, this brief age of pleasure and peace in Isfahan and Istanbul was violently disrupted by the Afghan invasion of Iran in 1722.
The rough treatment of Sunni tribes by the Safavid Georgian governor of Kandahar was the trigger for the Afghan plunder of Isfahan. The weakness of the court to contain further uprisings worsened the crisis. The Afghan invasion of Iran, the brutal takeover of Isfahan after a long siege, the bloodbath that followed in the palace and the city brought about the dramatic collapse of the Safavid Dynasty and the permanent decline of Isfahan from a major Islamic imperial capital to a provincial town in 1722. The Ottoman armies subsequently took the entire Western Iran while Peter the Great of Russia took part of the Caucasian provinces and the silk growing regions along the Caspian Sea. Now, this is going to be the subject of my next book. The triple division of Iran in 1725 led to the rise of Nadir Shah from a very humble background to power in Khorasan. His coronation and long campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, the Afghans, and Mughal India to restore the Persian Empire. Nadir’s defeat of Ottoman troops in Tabriz and the Ottoman withdrawal from Western Iran in 1730 triggered the most violent uprising: the Patrona Halil rebellion in Istanbul led by disgruntled janissaries, the city’s artisans, Albanian migrants and workers, and some Ulema households, so the preachers also played a key role in this event. This rebellion led to the takeover of the city by the rebels for several months. It was almost like the French Revolution. The destruction of all the tulip parks and mansions and the mistreatment of European traders. It also ended the reign of Sultan Ahmed the Third and his favorite grand wazir and son-in-law, who was cut to pieces and murdered and dragged through the streets of Istanbul. The Tulip Age had come to a violent end in Istanbul, eight years after the plunder of Isfahan by the Afghans in 1722. The fate of the Ottoman capital in 1730 at the hands of Albanian rebels was not too dissimilar from the plunder of Safavid Isfahan by Afghan rebels in 1722. You might also argue that Delhi also experienced a similar fate in 1739 and later in 1750s at the hands of Afghans and somewhere between the Safavid and Ottoman examples.
I think Abhishek’s opening chapter sets the stage to connect the rebellions of 1739 in Delhi to events in Isfahan and Istanbul, and I might even say in Tabriz in 1722 and 1730. At the same time, I also believe that to better understand all these developments, it might be helpful to integrate the study of imperial borderlands into that of the rest of our empires. For example, you know if you were to focus on events in the Afghan borderland, you know between these two empires or in Azerbaijan, for that matter, and what was going on as, as you know, these two empires, the Safavids and the Mughals, were trying to assert their control over these regions, how would we you know, otherwise evaluate you know what was going on in Delhi, in Istanbul and in Isfahan?
So while you know I completely agree with Abhishek that you know historiography of Mughal India and, for that matter, Safavid Iran and Ottoman Empire, you know, have not paid much attention to the role of the people, if he expanded the notion of the people right to peasants, you know as Tiraana brought up, to traders, as well as you know, to these tribes, you know who inhabited the edges of their empires, to the provinces, you know further further away. Might we also reconsider you know the notion of legitimacy, the notion of justice that obviously you know the rebels, you know in Kandahar or Herat, you know were trying to also address to these rulers and you know we’re kind of you know exhausted so so, in other words, you know what I’m really calling for is you know to kind of expand the scope scope of the subaltern right, you know the kind of center-periphery dynamic and also look at you know this kind of ground up ground up historiography maybe from the peripheries to the center rather than just focusing on our cities so kind of moving beyond you know urban urban centers and imperial capitals to other cities to other towns, to the peripheries of the empire. So I’m going to stop there, and I look forward to your comments.
>> Lhost: Thank you all for those comments. I think I will give Abhishek a couple of minutes to respond to any of the comments or questions that were presented to him before we move to questions from the audience. So if you have any questions, please remember to put them in the Q and A. We’ll start to sort and share them as we go along, but Abishek would you like to respond?
