Writing the Mughal World

Introduction: The Old and the New in Mughal Historiography

Sad naghma-i dard dar sukhan rīz

Dar sāghar-i nau mai-i kuhan rīz.

(Make a hundred songs of pain into poetry,

Fill the fresh goblet with an old wine.)

—Faizi, Nal-Daman

The Mughals have truly cast a long shadow on Indian historiography, from the time when they themselves began to patronize major works of history, largely in Persian, in the sixteenth century. From the very distinctive and remarkably accessible memoir authored nearly five hundred years ago in Chaghatay Turkish by the founder of the dynasty’s fortunes in Hindustan, Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur, to texts written in the next generation by his daughter Gulbadan Begam and several of his son’s officials (Bayazid Beg, Jauhar Aftabchi), to the massive chronicle Akbar Nāma produced in the third generation by Akbar’s most influential ideologue Shaikh Abu’l Fazl ibn Mubarak, these texts have long formed the central basis for an understanding of the Mughals.¹ The fifteenth century had seen a historiographical revolution of sorts in the Central Asian and Iranian Timurid world effected by writers such as Sharaf-ud-Din Yazdi, ‘Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi, and Mirkhwand, and the Mughals undoubtedly carried that tradition forward and consolidated it further south.² Historiographical production then proceeded apace in the century that followed, sometimes with royal or official patronage, and sometimes without its benefit. The reign of Shahjahan (1628–58) alone boasted major chronicles by ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori, Muhammad Amin Qazwini, and Muhammad Salih Kamboh. By the middle years of the eighteenth century, when the English East India Company began its conquest of eastern India, its administrators had to contend with a veritable Mughal library made up not only of histories and books of advice to princes, but literature on a vast variety of other subjects—from norms of comportment, literature, and prosody to astrology, cuisine, and the management of agrarian resources—all of which formed part of the potential curriculum for the novice administrator. These years saw the first halting translations of such texts as the Ā’īn-i Akbarī of Abu’l Fazl, the Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī of Muhammad Qasim ‘Firishta’, and the Inshā’-i Harkaran into English. But this did not mean that English became the dominant idiom in which the history of the Mughals was understood. Through the nineteenth century, their history continued to be addressed and debated vigorously in such diverse idioms as Persian, Urdu, Braj Bhasha, and vernacular languages from Tamil and Telugu to Marathi and Bengali, both before and after the great anti-British uprising of the late 1850s.³

What exactly the Mughals represented remained the subject of continuous and rather contentious debate, some nostalgically lauding their achievements in terms of both culture and material life, others claiming that they had always been an oppressive and despotic presence. The latter view increasingly came to be defended in official British views of India as they moved from their initial ideological claim that they were heirs to and renewers of the Mughal tradition of governance, to the much different view that the ‘improvement’ they were bringing about on the subcontinent represented the mirror image of the type of rule that the Mughals had set in place. An important transitional figure in this respect is that of the East India Company servant Henry Miers Elliot (1808–53), who collected and attempted to systematize materials on Indo-Muslim historiography from both pre-Mughal and Mughal periods.⁴ If Elliot was on the one hand an extremely energetic scholar—his colleague and friend Aloys Sprenger believed he had the best grasp of Indo-Persian historiography of any Englishman of his time—he was also firmly committed to the Company’s political expansion, which led him to suggest that the ills of nineteenth-century princely states such as Awadh could be seen to be endemic and representative of Muslim rule in general.⁵ The highly judgmental (and even accusatory) tone with which Elliot evaluated Mughal histories was exacerbated by his colleague John Dowson, who used his papers (which included draft translations of many Arabic and Persian histories by several hands) to produce the massive eight-volume work titled The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians: The Mohammedan Period (1867–77).

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as an English-language historiography of the Mughals came to be consolidated and developed for use in college and university curricula, several notable historians stand out, some interested largely in military questions, others in patronage and cultural movements, and still others—the dominant, in many respects—in administration. They deployed the recognized and preponderant tools of the time, namely philology and textual criticism (represented most fully in the celebrated Bibliotheca Indica series). This resulted in, above all, analyses of the ‘cream’ of Mughal writing; studies of numismatics and the inscriptional corpus; an examination and documentation of surviving built structures and monuments; studies of painting and visual representations produced under the Mughals; and finally, through a gradual and extremely uneven process, the constitution of an archive of Mughal documents (as distinct from the collections of texts initiated by the Company from the time of the seizure of the library of Tipu Sultan at the end of the eighteenth century—a library which had been incorporated in fair measure into the Asiatic Society’s collection in Calcutta in 1808).⁶ The motivations and methods of those engaged in such work were often complex, perhaps more so than those of Elliot. An early figure of importance, for example, was the Dresden-born Heinrich (Henry) Ferdinand Blochmann (1838–78), who after studies in Leipzig and Paris embarked for India as an enlisted soldier in 1858 (ostensibly drawing inspiration from the eighteenth-century orientalist scholar Anquetil Duperron).⁷ Blochmann knew Persian and Arabic, and upon arrival in India he proceeded to teach and interpret in these languages as well as pursue studies at Calcutta University after a brief stint in the colonial army. From the mid 1860s to the end of his short life he then taught at the Calcutta madrasa, and devoted himself almost exclusively to philological and related pursuits, in particular his eventually unfinished project on the Ā’īn-i Akbarī. Blochmann, like his ally W. Nassau Lees, was thus a central figure in establishing a close relationship between philology—as it was conceived in mid-nineteenth-century France and Germany—and the study of Mughal history.⁸ The relative neutrality of his tone, his attention to geography, the absence of sweeping generalizations, and his careful devotion to the protocols of textual reading in a characteristically positivistic mode have made him a far more attractive figure across a variety of constituencies than the more difficult Elliot.

