Abstract
Abhishek Kaicker’s monograph offers an analysis of the emergence of forms of ‘popular sovereignty’ and the ‘people’ as political subjects during the tumultuous eighteenth century in the Mughal imperial walled city of Shahjahanabad. The author examines the city as a site of regime change through regicide and fratricide within the imperial household as well as military occupations. In this period of upheavals, contestations and crises that were increasingly common in a city whose urban infrastructure struggled to live up to its heyday of the seventeenth century, Kaicker represents ordinary subjects as active participants in transforming the political landscape rather than being mute spectators living under Mughal dominion. The monograph is centred around events that have long been debated in the historiography as either representing Mughal ‘decline’ or ‘decentralisation’. Maintaining the standard historiographical narrative of Aurangzeb Alamgir’s reign, depicted as a phase of ‘Muslim orthodoxy’, the author argues that the emperor inadvertently laid the ground for radically altering Mughal sovereignty from a ‘sacral’ to a ‘legal-bureaucratic regime’ that the subjects could contest on their own terms. From being the ‘ruled’, the ‘people’ allegedly came to recognise themselves as actors of history, though, unfortunately, their demands do not reach its teleological end of ‘emancipation’ since the region came under British colonial rule in 1858.
The first chapter is set around Nadir Shah’s 1739 sacking that weakened the imperial city, depleting its resources. The following chapter describes the city’s foundation during Shahjahan’s reign and its imagination as the site of Mughal sovereignty. The next two chapters narrate the tumults in the city during the last of the Great Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb’s half a century reign. Poetry, wit and sarcasm play a role in shaping the ‘people’s’ interactions in the public spaces. Chapter four, titled ‘Law and the People under Aurangzeb’, forms the crux of the author’s claim that his policies produced two contradictory results: first, the subjects realised their own potential to be active political agents, and second, Muslims in particular began to identify themselves as a ‘community of Muslims’. Chapters five and six examine Farrukh Siyar’s deposition and protests in the 1720s while the final chapter analyses the famous shoemakers’ riot. In conclusion, the author makes a foray into the consequences this supposed popular transformation may have had for the great revolt of 1857. Many issues addressed in the monograph have been well-known and extensively studied by several generations of Mughal historians. The book’s chapter sequence and template follow both William Irvine’s and Jadunath Sarkar’s work on the later Mughals and the author cites manuscripts belonging to Irvine’s collection housed at the British Library.
The work’s interpretative gestures rely on a larger claim about the radical transformation of Islamic sovereignty and the emergence of ‘subaltern’ agency. Extending on Azfar Moin’s ‘sacred kingship’, it makes a case for Aurangzeb’s divestment from his predecessors’ sacrality towards the ‘supremacy of law’ built upon ‘impersonal administrative systems’ (p. 294). Narrative sources used here do not offer a portrait of how the law worked nor of the bureaucratic functioning of military, administrative and financial institutions that long predated 1658. Indeed, Deccan documents from prince Aurangzeb’s viceroyalty amply demonstrate the well-oiled machinery that had existed under Shahjahan, though it would be perfected in the second half of the seventeenth century. Examining chancery procedures and the legal system that are totally absent in the work but stand accused would have revealed a different empire. Nor does bureaucracy as such negate the charismatic sacrality that the emperors embodied. Yet, how could any emperor have personally rendered justice even in the pre-1650s? Contrary to the author’s claims, Aurangzeb continued with the Islamic legal responsibility (fard) of the Sovereign to do justice, almost every week, through ordinary jurisdiction (‘adalat) and extraordinary jurisdiction (radd al-mazalim) of rectifying Mughal officers’ heavy-handedness. Neither did the sacral end with the emperor nor did a legal regime begin with him. Therefore, the clichéd historiographical trope of Aurangzeb’s penchant for the shari’a becomes an empty placeholder without substance. Indeed, such tropes were repeated frequently, for instance, by Subaltern Studies scholars, a majority of whom needed to caricature Mughal sovereignty to justify their arguments for shifts in the colonial/modern period.
Subjects demanding their rightful claims (huquq) or protesting oppression (zulm) from state agents does not by itself constitute the emergence of a people’s voice. Such protest forms based on invoking the idiom of Islam have been known throughout Islamicate empires since sovereignty implied the protection of life and livelihood as well as public welfare like food security. This was hardly unique to Mughal Delhi. Common folk would no doubt mobilise the ideological claims of their masters for ensuring they fulfilled their obligations. However, the work does not ask what the place of the ‘people’ could even be in a society where divisions of caste, clan and ethnicity were markers of political categories. The author inadvertently ends up romanticising a few exceptional events rather than examining the norm: a non-representative form of absolutist sovereignty. Mughal elites did not require any form of legitimation from the commoners. Historians tend to forget that religious ideology, violence and even the use of brute force to repress subjects were normal in all premodern forms of governance.
From the perspective of urban history, the monograph seldom reveals the city’s spatial organisation in the mundane encounters between subjects, local agents and juridical officers. Beyond a few anecdotes portraying judges (qazis) negatively, one hardly finds any analysis of daily transactions and litigation proceedings at the court (mahkama). Contrary to the thick urban historiography available for other Islamicate cities (Istanbul, Cairo or Damascus), Shahjahanabad neither appears in its close connections to the suburbs (purajat) and the rural hinterland nor in its administrative capacity as the heart of the empire’s vast landscape.
By exploring occasional conflicts, the monograph advances the idea of the formation of ‘popular sovereignty’ at least among certain strata of non-elites, as if they constituted themselves as a body politic. One historian pointed to the limits of the 1857 revolt when judged from its political propositions that barely addressed ways of overcoming caste or ethnic differences (Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, 2016). If so, in the eighteenth century, what views of rights did the subjects enunciate to guarantee coexistence? On what grounds would the ‘people’ become a meaningful collective that would govern rather than be governed? Unfortunately, even these elementary issues of the political theory remain unaddressed. Instead, the author operates with a concept of sovereignty as ‘representation’, a European invention since Locke that continues to affect our present, namely, how citizens can deliberate on political choices with each other and represent themselves in the processes of decision-making in the government.
The hypothesis that the subjects of Mughal sovereigns transformed themselves into sovereign subjects, postulated as it is on the transfer of power from the king’s sacred body to the collective incorporated body–a Euro-Christian imagery idealised in Hobbes’ Leviathan–is imaginary at best for precolonial South Asia. The monograph does not account for Mughal legal-bureaucratic and military-administrative systems as well as daily realities of its subjects. The ‘people’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ are imaginary grafts far removed from the socio-economic hierarchies on one hand and, on the other, elite governance structures of Mughal India.