ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Shireen Moosvi, Economic History of Mughal India: Collected Essays, Vols. I–II. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2026.

The publication of the first two volumes of Shireen Moosvi’s Economic History of Mughal India: Collected Essays provides an appropriate occasion to assess not merely the essays now brought together but the larger scholarly achievement of one of India’s foremost economic historians. Volume I contains nineteen essays extending across numismatics, trade, shipping, regional economic profiles and the problem of capitalism; Volume II brings together seventeen essays dealing with imperial revenue administration, monetary systems, land revenue and rights, and urban economic development under Akbar, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb. They form the first two instalments of a projected four-volume collection of Moosvi’s writings.

Read alongside The Economy of the Mughal Empire, c. 1595: A Statistical Study, Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences, and People, Taxation, and Trade in Mughal India, these volumes reveal something more significant than the range of an individual historian. They document the development of a particular conception of economic history: one in which Persian textual scholarship, quantitative analysis and a materialist understanding of social relations are brought together in an attempt to reconstruct the workings of a pre-modern economy.

Moosvi belongs unmistakably to the intellectual tradition associated with the Centre of Advanced Study in History at Aligarh Muslim University. Mohammad Habib, S. Nurul Hasan, Irfan Habib, M. Athar Ali and Iqtidar Alam Khan had, in different ways, helped shift Mughal history away from dynastic narrative towards the investigation of institutions, agrarian relations, social classes and structures of power. But intellectual traditions become historically important not because succeeding generations merely reproduce them, but because individual scholars find within them new questions and methods. Moosvi did precisely that.

Her distinctive contribution arose partly from an unusual intellectual formation. She came to history not through the conventional path of a humanities scholar but as a trained statistician, having completed her MSc from Lucknow University. This background equipped her with a mathematical rigour and a scepticism towards unsupported generalisations that few historians of pre-colonial India possessed. Later, a fellowship at Bellagio allowed her to study counterfactual history under leading practitioners, which sharpened her sensitivity to alternative possibilities and the contingent nature of economic outcomes. These twin influences – statistical precision and counterfactual reasoning – gave her work a methodological edge that distinguished it from both orthodox economic history and purely narrative accounts.

If Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India demonstrated what could be recovered about production, agrarian relations, revenue extraction and rural society through an intensive interrogation of Persian sources, Moosvi pushed the enquiry in a direction few had attempted systematically: could the Mughal economy actually be measured?

From the Āʾīn-i Akbarī to an Economy

The fullest expression of this ambition was The Economy of the Mughal Empire, c. 1595, first published in 1987 and substantially revised for its second edition. Oxford University Press rightly describes it as a pioneering attempt to apply quantitative analysis to the pre-colonial Indian economy; the revised edition added, among other things, an estimate of GDP. The ambition of the original book was extraordinary. Its chapters moved from an examination of the statistics and their sources through the extent of cultivation and agricultural productivity to land-revenue demand and realisation; revenue grants and the zamindars’ share of agrarian surplus; imperial income, mansabdar salaries, military and household expenditure and the diffusion of surplus; and finally urbanisation, prices, wages, money, credit, foreign trade and population.

The importance of the work did not lie simply in producing numbers. Its methodological achievement lay in demonstrating how difficult it was to produce numbers that possessed historical meaning. The Āʾīn-i Akbarī was not a modern statistical abstract. Moosvi therefore subjected its quantitative material to the same kind of source criticism that historians normally apply to narrative evidence. She examined manuscript readings, recalculated totals, identified chronological inconsistencies and investigated precisely what administrative categories represented. Against Moreland’s description of the Āʾīn as essentially a hastily assembled collection of official material, she drew attention to Abu’l Fazl’s care in presenting quantitative information. At the same time, she refused simply to accept all the figures at face value.

Where manuscript figures differed substantially, she acknowledged the uncertainty and restricted the conclusions that could be drawn from them. She also insisted that the Āʾīn could not be understood in isolation. The Akbarnāma, Bayazid Bayat, Nizamuddin Ahmad, Badauni, Mutamad Khan and European testimony were required to clarify institutions, administrative terminology and the meaning of particular statistics. This combination of philology and statistics became one of the distinguishing features of Moosvi’s scholarship.