The tendencies represented by Elliot and Blochmann posed a challenge to the tradition of scholarship that resided still in the Persianized literati class which depended for its sustenance on regional courts, as well as to the prestigious vestiges of Mughal intellectual culture within British India. It could be said that a figure such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan took up the challenge thrown by the new philology allied with the emerging print culture: this seems evident from his partial edition of the Ā’īn-i Akbarī (1855–6), and his editions of Barani’s Tārīkh-i Firūzshāhī (1862) and the Tūzak-i Jahāngīrī (1863; reprinted 1864). In a sense, these followed the older tradition of Fort William College, which had seen several attempts by scholars to render Mughal chronicles into Urdu: they included Mir Sher ‘Ali Afsos’s Ārāyish-i Mahfil, which was a translation of Sujan Rai Bhandari’s Khulāsat al-Tawārīkh, and ‘Ali Husaini’s rendering of Shihab-ud-Din Talish’s Fathiyya-i ‘Ibriya. But Sayyid Ahmad Khan seems in mid career to have abandoned both his philological vocation and his antiquarian interests so evident in his celebrated early work Āsār al-sanādīd (of which two distinct versions exist).⁹ To study the past in this manner, he came to be convinced (apparently under the influence of the poet Ghalib), was to be excessively oriented towards it; rather, the real race was to dominate the future through a deep investment in reform. The foundation by him in 1875 of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh was part of this vision, with an emphasis on persuading members of the Indo-Islamic elite to grasp their future with both hands. Staffed in good measure by Cambridge alumni, and intended to be a sort of Indian Cambridge for the ashraf of northern India, the college was in its first generation (analysed at length by David Lelyveld) more oriented to producing bureaucrats and functionaries than historians of note.¹⁰ To be sure, some who were broadly of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s generation, notably Shibli Nu‘mani, Muhammad Husain Azad, and Munshi Zakaullah, continued to be interested in producing history of a sort, ironically with what has been termed ‘heavy borrowing from British sources, and sometimes their uncritical acceptance’.¹¹

The immensely prolific but quite derivative Zakaullah has been dealt with at length by a number of authors who have also noted that many other—non-historical—aspects of his oeuvre are probably more worthy of attention than his historical ventures. The work of Muhammad Husain Azad (1834–1910) is somewhat different, for we are aware that he specifically began writing a history of Akbar which was eventually brought into print as Darbār-i Akbarī.¹² Though this work came to be popular in many circles, there was little to be found in it for the historian of his time beyond a straightforward chronology of Akbar, beginning with his birth, and an accumulation of (at times engaging) popular traditions regarding the monarch. The most powerful of these authors was surely Shibli Nu‘mani (1857–1914), who also wrote extensively on Islamic history. With regard to Mughal India, however, he is generally known for his work Aurangzeb-‘Ālamgīr par ek nazar, a work frequently reprinted and even translated into English.¹³ Within his wide-ranging body of essays the focus is broadly on intellectual and cultural history.¹⁴ Writing at a time when manifestations of Hindu–Muslim communalism were becoming rather evident at the turn of the twentieth century, Shibli, who had earlier differed with Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s politics and supported the nascent Congress Party, defended Mughal rule and culture on the grounds that the Mughals had protected, befriended, and taken care of their Hindu subjects.¹⁵ In this regard his writings often seem to be addressed to non-Muslim readers. Thus, he aims to call for a recognition of the history of Muslim rule in its ‘positive’ aspects in India as these included efforts at promoting and protecting ‘Hindu’ culture. This he emphasized in particular in a well-known article, ‘Musulmānon ki ‘ilmī be ta‘assubī aur hamāre Hindū bhāiyon ki nāsapāsī’ (The intellectual tolerance of Muslims and our Hindu brethren’s ingratitude).¹⁶ The same sentiment is also expressed in an extremely romantic way in two of his poems, ‘Hamārā tarz-i hukūmat’ and ‘‘Adl-i Jahāngīrī ’. In the first we have these illustrative lines:

Kabhī hamne bhī kī thī hukmarānī in mamālik par,

magar woh hukmarānī jiskā sikkā jān-o-dil par thā […]

dulhan kī pālkī khud apne kandhon par jo lāye the

woh shāhanshāh-i Akbar aur Jahāngīr ibn-Akbar thā

yahī hain woh shamīm angeziyān ‘itr-i mohabbat ki

ke jinse bostān-i Hind barson tak mu‘attar thā.

Tumhe le de ke sārī dāstān mein yād hai itnā

ke ‘Ālamgīr Hindūkush thā, zālim thā, sitamgar thā.

(Once we too ruled over these kingdoms,

a rule which held sway over people’s hearts and souls. […]

The bride’s palanquin was carried on their own shoulders

by the Emperor Akbar and his son Jahangir.

This was the scent of the perfume of love they spread

which made the gardens of Hindustan fragrant for years.

As for you, all you recall of that tale is:

‘Alamgir as Hindu-killer, as tyrant, as oppressor.¹⁷)

This point is amplified in his poem on Jahangir’s justice ("Adl-i Jahāngīrī’), which emphasizes the extent to which the Mughals could put aside even their most cherished sentiments when administering justice to the people irrespective of their religion.¹⁸ For all the considerable impact of Shibli’s oeuvre on his contemporaries and successors, it seems settled that, for the most part, his realm was not properly Indian history.

This meant in effect that the high ground of Mughal history had for a time been almost entirely ceded, in particular to members of the Indian Civil Service who—following Henry Miers Elliot—pursued history either in their spare time or after retirement. Key figures in this respect were two near-contemporary Scotsmen, William Irvine (1840–1911) and Henry Beveridge (1837–1929).¹⁹ Irvine, after his retirement in 1888, wrote extensively on the Mughals, first publishing The Army of the Indian Moghuls (1903), and then reflecting at great length on the dynasty’s travails in the eighteenth century, explaining their decline in terms of moral deficiency; lastly, he showed a close interest in contemporary European narrative accounts of the Mughals and was responsible for an important translation of the Storia of the Venetian Nicolò Manuzzi, which had long lain neglected.²⁰ Beveridge was far more entirely inclined to the task of translation, notably with regard to the work of Abu’l Fazl; his wife, Annette S. Beveridge, produced translations as well, both from the Turkish and the Persian, including of Gulbadan’s memoirs.

The tradition of scholar–civil servants working on the Mughals was then continued but also appreciably transformed by a native of Northern Ireland, William Harrison Moreland (1868–1938).²¹ After his retirement from the Indian Civil Service in 1914, Moreland turned from studying the agrarian problems of the United Provinces to a closer interest in making comparisons between British and Mughal rule, above all from an economic standpoint. From an initial dependence on translations, including of the Ā’īn-i Akbarī, his work in the course of the 1920s and 1930s shows an increasing familiarity with and grasp of Persian narrative sources and documents, as well as the archives of the Dutch East India Company—on which he placed considerable reliance. His works, which are very largely devoted to the history of administration, have often been admired for their thoroughness and technical skill (particularly with respect to revenue vocabulary), but they remain consistent in their urge to demonstrate that, largely on account of poor administrative practice (in other words, despotic rule), the living standards of Indian peasants under the Mughals and their precursors were rather poorer than those under the British. This is a leitmotif from India at the Death of Akbar (1920), to From Akbar to Aurangzeb (1923)—perhaps the strongest of his three major works—to the wide-ranging The Agrarian System of Moslem India (1929). In an obvious jab at Indian nationalist scholars such as Brij Narain, he was to write in the 1930s of how ‘a small but voluble band of enthusiasts have of late adopted an attitude of uncritical hostility towards any evidence tending to show that the India of this [Mughal] period was not an earthly paradise.’²² Moreland for his part remained an ardent adherent of the ideology of colonial ‘improvement’, which led some self-conscious historians even in Britain, such as J.B. Harrison, to criticize his work in the late 1950s and early 1960s.²³