>> Kaicker: Yeah, I’m sorry that my internet connection is a little bit unstable, so I may have missed some aspects of the questions, but I hope that we can have a broader conversation and resume these things because I think that the points that both Fariba and Tiraana have raised were really interesting.
So you know, on Tirana, first, I think what you’ve really done is outline an entire course of research for the 18th century in South Asia, and I hope that you know someone will undertake it, maybe even you. But I think that you know because I, these are questions that were absolutely central and deeply interesting. So you know, to take the question, for instance, of the changing economic understanding of the period among actors is something that I would love to know more about, and I don’t know very much about it. It was possible, for instance, to read the [inaudible] poetry of the city, to be able to track the rise of certain kinds of groups and then you know the discomfort caused by the rising elites of the period.
But, of course, the question of the actual administration and management of the trade that fuels the empire is a much trickier affair, and I think it’s something that will probably require focus on the locality outside the city, particularly Bengal, particularly connection between Delhi elites, families of Delhi elites, and Bengali traders. This is, some of my work is going in this direction now, but I’d also like to sort of mention the upcoming work of young scholars, that is, Sudev Sheth who is thinking very seriously now about economic transformations and new systems of thinking that trade. And again, you know there’s much that we can learn from the Ottoman historiography so, for instance, the very idea of ijara, you know, as a potentially you know, a powerful or important financial instrument, rather than merely a form of the destruction rent forming, that is, you know merely a form of agricultural destruction, you know, is sort of staple of the Ottoman historiography for several decades now, but has yet to be seriously taken up, except for people like Shalib. So I think that there’s you know very much to do on that score. There’s, of course, the question of, a very important question of potential changes in the way that gender itself might operate in these urban spaces, and I think again that there’s very much to be said about that, but that will require a return to a linguistically challenging and interesting archive.
My only, you know, my only response to I think these, you know, phenomenal points, I think, the only, the only response that I can offer to one key point that you make Tirana, is the question of you know other cities and other places. So it’s certainly true that I think other places have other particular dynamics, right. Lahore I think is a very interesting city and it’s an interesting city because it’s clearly has a very large and deep theological infrastructure and communities of ordinary people who are deeply engaged with Islamic piety from the early 17th century onwards, if not even earlier. So it’s true that I think that looking at different cities will lead to different portraits, but I think that what this book revealed for me was the possibility of making an argument about a general form of politics in pre-modern South Asia, which I think is important, and I think is actually very important because it remains to the present. And that’s mainly to say that the divide between the religious and political in South Asia is a colonial divide, and it’s a move to depoliticize the workings of ordinary politics in the heartland of the Mughal empire, which were always very threatening to the emergence of the nation’s colonial state. And this again is a book project that I’m on. But I can, I think, I can make the case that thinking seriously about the question of the categories of what is religious and what is political in South Asia will remind us that there is no neat line between those two categories in South Asia. And there isn’t a neat line today right, and so you could make the case of the colonial state itself and the attempted depoliticization of the colonial state, and then the attempted liberal political order of the postcolonial states of South Asia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh have never actually managed to subsume the complex relationship between questions of the divine, access to the divine, and the workings of politics in the present, right. But my plea would be that in these sorts of situations which think of Islam in general as not just a religion but also a language of politics, a way of doing urban politics, and I think this insight potentially holds across the region.
And I would love to see how it is engaged in other places. And you know, to Fariba, you know, thank you so much for sort of laying out this broader context, which was you know, always in the back of my mind. You know you, you pointed out some of the limitations, I think, of like working in a purely urban space, and I think here part of the question for me was simply being able to make a kind of argument which required a certain amount of slave hands. It’s very convenient for me that the city of Delhi was built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in his own name. And therefore, the city itself represents in core Mughal ideology, to which its urban subjects can respond. This is obviously not true of Istanbul in the same way, so here was an act of convenience for me.
