Consolidating Empire: Power and Elites in Jahangir's India 1605-1627

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What happened in Mughal India in the quarter century after Akbar's death? Nothing that really mattered according to received wisdom. Through a complete re-examination of the reign of the fourth Mughal emperor Jahangir, this book upends that traditional view.

Rather than provide a linear history of this relatively neglected monarch, Lefevre analyses at wide range of imperial and non-imperial texts, as well as vestiges of material culture, to reveal major transformations involving imperial authority, ethno-religious diversity, and state centralism.

The book begins by questioning the historiography that categorises the monarch as a political lightweight. By contrast, Lefevre shows us an intellectually complex, astute, and multi-faceted Jahangir who managed a tightrope act between self-indulgence and the serious business of kingship. More important than looking at the king, she says, is examining the nature of the empire under his reign. To that end, she moves the focus onto the Mughal military, administrative, and religious elites, and highlights how they readjusted to the changing imperial ethos.

The book closes with an exploration of relations between the Mughal empire and two other major polities of early modern Muslim Asia - Safavid Iran and the Chingizi khanate of Central Asia.

Scholars and general readers will value this thorough and much-needed revision in our understanding of Jahangir and Mughal India.

CORINNE LEFÈVRE received her Ph.D. (2005) in History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She taught at the INALCO University before becoming a CNRS Research Fellow and a member of the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS) in 2006. She has published articles in the Annales HSS, Indian Economic and Social History Review, The Medieval Journal, Religions of South Asia, chapters in edited volumes, and coedited Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud. Sources, itinéraires, langues (XVI-XVIIIe siècle), and Cultural Dialogue in South Asia and Beyond: Narratives, Images and Community (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries) a special issue of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.

RITINGS ON THE Mughal empire have gone through several distinct phases in the past century, broadly following the trends in the larger historical profession, but also some- times diverging from them. In the first half of the twentieth century, various approaches already competed: those that derived from an emphasis on the character and predilections of the individual rulers, those that were mainly concerned with how a fiscal and administrative structure or 'system' was established and consolidated; and finally, those with a penchant for the artistic and architectural "achievements' of these sovereigns.

The first set seem to have been heavily influenced by the approach of the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and were brought to the study of the Mughals in part because of the significant voice of a set of Scottish administrator-scholars such as Henry Beveridge and William Irvine, who wrote extensively on Mughal history and then influenced weighty (albeit controversial) later figures like Jadunath Sarkar. The emphasis on fiscal administration for its part came from the fact that a number of colonial officials (like W. H. More- land), who had been involved in such tasks in their professional lives, turned to study the Mughal origins of the institutions they were faced with on a day-to-day basis. Finally, the Mughal empire was always an object of fascination for aesthetes and collectors, whether in India or in Europe, or later in the United States. Such people brought a different angle of appreciation to the empire, even if their work was often more descriptive than analytical in character. Together with all of these, one must also remember the influence of philologists and textual scholars who produced editions (and also translations) of major works on the Mughals, and thus gave shape to the field. A sizeable body of popular histories of the Mughals which have emerged and are regularly produced even today are wholly dependent on these translations, and so also usually wind up reproducing the errors and prejudices of the translators, After 1947, this landscape changed somewhat. Western scholarship on the Mughals gradually dwindled, except within art history, where it continued to flourish in the great Western museums and related institutions. In South Asia, a dominant historical school progressively emerged, namely that of Aligarh, with an emphasis on a combination of political and economic history. Initially innovative during its first phase in the late 1950s and 1960s this school eventually became an inflexible orthodoxy with a nationalist-Marxist reading of the Mughals. To be sure, discordant voices were heard at times, some insisting on the significance of religious history and mysticism, others arguing for histories of diplomacy. Some of these came from scholars based in Pakistan, such as Shaikh Abdur Rashid or Riazul Islam; others from those-like the peripatetic S. A. A. Rizvi-who were more closely associated with Aligarh itself.