The work of historians such as Irvine and Moreland, while certainly varied in nature and intent, shared a broad commitment to philology and positivism, the former intending to produce a narrative form of history and the latter a more analytical history focused on the fiscal system. Historians of other parts of the Islamic world working at the turn of the twentieth century, or even later, on political narrative or agrarian–fiscal history, whether themselves administrator–scholars or not, would surely have recognized themselves in some of what they did; one may think of the work of Ann Lambton on Iran or Ömer Lütfi Barkan in the Ottoman case.²⁴ So it is in relation to Irvine and Moreland that we must also place the work of the most important and prolific Indian historian of the Mughals in the first half of the twentieth century, Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958). Born into a zamīndār family in eastern Bengal, and educated almost exclusively in Calcutta, Sarkar was noted for being something of a cultural nationalist, famously complaining that ‘India cannot afford to remain an intellectual pariah, beggar for crumbs at the doors of Oxford or Cambridge, Paris or Vienna.’ Some welcome attention has been paid in recent years to Sarkar’s close (and sometimes tense) dealings with his historian contemporaries in Maharashtra; however, one cannot lose sight of his crucial association with William Irvine, as well as the mutual admiration and intellectual support between him and Moreland.²⁵ Within a vast body of work, arguably the best-known project was the five-volume History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources (1912–24), which may have drawn for inspiration on Irvine’s own rather firm notions (in turn influenced by his readings of Manuzzi) on the relative merits of Aurangzeb and his brother Dara Shukoh. Written as narrative ‘high political history’ in a tragic mode, the work claims to show how the highly intelligent Aurangzeb eventually fell victim to his own religious attitudes, which in turn influenced the eventual fate of the empire over which he ruled. Moreland saw no particular contradiction between Sarkar’s work and his own, as his reviews of the latter show; naturally, he preferred the works on administration and institutions to the more flowing narratives, and he also complained on one occasion that Sarkar was too gentle on the Mughals: ‘There is some risk that the lengthy quotations from instructions given to Mogul officials may tempt readers to believe that these instructions must have been followed in practice; a better estimate of the weight actually attached to them can be framed by readers familiar with such incidents as the Khan-Khanan’s excess profits levy at Dacca in 1661, or Mirza Ali Akbar’s extortion at Surat a few years before.’²⁶ For his part, and despite this gently critical remark, it is clear that Sarkar was most certainly not committed to the perspective of the nationalist critics of Moreland, who had insisted that standards of living in Mughal times had been far better than under British rule.

II

The principal difficulty of post-1950 historiography on the Mughals lay in understanding how to manage this troubled inheritance, exacerbated by the implications of the Partition. It soon ceased to be necessary to deal with a renewed British historiography on the subject; after the disappearance of the scholar–administrator from the ICS as a social type, British universities ceased for the most part to patronize the serious study of Mughal history in the 1950s and 1960s.²⁷ Even eccentric figures such as the Stepney-born inveterate traveller and polyglot Edward Denison Ross (1871–1940), who had worked variously on the translation of Mirza Haidar Dughlat’s Tārīkh-i Rashīdī and an edition of Ulughkhani’s Zafar ul-Wālih, were no longer to be found in these years. A figure such as Simon Digby, when he eventually appeared on the scene and began to publish occasionally in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was unable to find a proper place for himself in the academy.

In the South Asian context, however, a struggle played itself out between different tendencies. A simplistic reading of the struggle would view it as a binary one between a ‘communalist’ and ‘secular’ historiography, the former committed to reading the Mughal period in terms of the logic of its religious and ideational conflicts and the latter seeking more materialist and universal schemes of explanation. On this view, there would also be an implicit complicity between Hindu and Muslim communalist readings, the former located for example in the multi-volume History and Culture of the Indian People edited by K.M. Munshi and R.C. Majumdar, and the latter in various works produced in Pakistan by authors such as I.H. Qureshi (1903–81).²⁸ However, a closer inspection of the record reveals a far more complex picture.

Rather, the views summarized above—whether those of Sarkar with their emphasis on the religious basis of later Mughal rule, or Moreland’s more economistic claim that under the Mughals ‘the administration was the dominant fact in the economic life of the country’—were certainly under contest by the 1930s. Here, we refer to the works of historians such as Ibn Hasan, Ram Prasad Tripathi, and Parmatma Saran, and to the larger school of what has been termed ‘nationalist and liberal’ historiography associated with Allahabad University.²⁹ These writers attempted to argue that the Mughal state was no voracious Leviathan, that peasants had well-developed property rights, that reasonable limits existed to the extent of revenue collection, and that Mughal rule had within its institutional structure checks and balances that could be seen as a sort of unwritten constitution. There is no doubt a certain nationalist overzealousness in Saran’s insistence that ‘our modern [i.e. colonial] institutions are not in all respects necessarily an advance over their predecessors’, but the position of these scholars seems in retrospect far more reasonable than Moreland’s rather obsessive concern with the administrative evils of pre-colonial Muslim rule, whether in the Mughal domains or in the Sultanate of Golkonda.³⁰ The first generation of post-1950 historians, such as S. Nurul Hasan and Satish Chandra, came in some measure from this liberal-nationalist tradition and continued even in their later writings to owe much to it (whatever their ostensible allegiance to Marxism). Thus, Satish Chandra’s early work was marked by its critique of Sarkar’s ‘representation of Aurangzeb as a religious fanatic and [his] view that in a truly Islamic state religious tolerance was an impossibility’, while Nurul Hasan consistently insisted on the existence of a complex view of layers of rural middling groups—what he termed ‘primary’ and ‘intermediary’ zamīndārs—rather than a simple opposition between an incubus-like state and an impoverished peasantry.³¹

