Introduction: The Returns of the Mughal

Abstract

This introduction revisits the European deployment of the concept of Oriental Despotism in India and its colonial imbrication with Mughal history. Padamsee locates the founding appeal of the Mughal past in early and deeply conflicted British attempts to legitimate a despotic claim to territoriality that could not otherwise be accommodated by English legal and constitutional norms. While colonising the Mughal past became instrumental to colonial self-empowerment, the political-theological contradictions it entailed resurfaced in the embattled late colonial state and substantially shaped British and Indian historical fiction, continuing to fuel the contentious figure of the Mughal in Hindu Nationalist politics today.