Eventually, in the 1980s, when it became clear that the 'Aligarh School' had overstayed its historiographical welcome, a new impetus was given to Mughal history, and can be thought to have crystallised around the body of work of an Aligarh alumnus, Muzaffar Alam. Though Alam was at times reluctant to openly challenge the senior generation, it was his work, together with that of the American historian John Richards (also a reluctant rebel), which eventually opened up a set of new directions for Mughal historiography. This newer historiography had a distinct basis: new themes and questions; new comparisons and connections; and the exploration of freshly discovered and published sources. At the same time, it would be erroneous to claim that the older, let us say pre-1980, historiography, was simply discarded or rejected, for that is not how things really work in historical research. The present book by the French scholar Corinne Lefèvre is a part of the newer historiography and represents a distinctive contribution to it.

On 30 AUGUST 1569, the man who would become the fourth ruler in the Mughal dynasty (1526-1857) was born in Sikri, a hamlet perched on hilltops neighbouring the city of Agra. Salim was his given name, Jahangir the one he chose upon his accession to the throne in 1605. His father Akbar (r. 1556- 1605) was the scion of a prestigious lineage: he was descend- ed from the Mongol Chingiz Khan (Gengis Khan, d. 1227) and the Turk Timur (Tamerlane, d. 1405), two insatiable conquer- ors who had imprinted the idea of a universal empire on much of Eurasia and whose memory was still very much alive in the sixteenth-century Islamic world.' By the late 1560s, however, the ambitions of the young Akbar were much more limited. Enthroned in Delhi in 1556, when he was only fourteen years old, he de- voted the early years of his reign to recapturing the Indo-Afghan kingdom that his grandfather Babur (r. 1526-1530) had founded in the first quarter of the sixteenth century after he was driven out of Samarqand by the Uzbeks. In 1540, Babur's son and successor Humayun (r. 1530-1540, 1555-1556) lost the inherited dominions to the Sûrs (1540-1564) an Afghan dynasty from Bihar-and to a collateral Mughal branch that confiscated the Kabul region. It was only in 1555, after several years of exile spent in Iran, that Humayun eventually managed to regain the territories conquered by Babur. The first fifteen years of Akbar's rule were therefore a period of consolidation during which he was also trained as a king under the tutelage of elites from Turan (Central Asia) and Iran. This initial stage came to an end in the late 1560s, when he undertook to push the frontiers of Mughal domination beyond the Lahore-Banaras axis that had so far constituted the heart of the dynasty's possessions in India. Because they controlled access to the Gulf of Cambay and the Arabian Sea, and could mobilise the large armed peasantry of North India, the Rajput clans of Rajas than were a major target of Akbar's expansionist policy, which alternated shows of force and negotiations. Whereas the famous strongholds of Chittor and Ranthambhore had to be conquered through warfare, it was Akbar's marriage with the daughter of Bhär Mal (r. 1547-1574), raja of the relatively minor Kachhwäha clan from Amber (near Jaipur), that secured the fruitful and lasting alliance between Mughals and Rajputs.

The union was literally fruitful since it resulted in Salim's birth, Akbar's first male heir not to die in infancy and, most importantly, the first 'mestizo' among Mughal princes, soon to be followed by many others. The alliance was also productive in political terms: along with the co-optation of a sizeable number of Indian Mus- lims (shaikhzādas) who had worked for successive dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526), it provided indigenous support to the empire and allowed the ruler to rely less heavily on the Central Asian elites who were anxious to safeguard the dominant position they had enjoyed in Bäbur's early kingdom. Contrary to the wishes of these elites, the movement of 'Indianisation' intensified throughout the 1570s. The maritime sultanates of Gujarat and Bengal-coveted windows onto the lucrative trade of the Indian Ocean for which European, Middle Eastern, and Asian fleets fiercely competed-were incorporated into the empire as Akbar distanced himself from the religious orientations prevalent in Central Asia. In this latter respect, Salim's birth also appears symptomatic of a larger trend.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages