Artisans, the state, and the politics of wajabi in eighteenth-century Jodhpur

Abstract

Recent historiographical approaches have recognised the multi-centred nature of power in pre-colonial state systems, and have explored the networks between the state and already dominant or emerging groups that occupied the upper echelons of society. Shifting the gaze from the study of elitist discourses to state-artisan relations, this article has argued for the expansion of the constitutive scope of state formation by including lower strata like the artisanate and its politics. While doing so, it has emphasised the meanings of wajabi or ‘legitimate practices’, and their deployment both by artisanal communities and the eighteenth-century state agencies to ensure the observation of normative conduct in intra-caste relations, and in their interactions with one another. Adherence to this ideology, however, could not always dispel the stresses in their relationship because alternate readings of the notion by artisans and the state, and negotiations between the two over the ‘legitimate’ course of action, resulted in contestations and redefinitions of the concept of wajabi.