It also enabled her to ask questions of an order rarely attempted for sixteenth-century India. What proportion of the agrarian surplus was appropriated? How much reached the ruling class? What proportion was consumed through the imperial establishment? How large might the urban population have been? What relationships existed between money supply, prices and credit? What impact did overseas trade have upon internal production? Some calculations inevitably required assumptions. Yet Moosvi normally exposed those assumptions to scrutiny. The historian could therefore disagree with the multiplier or estimate without having to reject the entire enterprise. That remains an important virtue of her work.

From Structures to People

If The Economy of the Mughal Empire established the quantitative foundations of Moosvi’s scholarship, People, Taxation, and Trade in Mughal India demonstrated how widely those methods and questions could subsequently be extended. The collection is divided across a striking range of subjects: economic experience; silver influx, money supply, prices and interest rates; ecology, demography and gender; revenue administration and imperial finance; the economic consequences of Mughal expansion into the Deccan; agrarian crisis; and finally shipping, ports and the commercial world of Gujarat.

The title itself is revealing: people, taxation and trade. Economic history here is not simply the history of the state’s revenue. Nor is it reduced to merchants and markets. Moosvi continually attempts to connect economic structures with the lives of the people inhabiting them. Population and settlement matter; so do women’s work and labour. Fiscal policies matter, but so do scarcity, prices and exploitation. Ports matter not simply as nodes in international trade but as communities inhabited by merchants, sailors, artisans and others.

Her essay on work and gender is especially important in demonstrating how far her economic history could travel beyond the conventional subjects of revenue and currency. The visual material itself is revealing: women fetching water, spinning, breaking stones and sieving material for lime-making, carrying bitumen during the construction of Agra Fort, and a girl at school all form part of the evidence assembled for understanding work and gender. Such investigations complicate the stereotype of an older Marxist historiography concerned exclusively with impersonal structures. For Moosvi, structure ultimately consists of relationships among people.

Money, Markets and the Wider World

Another major strand running through the older collections and now particularly visible in the Primus volumes concerns money. Coins for Moosvi are not merely numismatic objects. Mint output can become evidence for monetary circulation; changes in precious-metal flows can illuminate movements in prices; interest rates can provide clues to credit conditions; imported bullion can be related to India’s position within international commerce. This necessarily carries Mughal history beyond the territorial boundaries of the empire.

The silver arriving in India originated in global circuits. European trading companies provide some of the documentation, but Moosvi is careful not to allow the abundance of European records to distort the historical picture. Her work on Gujarat, for example, recognises that English and Dutch bullion imports represented only part of the precious metals entering India, with the Red Sea and Persian Gulf trades remaining important. Her treatment of foreign commerce in The Economy similarly attempts to calculate its relationship with domestic production. In the revised reconstruction, foreign trade generated a significant proportion of the value added by urban manufactures, with textiles forming the principal export and bullion and horses among the major imports.

Yet Moosvi never permits commercial expansion automatically to become evidence of an impending capitalist transformation. That distinction is fundamental to her economic history. The existence of prosperous merchants, extensive markets, sophisticated credit and substantial commodity production demonstrates commercialisation. For Moosvi, it does not by itself establish capitalism. The crucial questions concern the organisation of production, the appropriation and deployment of surplus, labour relations and whether accumulated wealth was systematically converted into productive capital.

Her attempt to reconstruct the consumption of the Mughal ruling class is especially interesting in this respect. She asks whether the enormous rural surplus appropriated by the state and nobility generated demand for manufactured commodities or primarily sustained a large service sector. The conclusion bears directly upon the question of why commercial expansion did not necessarily produce a transition towards capitalism. The Primus volumes consequently place Moosvi within one of the largest historiographical debates concerning early-modern India: whether the subcontinent before colonial rule possessed tendencies towards autonomous capitalist development. Her answers may be debated. The importance lies equally in the precision with which the problem is formulated.

