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.
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.