But I think you’re absolutely right, and I think that much greater attention and engagement with trying to integrate the city into the countryside around it is obviously something to be decided right. So, for instance, it was recently pointed out to me by one of my distinguished colleagues that the river in Delhi is more or less absent from my work. And that’s a very major oversight. I can only plead a certain imposition in an arbitrary imposition of the limited framework as a way of trying to get a grip around archival sources that, as you know, are complex, and we should leave it at that. And you know I’m afraid Fariba that I also missed some of your last comments, because of my poor Internet connection. So if you could remind me, we could continue the conversation.
>> Zarinebaf: Yeah, well, um yes, first of all, I also wanted to kind of point out how integrated in the 18th century these three empires were through . . .
>> Kaicker: Yes.
>> Zarinebaf: precisely through, you know, trade, especially the Safavid and the Mughal empires empires. And I must say that, you know, on our side, there’s absolutely no interest in what’s going on in the Ottoman Empire and Mughal Empire, in both empires. I’m probably the only historian who works on Ottoman-Safavid connectivity. So the 18th century is a period when you know not only trade with the West, you know where the Ottomans, you know, and the Safavids, but also with the East. So these capitals are integrated they are connected. They’re also connected through their borderlands, and I think we need to really pay attention to imperial borderlands and contest them. Contestations over these borderlands, what’s going on in in in the Afghan borderland, I think is crucial in the 18th century, you know, as Isfahan is trying to assert its control and as Delhi is trying to do the same thing.
And then you have this big rebellion that affects Delhi and Isfahan, and it leads to the fall of them. The Safavids, right, and then the Ottomans don’t want the Afghans to get to their borderlands. You know, so they move into Western Iran to avoid having to deal with the Afghans. Right, so I think you know, this is really the wider question is, is really crucial to sort of try to figure out what is going on at this moment, which I think you paint you know that with so much you know kind of dynamism and, and it’s wonderful that you open your book with this chapter. I think it’s really great, and you ended with with another Afghan you know sort of invasion of Delhi, right, in 1759. So why the Afghans, what’s going on in that borderland, what’s going on between Isfahan and Delhi, so those were you know, the latter part of my comments.
>> Kaicker: Right and again, you know, there are wonderful young scholars, who are now working extensively on the history of the Afghans from the you know 15th to the 19th century, so I’m really delighted that this is a vibrant and major historiographical push in our field. It’s really a wonderful move, but I think you know, I think that the destabilization occasions by Afghanistan in the middle of the first third of the 18th century leads to the collapse of the Safavids and the Mughal empires. And I think you know it can be argued that the Afghans are actually more important in disrupting the Mughal Empire than the British are in 1757, right. And so I think that the you know that that the, the you know the world, I mean, in a sense, we have to come to terms with the world historical importance of Afghanistan not just in the 21st century. And you know there’s a reason that I think that we keep returning to it on our map as we teach, absolutely.
>> Lhost: Abhishek, we have a couple of questions that have come in. First, Pamela Price asks whether you can elaborate on your concept of sovereignty that you develop in the course of the book or perhaps elaborate the idea of the discourses of sovereignty. And then, if you would like to, David Lelyveld is also wondering whether you could talk a little bit about what carries over into the British period, particularly with reference to the 1857 Rebellion and British claims to imperial sovereignty in South Asia after that.
>> Kaicker: So I think that you know my claim about sovereignty is this: you know, I think that in South Asia, we have tended to use the word sovereignty merely as a stand-in for kingship, and we have a sort of anthropological sense of this stand-in for kingship that seems to simply suggest that everyone is playing at the games of kingship. And it’s interesting to sort of you know, read these claims against the very thick literature, and I’m thinking of people like Richard [inaudible] my colleague and Berkeley and others, you know, who really make the case that the ideal of sovereignty is something that is historically invented in the late 16th century for particular purposes. It is a claim. It is a claim that is routinely contested. This invented idea suggests that there’s some emanating force that actually permits and allows the constitution of politics and government as such, and it’s not there for merely a standing for kingship. So much more interested in the question of you know what is the thing that makes it possible for a Mughal emperor to make a world historical claim. And here the main actor would not be the emperor himself, but the ideologues/intellectuals at his court that marshalled diverse, intellectual, cultural, religious and social resources to create a language in a way of talking about the proper and orderly disposition of power and centering it at the Mughal court in opposition to other locales and places, right.
