The King and the People
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 18 August 2025
- ISBN 9780197767610
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages376 pages
- Size 235x157x22 mm
- Weight 540 g
- Language English 638
Categories
Short description:
The King and the People tells the history of a period of imperial collapse through the everyday experience of the Mughal empire's urbanites. This book offers a narrative of the evolving relation between courtly enunciations of sovereignty and the politics of the street. Set in Delhi, the capital of the largest and most sophisticated political formation in India before the British, the book brings together the study of intellectual traditions, power politics, urban culture and popular violence.
MoreLong description:
An original exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire's capital, The King and the People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah's devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only as the ruled.
Drawing on a wealth of sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book is the first comprehensive account of the dynamic relationship between ruling authority and its urban subjects in an era that until recently was seen as one of only decline. By placing ordinary people at the centre of its narrative, this wide-ranging work offers fresh perspectives on imperial sovereignty, on the rise of an urban culture of political satire, and on the place of the practices of faith in the work of everyday politics. It unveils a formerly invisible urban panorama of soldiers and poets, merchants and shoemakers, who lived and died in the shadow of the Red Fort during an era of both dizzying turmoil and heady possibilities.
As much an account of politics and ideas as a history of the city and its people, this lively and lucid book will be equally of value for specialists, students, and lay readers interested in the lives and ambitions of the mass of ordinary inhabitants of India's historic capital three hundred years ago.
The book is based on an incredible wealth of Persian manuscripts, which Kaicker reads both with and against the grain, always careful not to flatten out the complexity of the phenomena described and the multiplicity and heterogeneity of voices.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Nadir Shah and the State of Conquest
Chapter 2: Sovereignty, City and the People
Chapter 3: Poetry and the Public in Aurangzeb's Delhi
Chapter 4: Law and the People Under Aurangzeb
Chapter 5: Regicide and Popular Protest
Chapter 6: Islam as a Language of Popular Politics
Chapter 7: The Shoemakers' Riot and the Limits of Popular Politics
Epilogue
Bibliography
