The Mughals of India

Abstract

This book has turned out to be an essentially experimental venture in many ways, almost independently of the author’s volition. When Blackwell Publishing approached me some dozen years ago to do a volume on ‘The Mughals’ in their ‘Peoples of the World’ series, I readily agreed and gave them an outline with a commitment to hand in the script within a three-year deadline. The outline was quite simple in its essence: the Mughal conquest of India in the sixteenth century, the organization of the state, administration, economy, trade and life in urban centres, and in the countryside, and so forth. In other words, encapsulating the existing state of knowledge on the subject, not an awesome task for one who has taught this history in two major Indian universities for over four decades. If writing the book exceeded the deadline by more than a decade, it was largely because in my enthusiasm I started reading up the primary sources over again. By and by, not only had questions that hadn’t occurred to me earlier begun to arise, but the whole perspective of the project altered radically; by now virtually nothing of the original outline has remained intact. In its place a sort of broad profile has evolved of what I, at this moment, believe are the key entry points for understanding the nature of Mughal state and society. By and large, these entry points have remained unexplored in the arena of the history-writing of Mughal India, even in the midst of innumerable studies of a whole spectrum of themes and some very innovative endeavours. This might explain the preliminary nature of my own explorations here. Even as the title originally proposed – ‘The Mughals’ – could arguably be self-explanatory and self-sufficient, in that the identification of the Mughals with India is virtually given for the professional historian, the popular image – and, more importantly, the image of the Mughals constituted in India’s political scenario as one of several ‘foreign’ Muslim dynasties ruling over India in the medieval centuries – leaves some space