Now this language becomes a widespread language. So, obviously, it becomes very important at the court of Akbar in the 16th century, but it is enunciated repeatedly and changed productively over the 17th century in very dramatic ways. And so Shah Jahan’s discourse of sovereignty, I make the case, his greatest enunciation in that discourse is, in fact, the creation of a city in his own name, and I think I can show that the urban fabric of the city directly represents the ideological values that are central to the empire, because it is a new construction. But the discourse changes with the coming of his son Aurangzeb to the throne, and here it requires a much more legalistic and Islamic tint. And that is also productive for the emergence of the practice of popular politics, so there’s a kind of dynamic relationship between these expressions and claims to power and the proper ordering of the world that are never rejected by the people to whom they are applied, right. And I think that is important to remember that there is, you know, the story of sovereignty and popular politics is not a story of only resistance. It is also a story of acquiescence and engagement, and in that sense, it is more than merely resistance in the market sense. It is politics as such, right, And, therefore, the people of the city because precisely of their engagement with the intellectual questions at the heart of sovereignty are not people. They are, in fact, political. They are in politics. So that’s the that’s the that’s the question of sovereignty. And what was the second question, Elizabeth could you please remind me?
>> Lhost: Yes, the second question has to do is what carries over when the British start to make claims or start to take over claims to imperial sovereignty—or to being the sovereign—in the subcontinent, whether they adopt some of the same language or same terms or same ideologies and how it might be different, and maybe even you could talk about what carries over, if there’s anything that carries over, into the post independence period.
>> Kaicker: Right, well, I mean, I, you know, I, David obviously knows much more about this than I do, and I’ve learned so much from his work over the years, but it’s very, very clear that, for instance, you know, if you read the Urdu account or the Persian accounts of the arrival of the mutineers in Delhi, from those perspectives, it looks like an 18th century urban riot, right, where the mutineers arrived, and the first thing they do is approach the king, and they say we demand justice, and our justice is that we would like to extricate all of the Europeans. Why must they be extricated? Because they are damaging religion, right. Because they’re attacking the [inudible]. So this is a very classic enunciation in a very familiar language. Sorry. Am I audible? Am I coming through?
Okay, yeah.
>> Lhost: Yes, the sound is coming through.
>> Kaicker: Okay, I think, I may have some internet issues.
Okay, then. I think that you know, there is also a sort of longer, deeper history that carries through to the 20th century, and I can’t you know, obviously, it’s not possible to have a fuller discussion of that at this moment, but I do want to say, for instance, you know the profound importance of the satirical poem in South Asia as a means of doing politics, as a means of political communication is something that does not end in the 18th century. And so you know, for those of us in South Asia who you know will pick up a phone and open WhatsApp and go to a WhatsApp group and are immediately inundated by a stream of political poetry, doggerel, and satire should suggest that there is, in fact, a deeply historical genealogy to the ways in which actual political communication and work happens in the region, and that is a historical genealogy that is infected by technology, obviously, but clearly has much richer and deeper histories, than the political order of the so-called, you know, liberal democratic state, of which the vineyards anyway fading fast in the present and I think of both Pakistan and India in this case.
>> Lhost: Thanks, Abhishek. We have a question from Taha Rauf who asks how you would describe the position of the khanqahs in the language of politics. Would you consider these institutions part of decentralized nodes of power that are either cooperating or competing with a more centralized political central, center—Mughal or otherwise or is there some sort of dichotomy? Where do they fit into this discourse? And the person posing the question says it is framed in reference to Richard Eaton’s work on Bengal.
>> Kaicker: Right, thank you. I’m just going to turn my video off to see if I can improve my sound and video quality. This is a good question. I don’t really know. I have an article coming out on religious institutions in Delhi in the 18th century, in the 17th and 18th century in the near future, where I make the case that the fortunes of commercialization which sweep the city also have a transformative impact on religious practice and religious institutions in the period. You know, I think much more can be said about the place of the khanqahs, but it’s very clear that there are different kinds of khanqahs, there are different kinds of political actors and orders. So you have very elite Sufi lineages in the 18th century, you know the Chishtis in Delhi, for instance, who have a very particular sets of religious practices. And then it seems that there are other Sufi lineages that speak much more directly to warrior groups and low lying urban groups, such as the Naqshbandis that I think in are particularly important important in Delhi in this regard, and it’s not an accident that Naqshbandi [inaudible] seem to be particularly associated with political uprisings in the late 17th and particularly the early 18th century in Delhi and Lahore. And again, of course, there is a direct connection, I think, to the Ottoman and Safavid empires, particularly the Ottoman Empire. I’ve long wondered about whether it might be possible to trace more tightly relations of political ideas moving between these spaces. It occurs to me, of course, that you know if there were rebels in Delhi in 1729 or 31 who were imagining new forms of doing politics altogether the ideas that came to them that they would have picked up in the [inaudible] in Delhi would have been from been from the Naqshbandi soldiers and travelers who came from Istanbul and could talk about the 1703 Uprising. So, so it occurs to me that there is a landscape of interconnection there, but I think that is yet to be revealed.
>> Lhost: Thanks. We have just a couple of minutes left so I’m going to try to group two of the questions that have come in, and the first one raises a question about archives and the way that in in historiography on South Asia, we tend to talk about the absence of the archive, the loss of the archive, and this person asks, in some ways, how, how your work grapples with this, but also how, as historians, do we transgress the idea that Anjali Arondekar has put forth, that we’re kind of obsessed with the epistemological preoccupation of the loss and the impoverishment of the archive—so, allowing what we don’t find in the archives to drive some of the questions that we ask—to drive the way that we talk about the history. How do we sort of square that with with what you’ve done in your work, maybe finding alternative archives or creating other archives or looking to sources that have been in plain sight for a while and just thinking about them in other ways?
And then, second, Sana Haroon asks whether you could say more about the non-elite actors who come through some of your reading of the sources. Who are they? How do they, how do they come to engage with the state? How do you engage with them in your work? And then who, who still remains hidden, even when we’re doing this sort of alternative reading or looking at sources and other ways, who, who still escapes some of the archival traces or the written, the written traces?
>> Kaicker: So, I mean to just touch on Sana Haroon’s question, you know, the last chapter or the second to last chapter of my book, really is a detailed exploration of an uprising of shoemakers, Muslim shoemakers, in the city of Delhi. And I think you know, in some ways, you know, it is possible under certain very limited conditions to be able to talk about very particular low lying actors in the urban space in the city. But that is only under very particular conditions. The only time when shoemakers will enter the pages of Persian prose, right, the beautiful pages of Persian prose is when they do something so reprehensible that elites are forced to write about them against their will, right, because everybody knows that you don’t sully the beautiful page of language with mention of unmentionable people, right. So in a sense that becomes an opportunity to actually think about the profoundly transgressive nature of low level actors and their political power, but it only becomes possible under very limited conditions.
The question of the loss of the archive . . . it’s certainly true, you know there’s no denying the fact that the Mughal archive does not exist in the way that it was constituted, right. I’ve been you know examining again with wonder this massive collection of the, you know, thousands of recently published pages on a single library catalog from the Topkapi Palace in the 16th century.
We are very far from being able to do that.
It’s also the case, I think, that some of the archives of the city of Delhi were destroyed again by Afghan invasions but also all the other actors who were doing things in that period, and I think obviously colonial rule has much more to do with this than we like to think.
At the same time, it seems to me that you know, the question of the loss of the archives as a sort of emotional response for South Asians, and for South Asian scholars and not necessarily one grounded in physical reality. And I simply say that, you know, as someone who spent a lot of time at places like the National Archives of India and the Salar Jung Museum, and you know the Khuda Bhaksh Museum and the Raza Rampur Library, which have literally thousands of manuscripts from our period that are waiting to be read, right. And until we read them, until we read them extensively, I think it is really difficult for us to make claims about what is and what is not in the archives. So I think that you know, we need to recommit ourselves to an archival practice in South Asia, and we cannot let inconvenience be the thing that prevents us from going to the archive and making statements that probably are not held up on an evidentiary basis.
>> Lhost: Thank you for that. I think that’s a, that’s a good point to end on that we all need to take ourselves back to the archive to find out what they say before we start to talk about what they don’t say.
I would like to thank Abhishek and Tiraana, and Fariba for joining us today for this inaugural first event in our Conversations on South Asia series. And for those of you who missed the announcements at the beginning, our next event will be in November with Mytheli Sreenivas’ new book on reproductive politics.
So follow us on Twitter @SAsiaConverse, look us up on the website, and join us for our upcoming events. Thank you everyone.
For almost a century, the multinational Tata Group has been at the top of India’s corporate pyramid. Producing everything from steel, to salt, to software, Tata—whose subsidiaries today operate in one hundred countries worldwide—has been remarkably agile and adept at navigating changes in markets, economics, and politics.
What has fueled Tata’s success and sustained its growth? And how can Tata’s history help us understand the influence of global corporations today?
Join us on Tuesday, January 11 from 12:15–1:30 pm (ET) to hear author and historian Mircea Raianu (University of Maryland), in conversation with Meghna Chaudhuri (Boston College), Stefan Link (Dartmouth College), and Osama Siddiqui (Providence College), discuss Tata’s past and what it holds for capitalism’s future.
Elizabeth Lhost (Dartmouth College) will moderate the discussion.
The Conversations on South Asia Series is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
Today, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) runs over five hundred centers, dozens of vegetarian restaurants, thousands of local meeting groups, and has millions of followers around the world.
How has ISKCON marketed itself to attract devotees using mantra lounges and yoga studios in Philadelphia and New York? What has it done to rebrand the movement and to recast its message to attract new followers? Nicole Karapanagiotis(Religion and Philosophy, Rutgers University-Camden) explores these questions in Branding Bhakti: Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement (Indiana University Press, 2021).
Join us for the next Conversations on South Asia series event on Tuesday, December 7 from 12:15–1:15 pm (EST) to hear the author answer these questions.
Mara Einstein (Media Studies, Queens College) and Reiko Ohnuma (Religion, Dartmouth) will be joining the conversation, moderated by Elizabeth Lhost (History, Dartmouth).
Event attendees can use the promo code SAVE30 to receive a 30% discount when ordering a copy of the book from IUPress.org.
The Conversations on South Asia Series is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
How did reproductive politics become central to producing modern India? In her latest book, Mytheli Sreenivas (The Ohio State University) tackles this question and turns to the history of marriage, the family, and contraception to show that reproduction was central to debates about politics, economics, and the future of independent India.
Join us Tuesday, November 9 from 12:15–1:15 pm (ET) for the next event in the “Conversations on South Asia” series featuring Sreenivas’s Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washington Press, 2021) to hear more.
Amna Qayyum (Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University) and Carole McCann (Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies, UMBC) will be joining the author as discussants.
Event attendees can use the promo code W139 to receive a 30% discount when ordering a copy of the book from the University of Washington Press.
The Conversations on South Asia Series is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
The “Conversations on South Asia” series invites authors to discuss their recent publications in South Asian studies with scholars from within and beyond the field. Featuring experts in history, religious studies, politics, and gender studies, this year’s series brings a range of regional experts together with disciplinary and interdisciplinary readers and respondents.
Sign up for our mailing list to receive updates about these upcoming events, or register for the individual events using the links below.
Wednesday, October 13, 12:15–1:15 PM ET
The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi
Abhishek Kaicker, University of California, Berkeley
Thanks to all who attended! Check out the webinar recording and transcript here.
Tuesday, Nov. 9, 12:15–1:15 PM ET
Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India
