Description
The Mughal Of India: In writing this book I have been privileged to have accumulated an enormous wealth of the debt of gratitude from a very large number of friends, colleagues and students. It was the late Burton Stein who suggested my name to Blackwell Publishers when they were looking for an author for this volume in their ‘Peoples of the World’ series. In the last nearly two decades of his life, Burt had shared with me many intimate moments of joy and sorrow about virtually everything under the sun, history-writing included. My sadness at his departure is the greater for the certainty that he would have been mightily pleased to see the book in print, though he probably would not have agreed with almost anything it contains. That was Burt: forever joyful, friendly and critical, of the kind that revives one’s faith in humanity. The first chapter on legitimacy, in many ways the toughest for me to write, has been seen by several friends: Muzaffar Alam, Aijaz Ahmad, Rajat Datta, Dilbagh Singh, Monica Juneja, Urvashi Dalal. Each of them made many comments and suggestions; all of these added up to substantial help in polishing up a point here, an argument there. Some years ago I also experimented with it at a seminar which John F. Richards had chaired at the Department of History, Duke University. His observations led me to nuance several of the formulations. A couple of generations of my students at the Centre at JNU, too, read the draft, and in various ways their discussion of it, along with other writings on the theme of governance, came as very valuable feedback This innovative book examines the Mughal presence in India from 1526 to the mid-eighteenth century through four new entry points: the sources of the Mughal state's legitimacy; the evolution and meaning of court etiquette; the world of the imperial Mughal Empire; and the interaction between folklore and court culture..