Preparing for the Mughal state

Abstract

Historians usually trace the process of the emergence of an imperial state in the middle ages with respect to a host of contingent factors: the pioneering vision and role of its founder(s), the availability of sufficient agrarian surplus, the making of its most salient institutions of governance and so on. Thus the rise of the Mughal state in north India in the sixteenth century is also credited to the smart manoeuvers by Akbar, the robustness of institutions established by the Afghans before the Mughals and a host of other contingent factors such as the presence of a military labour market. However, as much as the presence of able empire builders and resilient institutions, an empire owes itself also to the ‘preparations’ of its people even before the state actually comes into existence. Not all surplus-producing populace are equally prepared to play along in an imperial project. No empire can take root among people who have not already been seeped into a complex literary-political lore that a future empire can build upon. An imperial subject, in other words, is also historically produced. This paper argues that the process of the making of imperial subjects started much before the early Mughals actually built the empire in the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century in north India was a period of unusual cultural ferment. The emergence of the Mughal imperial formation in the next century was intimately related to the fast congealing tendency of the north Indian society towards a greater disciplining of itself. This tendency is evident in the multilingual literary cultures and diverse knowledge formations of the long fifteenth century.