Land and Sea

Moosvi’s interests in trade also enabled her to challenge another inherited assumption: that the Mughal Empire, being overwhelmingly dependent upon agrarian revenue, was essentially indifferent to maritime activity. Her essay on shipping under Akbar begins precisely with this historiographical proposition. She does not deny the fundamentally continental character of Mughal power. Instead she asks whether that generalisation adequately describes the actual behaviour of Akbar and his nobility.

The evidence complicates the conventional picture. Akbar personally encountered the maritime world after the conquest of Gujarat, visited Cambay, travelled on a vessel and personally directed the reduction of Surat. Moosvi then investigates Mughal shipping and imperial attitudes towards navigation rather than assuming that dependence upon agrarian revenue necessarily implied indifference to maritime commerce. The method is characteristic. A large historical generalisation is neither casually rejected nor respectfully repeated. It is tested against evidence.

Another Moosvi: Episodes in the Life of Akbar

The danger in describing Moosvi principally as a quantitative economic historian is that another important dimension of her scholarship disappears. Episodes in the Life of Akbar offers perhaps the best corrective. It is an unusual book. Rather than write another continuous biography of Akbar, Moosvi selected contemporary descriptions, reminiscences and eyewitness accounts, predominantly from Persian sources, translated or revised their translations, and supplied the historical context necessary to understand them.

Her Preface explains the conception succinctly. Because Akbar was unusually accessible and because of his own interest in history, he became one of the most intimately documented individuals in pre-modern India. Moosvi therefore preferred eyewitness testimony wherever possible so that readers might encounter not only Akbar himself but something of what the times were like. This book reveals the historian behind the statistician.

Consider her treatment of Akbar’s administrative measures of 1574-75. Rather than supply a synthetic account alone, she places Abu’l Fazl’s official interpretation alongside Badauni’s hostile version. Both required fresh translation because technical administrative terminology could materially alter their meaning. The result is not an uncomplicated celebration of Akbar. When Abu’l Fazl is biased, Moosvi says so. When Badauni is hostile, that hostility becomes part of the evaluation of his evidence. When earlier translations obscure technical meanings, she revises them. And when competing witnesses disagree, the reader is permitted to see the disagreement.

The selections themselves range from Akbar’s childhood, hunting and elephant fights to the consolidation of central authority, administrative experiments, religious debates, encounters with Jesuits, translations of Sanskrit works and reflections attributed to the emperor. At the end, Moosvi presents a checked and corrected selection of Akbar’s sayings preserved by Abu’l Fazl. Among them appear striking affirmations of reason and demands for evidence rather than credulous acceptance of extraordinary claims. Episodes consequently tells us something important about Moosvi’s historical method. Numbers never displaced texts. Indeed, her ability to quantify the Āʾīn-i Akbarī depended upon precisely the textual sensitivity displayed in Episodes.

The State and the Surplus

Across these works, one concept repeatedly binds together apparently disparate subjects: surplus. Agricultural production generates it; revenue institutions appropriate it; zamindars claim portions of it; mansabdars receive it; imperial households consume it; towns absorb it; artisans benefit from some forms of elite demand; and merchants participate in the movement of commodities produced within the economy. The Mughal state is therefore neither simply a political superstructure nor merely a revenue-collecting machine. It occupies a central position in the circulation and redistribution of economic resources.

This is where Moosvi’s Marxist inheritance is clearest. But her Marxism operates most effectively as a set of questions rather than a substitute for evidence. Who produces? Who appropriates? How much? Through what institutions? Where does the appropriated surplus go? What economic activities does its expenditure encourage? These questions convert abstractions about class into empirically investigable historical relationships.

The Problem of Precision

The most obvious criticism of Moosvi’s work also arises from its greatest methodological innovation. Can sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence really sustain calculations of population, agricultural output, urbanisation, sectoral distribution or income with the precision sometimes suggested by quantitative reconstruction? There must inevitably be doubts. The evidence is incomplete, uneven and produced for purposes entirely different from those of modern economic statistics. A figure generated from several assumptions may acquire, when placed in a table, an appearance of certainty that the original evidence does not possess.

But two qualifications are necessary. First, Moosvi is unusually alert to the problem. She identifies manuscript discrepancies, recalculates figures and explicitly limits the uses to which particularly uncertain data can be put. Secondly, an estimate whose assumptions are visible is intellectually preferable to an impression whose assumptions remain concealed. One can dispute Moosvi’s population estimate, alter a conversion factor or challenge a calculation of surplus. Precisely because the reasoning has been made explicit, the argument can be tested. That is a major scholarly achievement.

The Primus Volumes and a Career Seen Whole

This is where the publication of Economic History of Mughal India acquires significance beyond republication. An article written decades ago inevitably belongs initially to a particular controversy. Gathered together, such articles reveal patterns that may not have been apparent when they first appeared. Volume I‘s juxtaposition of numismatics, trade, shipping, regional economies and capitalism makes visible Moosvi’s continuing concern with the relationship between money, markets and production. Volume II‘s essays on revenue administration, monetary systems, landed rights and urban economies reveal the complementary relationship between state, surplus and society.

And People, Taxation, and Trade supplies the bridge between these two worlds. Its seventeen essays range from quantitative economic experience, silver and interest rates through ecology, population and women’s work to Todar Mal, Shahjahan’s financial policies, Aurangzeb, the Deccan, agrarian crisis, shipping and Surat. What initially looks like remarkable diversity therefore possesses an underlying coherence. Moosvi has spent much of her career asking how resources moved through Mughal society. They moved from cultivator to zamindar and state; from treasury to mansabdar and imperial establishment; from countryside to town; from merchant to artisan; from overseas bullion flows into Indian mints; from elite consumption into craft production and services. Economic history, in this conception, is ultimately the history of these movements and of the social relationships governing them.

Shireen Moosvi and the Aligarh Tradition

The new collections also permit a more precise assessment of Moosvi’s relationship with what has conventionally been called the Aligarh School. There is an obvious intellectual genealogy. Mohammad Habib’s concern with social formations, Nurul Hasan’s work on agrarian relations, Athar Ali’s reconstruction of the Mughal nobility and Irfan Habib’s analysis of the agrarian system collectively transformed the questions asked about medieval India. Moosvi belongs to this transformation. But she should not simply be placed in Irfan Habib’s shadow. If Habib’s Agrarian System reconstructed the relations surrounding agricultural production and extraction, Moosvi attempted something somewhat different: to estimate the dimensions and proportions of the economy generated by those relations.

That required a methodological apparatus distinctly her own. Statistics, cartography, numismatics, fiscal documents, Persian chronicles, European commercial records and later comparative material could all become evidence within the same investigation. The result was neither conventional economic history nor simply an extension of agrarian history. It was an attempt at a quantitative social history of a pre-modern empire. There is also a quality shared with the best scholarship of the Aligarh tradition that deserves emphasis: an unwillingness to allow the scale of the argument to reduce the density of the evidence. The questions may be very large (capitalism, economic growth, imperial crisis, population), but the argument repeatedly returns to a coin hoard, manuscript variant, revenue figure, Persian technical term or shipping record.

Why These Essays Matter Now

The publication of these collected essays comes at an interesting historiographical moment. Over recent decades Mughal studies have expanded enormously. Historians have investigated kingship and political culture, gender, household, literature, language, emotions, art, architecture, religious identities, courtly practices, environmental history and the representation of sovereignty. Much of this scholarship has transformed our understanding of Mughal India. But historiographical expansion should not become historiographical substitution.

The questions posed by Moosvi have not disappeared. How much agricultural surplus was extracted from the countryside? How was it distributed? What were the living conditions of producers? What happened to wages and prices? How extensive was monetisation? How large were India’s towns? How important was overseas commerce to domestic production? What kinds of labour sustained manufacturing and construction? What was women’s contribution to production? How were commercial wealth and political power related? Why did an extraordinarily sophisticated commercial economy not necessarily generate capitalist relations of production? These are not old questions simply because they were asked several decades ago. Nor can they be answered solely through the study of discourse and representation. Empires require resources. Courts require revenues. Armies have to be paid. Buildings require labour. Cities require food. Artisans require markets. Merchants require credit. Peasants confront demands upon their produce. Moosvi’s scholarship continually reminds us of this material foundation of historical life.