The emergence in the late 1950s of a new tendency in Mughal studies at Aligarh Muslim University tended to overshadow and obscure this liberal-nationalist riposte to Sarkar and Moreland. After the somewhat unpromising beginnings we have noted above, in the early 1920s the college founded by Sayyid Ahmad Khan was transformed into a university and quickly gained ground with regard to its investment in history; a key figure was the Aligarh- and Oxford-educated Mohammad Habib (1895–1971), whose early work is also marked by a liberal-nationalist perspective not entirely dissimilar to that of the Allahabad historians cited above. Indeed, the combined effect of the emergence of historical schools in Allahabad and Aligarh in the period may be seen as an attempt by both elite Muslim and Persianized Hindu (i.e. Brahmin, Kayastha, and Khatri) groups in northern India to reappropriate Sultanate and Mughal history from the hands of the British ICS historians who had largely reduced them in enterprises such as Bibliotheca Indica to the role of lowly informants and munshīs.³² It is notable moreover that the preponderance of such Indian historians of the Mughals at the time came from families either of wealthy landowners (such as the ta‘ālluqdārs of Awadh or the Indo-Afghan elites of western UP), or from families heavily and prosperously invested in the new liberal professions (such as law). Mohammad Habib emerged from such a milieu, as did a number of other historians—whether liberals or leftist—mentioned below. However, his impact on Mughal historiography was somewhat attenuated by the fact that the greater part of his work focused on the period of the pre-Mughal Sultanate dynasties, as well as early conqueror figures such as Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (971–1030). Of Mohammad Habib’s approach and inclinations as a historian, Simon Digby says: ‘Habib’s interpretations of Indian and Islamic history bear the mark of a succession of intellectual influences upon him. A pious and educated family background, reinforced by Shiblī Nu‘mānī’s historical writings, gave him a keen interest in early Islam, suffused by a romantic but in effect re-interpretative approach. He also had some grounding in fiqh, kalām, and other scholastic Islamic branches of learning, which some of his pupils and successors today lack.’³³ Over time, however, and particularly from the early 1950s, Mohammad Habib’s writings came gradually to acquire a more Marxist colouring, a tendency that may also be linked to the growing prestige and influence of other figures such as Kunwar Muhammad Ashraf (1903–62), who had written widely on Indo-Islamic themes from a broadly Marxist perspective.³⁴ The flagship text of the new Aligarh historiography, or the ‘Aligarh School’ as it is sometimes termed, was written however by a member of the next generation.

This was Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963), initially submitted as a D.Phil. thesis to Oxford University. The work was immediately received with acclaim, though some discordant notes may also be found in reviews, such as two by the Karachi-based historian and Aligarh alumnus Riazul Islam (1919–2007), published in the same year (to which we shall return below). In a glowing review, Tapan Raychaudhuri, who had earlier written on the history of the Mughals in Bengal, declared: ‘Once in a very long while something happens to stir the shallow, turbid and yet extensive waters of Indian historiography. The publication of Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India is generally recognised—even in the most unlikely quarters—as one of these rare occasions.’³⁵ The virtues of the work were seen in part as rootedly traditional, namely the author’s massive erudition particularly with regard to Persian sources; but he was also applauded for explicitly linking Mughal historiography with a Marxist perspective, this being in keeping with the earlier attempts of D.D. Kosambi with regard to ancient India (of which a major statement was published in 1956).³⁶ But critics, even friendly ones, noted the uncomfortable proximity of the work (including its title) with the earlier work of Moreland. Just as the observations of British colonial administrators had once enabled Marx to build his edifice of the Asiatic Mode of Production, it appeared that the logic of Irfan Habib’s argument depended on the cross-pollination of Moreland’s conception of Mughal rule as a voracious Oriental Despotism with the Canadian Marxist Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s characterization of the Mughal regime as undermined by ‘lower class uprisings’.³⁷ Riazul Islam was the most perspicacious of the work’s critics, pointing to how after the ideologically-determined strictures passed on Mughal administration by Moreland and Sarkar, ‘Dr. Beni Prasad, Dr. Ibn Hasan, Dr. B.P. Saksena and, above all, Dr. P. Saran, showed a better understanding and appreciation of Mughal rule.’ He then remarked: ‘Now the wheel has turned full circle and Dr. Irfan Habib has come out to support the view held by an earlier generation of historians’, meaning that of Moreland above all. His critique was particularly sharp with regard to Irfan Habib’s determination to stretch the evidence out on the procrustean bed of a rather crude theory of class struggle:

Dr. Irfan Habib has indeed tied himself into knots in trying to equate the Marathas with peasants in revolt. After observing, ‘The conditions of the peasants were aggravated beyond endurance from the Maratha depredations’, he goes on to draw the astonishing conclusion: ‘This apparently drove the peasants still further into the arms of the Marathas.’ In substantiation he quotes at length from Bhimsen’s Nuskha-i Dilkushā. Curiously enough the passage he cites concludes thus: ‘The peasants have abandoned cultivation and neither dām nor dirham reaches the jāgirdārs. Despairing and perplexed because of (their lack of strength) many of the mansabdārs of this country have gone over to the Marathas.’ If the peasants were reeling under Maratha depredation and if the mansabdārs were going over to the Marathas, it passes understanding how the Maratha eruption can be acclaimed as a revolt of over-taxed peasants against an oppressive, exploiting regime. The fact of the matter is that Dr. Irfan Habib has tried to force a class pattern on facts and the facts have refused to oblige him.³⁸

Despite the accuracy and force of such criticism, The Agrarian System of Mughal India became the magnetic pole around which a whole body of work came to be oriented, while at the same time historians who continued to work within the broadly liberal-nationalist framework—amongst whom we may count such older and highly prolific figures as Mohibbul Hasan (1908–99) and Haroon Khan Sherwani (1891–1980)—were relegated to a distinctly secondary role. To the work of Irfan Habib was added that of, first, Iqtidar Alam Khan and M. Athar Ali, and later, Shireen Moosvi, while each year’s Indian History Congress now saw the production of a separate mimeographed ‘Aligarh volume’ dominated by the perspective of Irfan Habib. This was despite the fact that the greater part of the work of scholars such as Iqtidar Alam Khan and Athar Ali was either profoundly traditional in nature (the biographies of elite figures such as Mirza Kamran and Mun‘im Khan in the case of the former), or perfectly comprehensible within the older liberal–secular framework of history (the case of the latter’s prosopographical work on the Mughal elite), with no particular relationship to the doxa on peasant hyperexploitation that had been filtered through Moreland.³⁹ Further, if the ‘Aligarh School’ gained adherents outside Aligarh, such as to an extent Tapan Raychaudhuri, it also had a polarizing effect within Aligarh (and in Mughal history circles more generally), particularly with regard to scholars such as Khaliq Ahmad Nizami (1925–97) and Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi (1921–94), who continued to express and develop a deep interest in religious questions.⁴⁰

