Indian Paradigms of Political Authority and Usages of Urban Spaces: Comparative Analysis of Jaipur as an Eighteenth-century Example

Abstract

This article critiques the current scholarship on Indian urbanization, which either provides social, economic and cultural histories of the Indian cities or offers religious models for the origins of the cities. The investigation of urbanization processes in the Jaipur state reveals the centrality of this aspect to the consolidation of sovereignty and its incorporation of diverse social groups. This article draws attention to the historically located factors that produced new forms of indigenous sovereignty and proposes that two imperial cities, Shahjahanabad (Delhi) and Jaipur, came close to this definition.