What was the content of the older tradition marooned or set aside by the rising tide of the ‘Aligarh School’? The answers could be diverse, and actually varied over a large spectrum. We may take an example that is relatively well documented to gain a sense of what was at stake. This was the case of Haroon Khan Sherwani, born into a prosperous zamīndār family from Dataoli, just east of Aligarh, but whose grandfather had migrated for political reasons (in the aftermath of 1857) to al-Ta’if in Yemen. The historian Sherwani’s Mecca-born father Musa Khan, on his return to India, was closely associated for a time with Sayyid Ahmad Khan, then joined the Muslim League, and was eventually a follower of Gandhi in the last decades of his life.⁴¹ Despite his close associations with Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s family (including a close personal friendship with his grandson Sayyid Ross Masood), H.K. Sherwani was not educated at the college at Aligarh but admitted to Cambridge in 1907. Though initially inclined to study mathematics, he eventually transferred to Oxford and completed a degree in modern history there in 1911 before pursuing studies in law and travelling in Europe where he became an avid Francophile. Returning to India, Sherwani then spent the years of the First World War somewhat adrift in Aligarh before being appointed to the newly founded Osmania University in Hyderabad in 1919, where he remained for the greater part of his career, with the exception of the years bracketing the Partition and the Indian ‘police action’ in Hyderabad, which he spent in Delhi. In the decades that followed his arrival in Hyderabad, Sherwani consolidated his reputation through his translations, original publications, and participation in the activities of such bodies as the Indian Historical Records Commission. Although himself a transplant to the region, it is clear that his work gradually grew to have a certain Deccani patriotism about it, as one sees in Mahmud Gawan, the Great Bahmani Wazir (1941), The Bahmanis of the Deccan (1953), and his long series of studies on the Qutb Shahi rulers of Golkonda, culminating in the publication of the massive History of the Qutb Shahi Dynasty (1974). These are almost all works of narrative history, albeit with some attention to the functioning of institutions; Sherwani’s other great interest was the Muslim presence in Europe. At the heart of the work lies a somewhat idealized view of the South Asian ‘composite culture’ that is thought by him to have characterized the centuries between about 1350 and 1750. This idea he developed largely from a reading of Persian and Arabic materials, but also—as in his last work, on the Qutb Shahis—by drawing on the work of collaborators to address literary materials in Telugu. The tone is at times nostalgic, but often soberly modernist as befitted a moderate admirer of Mustafa Kemal. The ‘drawback’ with this form of history is its lack of schematization, an absence of great and totalizing theoretical edifices, and adherence to a particular style of British empiricism; its advantages include a very broad coverage of both material and cultural themes, as well as attention to and respect for philological precision.

Such virtues were scarcely enough to protect these writings from marginalization, a process that cannot simply be understood as an assault on humanistic history by the methods of the social sciences. By the early 1990s, some three decades after the publication of Irfan Habib’s magnum opus, an attempt was made by one of us to understand systematically what the long-hegemonic ‘Aligarh School’ had come to stand for in regard to Mughal historiography.⁴² The exercise made it clear that the ‘school’ itself had by then ossified into defending a series of propositions which, when taken together, did not appear either particularly innovative or even entirely coherent as a programme. However, these propositions were widely diffused not only within India but in the nascent historiography on the Mughals that had emerged in the West (and above all in American universities) from the 1970s. Here then was the body of orthodox propositions that the ‘school’ and its chief adherents seemed to defend.

First, on matters of chronology and periodization, the main focus of research on the Mughals seemed always to be on the period from Akbar to Aurangzeb, which is to say 1556 to 1707. This was the period dealt with in Irfan Habib’s Agrarian System. Even within this period, the main focus was to be on the reigns of Akbar and Aurangzeb, with a relative neglect of the first half of the seventeenth century. This also meant giving overwhelming importance to certain texts, of which ‘most favoured status’ was extended to the Ā’īn-i Akbarī of Shaikh Abu’l Fazl, completed in the late sixteenth century.⁴³ It was argued moreover that the ‘key’ Mughal institutions were put in place by Akbar and remained there under Jahangir and Shahjahan, only to come under challenge during the reign of Aurangzeb. We have noted that both the early period of Mughal rule (including both Babur’s and Humayun’s reigns), and the post-Aurangzeb era, were given short shrift.⁴⁴

A second set of propositions concerned the nature of political power. The empire in the years under examination had to be portrayed as a highly centralized and bureaucratized despotic ‘absolutism’. Such however was apparently not the case under Babur and Humayun, nor under Aurangzeb’s successors. Manifestations of this precocious centralization were to be found in the Mughal revenue system, mansabdārī, the coinage system, and the high degree of control exercised over society in general (on which more below). Flowing from this was an insistence on the ruthlessly extractive character of the dispensation: the Mughal state was thought to have had a massive impact on producers, extracting their surplus almost wholly. In Tapan Raychaudhuri’s portrayal in The Cambridge Economic History of India, the Mughal state was ‘an insatiable Leviathan (with) … unlimited appetite for resources’, which had the peasantry ‘reduced to bare subsistence’.

This extractive character implied in turn massive concentration of resources in the hands of the elite. However, the surplus extracted, it is argued, was used unproductively for conspicuous consumption, including imports. At the same time, relations with the world at large were seen as showing a passive character. Imports were seen as largely required to service elite consumption, thus affecting a narrow, mostly urban segment of society. Since this position bore a close resemblance to the one espoused by eighteenth-century Physiocratic literature, it was natural for the ‘Aligarh School’ to oppose its writings to those of ‘bullionist’ historians, who it portrayed as praising trade because it brought precious metals into the economy. However, even for the ‘Aligarh School’ trade may not have been wholly irrelevant in one specific sense. This was in terms of the potentially destabilizing effects of the bullion inflow through inflation in the seventeenth century, the so-called ‘Price Revolution’. Again, one of the central reasons why technology allegedly remained static was the cultural attitude of the elite, which was portrayed as lacking in scientific curiosity and technological application. Aside from its place in such blunt-edged culturalist formulations, ‘ideology’, usually read simply as ‘religion’, had to be seen as largely irrelevant for purposes of historical analysis. The main contradictions and tensions in the empire were to be viewed as structural, and flowing from the clash of interests rather than ideological perspectives. Even the reasons for the curious elite ideology mentioned above are not to be investigated, but treated as given. Part of the reason for this appeared to be the need to use certain selected texts quite literally, rather than consider the possibility that they may have been ideologically motivated. The notion of the ‘normative’ text thus did not feature in these writings for the most part.

Finally, there was the sensitive matter of ‘eighteenth-century decline’, which has perhaps attracted more attention than any other.⁴⁵ This was in spite of the fact that not even all of the ‘Aligarh School’ (as we have defined it) had precisely the same opinion on the question. Tapan Raychaudhuri, for example, apparently did not subscribe to the view of a decline in the economy in the eighteenth century, as evident from his contributions to the two volumes of The Cambridge Economic History of India. Most fervently attached to the proposition were Athar Ali and Irfan Habib, with the latter having first articulated his position in the closing chapter of his Agrarian System. He argued there that the jāgīrdārī system, whose very nature promoted short-term exploitation of the peasantry, combined with other factors such as inflation to provoke a ‘crisis’, manifested in widespread peasant rebellions against the Mughal state. This crisis came to a head in the last years of Aurangzeb’s reign and continued through much of the eighteenth century, leading to the generalized ‘subversion of peasant agriculture’. The eighteenth century was in his view a period when ‘the gates were opened to reckless rapine, anarchy and foreign conquest.’

III

It is against this long historiographical background that the studies in this volume, which were largely conceived and written between 1997 and 2009, must be considered. Its authors are two historians of considerably different background and training. The first author (Muzaffar Alam) after an initial training in Islamic studies, traditional philology, and theology (outside Western-style institutions), studied history at Jamia Millia Islamia, Aligarh, and the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has long been invested in textual edition and criticism as well as the study of narrative materials and archival documents in Urdu and Persian (and more recently Arabic). The second author (Sanjay Subrahmanyam) was trained in the social sciences and completed his initial research at the University of Delhi on the economic history of southern India. Thereafter, his interests have widened on the one hand to include new geographical areas (from Iberia to Southeast Asia), and on the other hand to social, cultural, and literary questions. This book thus finds itself at the intersection of these two quite diverse sets of authorial interests and skills.

The themes treated here are in turn quite diverse, and if in part they were deliberately conceived to swim against the tide of historiographical orthodoxy, they are also often motivated by more simple philological and textual concerns. They broadly cover the three centuries from 1500 to 1800, albeit not in an even or systematic fashion. Our first study concerns one of the forerunners and eventual targets of the Mughals, namely the Sultanate of Gujarat. Initially written for a volume in memory of the French scholars Jean Aubin and Denys Lombard, this study has since been somewhat expanded through the addition of material. Here, we hope to contribute to the renewal of a broad diplomatic history of the sort upheld and defended by Riazul Islam in his several works on the subject of ‘Indo–Persian relations’.⁴⁶ However, we do so by looking at Gujarat’s relations with the Ottomans on the one hand and the Portuguese Estado da Índia on the other. Our intention is moreover to argue that the Mughals from the very outset operated in a broad inter-state and diplomatic context, which thus obliged them to render their political and sovereign expressions commensurable with others—whether Islamic or European.⁴⁷

The second study is in a related vein, but looks instead to Mughal understandings of Southeast Asia in the late sixteenth century. This was motivated in part by our study of a single, somewhat neglected text by a certain Tahir Muhammad Sabzwari (which has never to our knowledge been edited), but it was also intended to counter the cliché (referred to above) regarding the Mughal elite’s lack of cultural curiosity.

The next four studies address issues from the early seventeenth century, the period of transition between the Mughal emperor Akbar and his son Jahangir. The first draws on Jesuit materials and the autobiographical narrative of a Mughal notable, Asad Beg Qazwini, to consider how matters of succession were managed at this time. In part, this takes us back to the preoccupations of the ‘Allahabad School’ regarding the robustness and resilience of Mughal institutions as against the portrayal of the empire as an arbitrary despotism. The second of these studies then contrasts Asad Beg’s views of the Mughal frontier with the sultanates of the Deccan (particularly Ahmadnagar and Bijapur) with those of a slightly earlier Mughal envoy to the same region, the poet Faizi, brother of the celebrated Abu’l Fazl. The poet Faizi is again the central subject of the next study, which has a far more literary flavour and concerns one of his most important works, the narrative poem (or masnawī) devoted to the old Indic story of Nala and Damayanti. We propose a politically-inflected reading of this work, and argue that Faizi was influenced by ideas of advice literature and the ‘mirror of princes’ genre in his treatment of these materials. We thus hope here to argue that it is necessary to cast our net wider in search of the key texts through which to comprehend Mughal ideology, going beyond the chronicles and treatises that have usually been drawn upon. A fourth study returns us to the Jesuit materials, which are on this occasion read together and contrasted Rashomon-like with a recently discovered text of prime significance, the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī of the Mughal intellectual ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri. Through this exercise we gain a better sense of the courtly intellectual milieu as well as the inter-religious debates (munāzara) that characterized a good part of this period, and which were important precursors to those of the colonial period.

The succeeding study then deals with a rather different type of text, namely the short (but extremely rich) autobiography of a Hindu (probably Kayastha) munshī named Nek Rai from the second half of the seventeenth century. We argue that first-person narrative texts like this, though somewhat rare, are crucial in order to understand how a literati culture was formed and transformed under the Mughals. We have drawn inspiration here from a rich literature that exists on similar themes for the Ottoman empire.

The last three studies take us finally into the eighteenth century, long the neglected stepchild of Mughal historiography (despite the early interest shown in it by Irvine and Sarkar). In the first of this triptych, we propose a regional study of the emerging ‘successor state’ of Arcot in southern India, drawing upon the Persian chronicling tradition and the records of the Dutch East India Company. We show that this state as it emerged was a sort of condominium of a Deccani (Nawayat) elite and Persianized Hindu communities such as the Khatris. We also argue for the need to reintegrate studies of agrarian-fiscal themes with those of external trade, two fields which we argue had for too long been kept artificially separated. A second study then takes us to examining the changing fate of our munshīs in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as they accompanied the changes in Mughal rule as both agents and witnesses. We read both histories and autobiographical accounts by some of these figures to this end, and compare them with similar figures elsewhere in the early modern Asian world.

Finally, coming full circle, the last study included here examines the views and writings of an obscure Mughal prince of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, Mirza ‘Ali Bakht Azfari. Azfari’s chief work, an autobiographical text, was deliberately modelled on that of his distant direct ancestor Babur, but unlike his illustrious forebear he was unable to emerge triumphant with a kingdom to rule over at the end of his travails. Once more, this study is a contribution to a broader understanding of the varied and contested basis of the Mughal ideology of rule. A brief epilogue then traces how the Mughals were seen from the perspective of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, using the writings of a series of intellectuals who left the old Mughal capital of Delhi for Lucknow further east.

Taken together or read separately, these studies form part of an interesting renewal and reorientation of Mughal historiography that has taken place over the last quarter-century and more. These changes can be understood in a variety of ways, but there is little doubt that they constitute a gradual erosion (if not dismantling) of the erstwhile hegemony of the ‘Aligarh School’.⁴⁸ In 1975, the American historian John F. Richards published his Mughal Administration in Golconda, the first significant monographic work on Mughal history to appear by a scholar entirely trained outside the subcontinent in many decades. This was a carefully constructed discussion of a single region in the Deccan over roughly four decades (from 1687 to 1724), based on hitherto underexplored archival documentation. While insisting on the great influence exerted over his work by Jadunath Sarkar, it is nevertheless interesting that Richards chose at the time to pose his book as a part of the ‘Aligarh School’. In marked contrast, when a long-awaited (and slightly revised) second edition of Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India appeared in 1999, it fell on stony ground, hardly being reviewed (or read) for the most part. Several new themes had emerged in the intervening years, and the narrow conception of history as the examination of a fiscal-administrative apparatus seemed curiously old-fashioned by then. This was depite the fact that neither the Cambridge historians (whether in their first incarnation of the 1960s as the ‘Cambridge School’, or as reoriented by C.A. Bayly in the 1980s), nor ‘Subaltern Studies’ had addressed the Mughal period for the most part.⁴⁹

What then were the new trends and themes of the changed Mughal historiography? To some extent they were indeed entirely new, but they also at times represented the renewed respectability now afforded to certain classic subjects that had for a time been set aside. We shall identify seven such areas below, to which others can certainly be added.⁵⁰

(1) The question of religion under the Mughals saw a great deal of renewed interest in the period, for reasons that had in part to do with the contemporary controversies of the period. Faced with the debates around the Babri Masjid, for example, it became clear that the received portrayal of the Mughal elites’ religious attitudes was in need of closer examination. This also required a return to the vast body of materials from the period left by Sufi orders and charismatic saintly figures. The work of Simon Digby on the Naqshbandis in the Deccan had been preceded by Richard Eaton’s and Carl Ernst’s work on other Sufis, and was followed by that of Nile Green.⁵¹ One of the present authors also contributed several essays on this question, whether with regard to the early Mughals or the neglected Chishtis of the seventeenth century.⁵² Where once such hagiographical and related materials were seen as irrelevant (or relegated to a distinctly secondary status, as with the work of Nizami and Rizvi), they came now to play a far more important role in research.

(2) In a related vein, literature and literati culture emerged once more as serious fields of inquiry rather than as a minor set of sources to be mined for their descriptions of material life. Some of the studies in this volume partake of that trend, as in our repeated recourse to and discussion of first-person narratives in Persian. Elsewhere, we have written at monographic length on the Indo-Persian travel account as a genre and also on the emergence of Persian as the dominant language of courtly and elite expression amongst the Mughals.⁵³ Equally, there has been a growing interest and careful discussion of vernacular materials, in particular Braj Bhasha, but also other regional materials, and even Sanskrit.⁵⁴ In part, this can be read as an aspect of a ‘new intellectual history’ of the period, encompassing a variety of subjects including music, and seeking to go beyond the paradigms of ‘cultural failure’ and oriental stasis dear to earlier authors.⁵⁵ The study of translation (for example between Sanskrit and Persian) in the polyglot culture of the Mughal elite is also a thriving field that is bound to grow in significance. Again, it may be noted that such studies often have both elite and popular dimensions, and incorporate oral traditions as much as written ones.⁵⁶

(3) There has been a marked revival of interest in the ‘neglected periods’ of Mughal history, both the first half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century. We can thus count new monographs on Babur and Humayun, as well as on later Afghan rule in northern India; equally, the reign of Jahangir has been the subject of renewed interest and curiosity.⁵⁷

(4) Also of significance was the trend of the regional monograph, possibly inaugurated by Richards’s work on Golkonda cited earlier, and continued by his student Richard Eaton in his work on Bengal in the longue durée; Punjab has been treated in the seventeenth century by Chetan Singh.⁵⁸ A set of new studies on Gujarat under Mughal rule include an important one by Farhat Hasan, possibly the most credible of the recent generation of Aligarh-trained historians.⁵⁹ Yet, what is of particular interest in Hasan’s work is the judicious distance he puts between his own work and older orthodoxies, both with regard to methods and conclusions.

(5) There have also been some significant strides in the integration of the traditionally distinct domains of art history and architectural history with Mughal studies in general.⁶⁰ In part, as with writers like Ebba Koch, this has been by treating both art and architecture as part of the sphere of ideological production and even as somewhat propagandistic in nature.⁶¹ But, more generally, the capacious rubric of ‘visual culture’ has enabled the synthesis of visual and textual materials, to which we too have contributed elsewhere.

(6) One of the paradoxes of Mughal studies in India in the decades following Independence was the relative neglect of textual editions. Between roughly 1960 and 2000, very few editions of important Persian texts appeared in the country, and the historians of the ‘Aligarh School’ proved to be particularly negligent in this respect.⁶² In contrast, several important works were edited in Pakistan (both in Lahore and Karachi), as well as in Qom and Tehran. These included works that had long been known and catalogued but little studied; several important discoveries were also made in the process.⁶³ In the pages that follow, we have made full use of these quite recently edited texts, whether the letters of the poet Faizi, or the account of ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahori of the nocturnal discussions in the court of Jahangir.

(7) Finally, one must note the innovations in the treatment of gender and related questions by several authors, most notably Rosalind O’Hanlon. These include not simply the treatment of the harem, or of femininity (older subjects that have now been significantly reinterpreted) but also studies of masculinity in relation both to the elite at large and the royal figure himself.⁶⁴

These trends, if taken together, might suggest that Mughal historiography had taken something of a belated ‘cultural turn’, in keeping with that of the historical profession in general. While this is true to an extent, we should note a continued interest in the sphere of high Mughal politics as such, political economy in a more general sense (whether analysed through Marxist frameworks or not), the history of knowledge-making and technology, and many other somewhat materialistic themes. From the earlier dominance of a single pole, we can say that a hundred flowers of Mughal studies now bloom in various continents. We hope through these studies to have contributed a few more sprigs to that bouquet.

¹For a useful recent and ambitious reconsideration of a large group of texts, see Stephan Conermann, Historiographie als Sinnstiftung: Indo-persische Geschichtsschreibung während der Mogulzeit (932–1118/1526–1707) (Wiesbaden: 2002). No comprehensive general discussion exists in English of Mughal historiography. For a still-useful overview, see Abdur Rashid, ‘The Treatment of History by Muslim Historians in Mughal Official and Biographical Works’, in C.H. Philips, ed., Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (London: 1961), pp. 139–51; more specifically, see studies such as Harbans Mukhia, Historians and Historiography During the Reign of Akbar (New Delhi: 1976). Interesting readings of particular texts are also emerging, such as Ali Anooshahr, ‘Mughal Historians and the Memory of the Islamic Conquest of India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 43, no. 3, 2006, pp. 275–300.

²John E. Woods, ‘The Rise of Timurid Historiography’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 1987, pp. 81–108.

³See, for example, Phillip B. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 45, no. 4, 2003, pp. 783–814; Kumkum Chatterjee, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in 17th and 18th Century Bengal (Delhi: 2009); Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, ‘India’s History Revealed in a Dream’, trans. Sujit Mukherjee, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 1995, pp. 219–44; Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (New York: 2007).

⁴On Elliot, see Tripta Wahi, ‘Henry Miers Elliot: A Reappraisal’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1, 1990, pp. 64–90; more generally, see J. S. Grewal, Muslim Rule in India: The Assessment of British Historians (Calcutta: 1970).

⁵It has been suggested that Elliot’s younger contemporary and sometime collaborator Abraham Richard Fuller (1828–67) possessed a sounder and less biased grasp of Mughal historiography. For a discussion of this question, as well as of the broader Indian reception of British colonial historiography, see Avril A. Powell, ‘History Textbooks and the Transmission of the Pre-colonial Past in North-Western India in the 1860s and 1870s’, in Daud Ali, ed., Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia (Delhi: 1999), pp. 91–133.

⁶Charles Stewart, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Library of the Late Tippoo Sultan of Mysore: To Which are Prefixed Memoirs of Hyder Aly Khan and His Son Tippoo Sultan (London: 1809).

⁷On Anquetil Duperron, see the important reconsideration by Lucette Valensi, ‘Eloge de l’Orient, éloge de l’orientalisme: Le jeu d’échecs d’Anquetil-Duperron’, Revue de l’histoire des religions, vol. 212, no. 4, 1995, pp. 419–52.

⁸For a wide-ranging reflection (which does not however take the case of Indo-Persian into account), see Sheldon Pollock, ‘Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 4, 2009, pp. 931–61.

⁹Christian W. Troll, ‘Note on an Early Topographical Work of Sayyid Ahmad Khān: Āsār al-Sanādīd’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 2, 1972, pp. 135–46.

¹⁰David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton: 1978).

¹¹Mushirul Hasan, A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (Delhi: 2005), pp. 225–34 (p. 231); Muhammad Aslam Syed, Muslim Response to the West: Muslim Historiography in India, 1857–1914 (Islamabad: 1988).

¹²See the editor’s introduction by Muhammad Ibrahim to Muhammad Husain Azad, Darbār-i Akbarī, reprint (Lucknow, n.d.).

¹³Shibli Nomani [sic], Alamgir, trans. Syed Sabahuddin ‘Abdur Rahman (Delhi: 1981). This work was originally written as a series of essays between 1906 and 1909 in the magazine Al-Nadwa. For a discussion, see Aslam Syed, Muslim Response to the West, pp. 88–9.

¹⁴Some of Shibli’s most important essays regarding the Mughals are: ‘Zaib-un-nisā’’ (1909), Maqālāt-i Shiblī, vol. 5 (Azamgarh: 1989), pp. 100–11; ‘Maulawī Ghulām ‘Alī Āzād Bilgrāmī’ (1905), Maqālāt-i Shiblī, vol. 5, pp. 112–28; ‘Hindustān mem Islāmī hukūmat ke tamaddun kā asar’, Maqālāt-i Shiblī, vol. 6 (Azamgarh: 1989), pp 194–216; ‘Humāyūn-Nāma az Gulbadan Begum’, in Rashid Hasan Khan, ed., Intikhāb-i Mazāmīn-i Shiblī (New Delhi: 1993), pp. 106–17; ‘Tuhfat al-Hind: Musulmānon ki tawajjoh braj bhāshā par’, in Khan, ed., Intikhāb-i Mazāmīn-i Shiblī, pp. 48–58; ‘Bhāshā, zabān, aur Musalmān’, in Khan, ed., Intikhāb-i Mazāmīn-i Shiblī, pp. 59–71; ‘Jahāngīr aur Tūzak-i Jahāngīrī’, in Khan, ed., Intikhāb-i Mazāmīn-i Shiblī, pp. 118–49.

¹⁵On Shibli’s differences with Sayyid Ahmad Khan, see Sayyid Sulaiman Nadwi, Hayāt-i Shiblī (Azamgarh: 1999), pp. 295–8 and 618–23.

¹⁶The essay is reproduced in Maqālāt-i Shiblī, vol. 6, pp. 217–36.

¹⁷Kulliyāt-i Shiblī Urdū, ed. Sayyid Sulaiman Nadwi (Azamgarh: 1954), p. 41.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 42.

¹⁹A third Scottish savant who might be added to their number is Thomas Wolseley Haig (1865–1938), though he devoted greater attention to the Deccan than to Mughal India.

²⁰See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Further Thoughts on an Enigma: The Tortuous Life of Nicolò Manucci, 1638–c. 1720’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 45, no. 1, 2008, pp. 35–76.

²¹For a useful, but rather apologistic, view of his career, see Margaret H. Case, ‘The Historical Craftsmanship of W.H. Moreland (1868–1938)’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 2, 1964, pp. 245–58.

²²W.H. Moreland, ed., Relations of Golconda in the Early Seventeenth Century (London: 1931), p. xxvi. In this work, which edits and presents the accounts of William Methwold, Pieter Gillisz van Ravesteyn, and Anthonij Schorer, Moreland defends their narratives as largely objective views of a despotic state. Cf. Brij Narain, Indian Economic Life: Past and Present (Lahore: 1929).

²³J.B. Harrison, ‘Notes on W.H. Moreland as Historian’, in C.H. Philips, ed., Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, pp. 310–18.

²⁴In the case of Barkan, some Turkish scholars have in fact termed his approach one of ‘state fetishism’. See Halil Berktay, ‘Three Empires and the Societies They Governed: Iran, India and the Ottoman Empire’, in Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi, eds, New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History (London: 1992), pp. 242–66.

²⁵Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Public Life of History: An Argument Out of India’, Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 1, 2008, pp. 143–68; also Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Bourgeois Categories Made Global: Utopian and Actual Lives of Historical Documents in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 25, 2009, pp. 67–75. The conventional treatment in works such as S.K. Srivastava, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the Historian at Work (Delhi: 1989) is in need of considerable revision.

²⁶W.H. Moreland, ‘Review of Sarkar, Studies in Mughal India and Mughal Administration’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 3, 1921, pp. 438–9.

²⁷The only major area of continued interest for British scholarship on the Mughals was literary, as we see from the work of Ralph Russell, Christopher Shackle, David Matthews, and others. For a good example of such work, see Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, Three Mughal Poets: Mir, Sauda, Mir Hasan (Cambridge, Mass.: 1968). Aside from these, we may count a few essays on the Mughals, such as Peter Hardy, ‘Abul Fazl’s Portrait of the Perfect Padshah: A Political Philosophy for Mughal India—or a Personal Puff for a Pal?’, in Christian W. Troll, ed., Islam in India, Studies and Commentaries: vol. 2, Religion and