An Achievement in Perspective

It would nevertheless be inappropriate to turn the publication of collected writings into an exercise in commemoration alone. Moosvi’s interpretations should continue to be questioned. The increasingly sophisticated literature on early-modern global economic history has changed some of the contexts in which questions about Indian commercialisation and capitalism are posed. Regional studies have complicated any single model of the Mughal economy. Environmental history has drawn attention to ecological variables insufficiently integrated into earlier economic models. Histories of labour have uncovered relationships difficult to capture through aggregate calculations. Comparative work on standards of living and the Great Divergence has generated new methods as well as new controversies.

Moosvi’s own work, however, anticipated some of these directions more than is sometimes recognised. Ecology, population, women’s work, regional variation and global bullion movements were already part of her economic history. And the proper measure of an important historian is not whether every conclusion survives unchanged. It is whether subsequent scholarship must continue to confront the questions and evidence that historian placed before it. By that standard, Moosvi’s achievement is considerable.

The Economy of the Mughal Empire, c. 1595 demonstrated that the pre-colonial Indian economy could be subjected to quantitative investigation of remarkable ambition. The book explicitly set out to test received impressions against quantified data and ranged from population and agricultural production to class expenditure, urbanisation, consumption, prices, interest and foreign commerce. Episodes in the Life of Akbar demonstrated that the same historian was capable of handling narrative evidence with sensitivity to language, authorship, bias and contradiction. People, Taxation, and Trade widened the enquiry from a reconstruction centred upon c.1595 towards economic processes operating across the seventeenth century and beyond, incorporating people, gender, environment, regions and maritime commerce. The new Primus volumes now enable these investigations to be viewed retrospectively as components of a single, remarkably sustained intellectual enterprise.

The Measure of Moosvi

Perhaps the most appropriate word with which to characterise Shireen Moosvi’s scholarship is measure. She measures in the literal sense: acreage, revenue, population, wages, prices, silver, expenditure, urbanisation and trade. But she also measures evidence. How reliable is Abu’l Fazl? What does a particular Persian administrative term actually signify? Can two manuscript readings be reconciled? Does a European traveller’s figure correspond with indigenous evidence? Can a generalisation inherited from Moreland survive comparison with new data? Does the existence of extensive commerce justify speaking of capitalism?

That second kind of measurement is ultimately more important than the first. It explains why her scholarship cannot adequately be characterised simply as statistical history. The numbers are instruments for recovering relationships among people, resources and institutions. The publication of Economic History of Mughal India: Collected Essays therefore performs an important service. It makes available a substantial body of scholarship, but more importantly it allows us to see the contours of a historian’s intellectual life.

Within the larger Aligarh tradition, Shireen Moosvi developed a recognisable historical practice of her own: empirically exacting, quantitatively adventurous, materialist in explanation, sceptical of easy generalisation and remarkably willing to extract historical meaning from evidence that initially appears incapable of answering the questions being put to it. Not every estimate will endure. Nor should it. Economic history advances through recalculation as much as reinterpretation. But after The Economy of the Mughal Empire, it became considerably harder to speak about the Mughal economy without asking how much. After People, Taxation, and Trade, it became harder to discuss those quantities without asking who produced, paid, worked, traded and benefited. And Episodes in the Life of Akbar reminds us that behind both questions lies another: what does the evidence actually permit us to say?

The first two Primus volumes bring these strands together. They are therefore more than collections of previously scattered essays. They provide an opportunity to recognise the cumulative achievement of Shireen Moosvi as one of the major historians of the economy and society of Mughal India, a scholar who taught us not simply to describe that economy, but to attempt to measure it, and then to ask what those measurements tell us about the people who lived within it.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The history of the English East India Company in India is generally written backwards, beginning with its eventual political ascendancy in the eighteenth century and tracing its origins to the modest commercial establishments of the seventeenth. Such an approach frequently creates the impression that European domination was inevitable, that the Company’s superior maritime technology and military organisation had already assured its eventual triumph over the Indian powers. Yet the historical record presents a considerably more complex picture. In the closing decades of the seventeenth century, when the English East India Company attempted to challenge Mughal authority through armed force, it suffered a humiliating defeat and was compelled to seek the forgiveness of Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir.

The Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690, sometimes called Child’s War after Sir Josiah Child, one of the Company’s principal directors, deserves greater attention than it has generally received in popular historical writing. It was not merely an isolated military confrontation between a European commercial corporation and an Indian empire. It was a contest over political sovereignty, commercial privileges and the limits of European intervention in the Indian Ocean world. Its outcome demonstrated the formidable resources of the Mughal state and the ability of Aurangzeb to assert imperial authority even while his armies were engaged in extensive campaigns elsewhere.

The episode also provides an opportunity to reconsider Aurangzeb himself. Few rulers in Indian history have been subjected to such sharply contrasting representations. In contemporary political discourse, he is frequently reduced to a caricature: an intolerant, narrow-minded and destructive ruler whose religious convictions supposedly overwhelmed his political judgement. Such representations tell us more about the selective appropriation of history in the present than about the complexities of seventeenth-century Mughal governance. Aurangzeb was undoubtedly a deeply religious sovereign, and some of his policies, particularly the reimposition of the jizya in 1679 and certain measures concerning temples, remain legitimate subjects of historical criticism and debate. Yet to allow these issues alone to define a reign extending over nearly half a century is to disregard the extraordinary political, administrative and military responsibilities that he discharged.

Aurangzeb was one of the most powerful sovereigns of his age. He governed an empire of immense territorial extent, commanded enormous military resources, supervised a sophisticated administrative establishment and remained personally involved in the conduct of government to an unusual degree. His reign witnessed the conquest of Bijapur and Golconda, the further expansion of Mughal authority in the Deccan and the continued integration of distant regions into imperial political and fiscal structures. His long correspondence, preserved in collections such as the Ruqʿāt-i Alamgīrī and the Kalimat-i Tayyibāt, reveals a ruler deeply concerned with appointments, revenue administration, military affairs, justice and the conduct of his officials.

This does not mean that his policies were invariably successful. His prolonged Deccan campaigns imposed enormous pressures upon the empire, and the expansion of Mughal authority created administrative and financial problems that became increasingly apparent towards the end of his reign. Nevertheless, political difficulties and controversial decisions should not obscure his considerable abilities as an administrator, commander and statesman. He was a ruler with a clearly articulated conception of sovereignty, political responsibility and imperial order. The defeat of the English East India Company offers a particularly revealing illustration of these qualities.

The Mughal Empire and the English commercial presence

When the English East India Company received its charter from Queen Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600, the Mughal Empire was already firmly established as one of the great powers of the early modern world. Under Akbar, its territorial authority and administrative institutions had undergone substantial consolidation. During the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, the empire continued to exercise considerable influence over the commercial and political life of the subcontinent.

European merchants entering Indian waters encountered neither an economically stagnant society nor a political vacuum. They entered a densely interconnected commercial world in which Indian merchants, bankers, brokers and shipowners played dominant roles. Gujarat, Bengal and the Coromandel Coast were major centres of textile production and maritime commerce, while cities such as Surat, Ahmadabad, Agra, Lahore, Patna and Dhaka were linked through extensive networks of trade and credit.

The English Company initially operated within this established system. Its commercial activities depended upon permissions granted by Mughal authorities, negotiations with provincial governors and arrangements with Indian merchants. The English factory at Surat and the subsequent expansion of Company establishments in Bengal were made possible not through military conquest but through commercial diplomacy.

Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy to Jahangir’s court between 1615 and 1619 illustrates the nature of these relationships. Roe sought trading privileges from a sovereign whose court possessed political resources and ceremonial authority far exceeding anything that the English Company could command in India. The English were petitioners seeking imperial favour, not representatives of a superior power dictating terms.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Company had established itself at several important commercial centres. Madras developed around Fort St George, while Bombay, acquired by the English Crown from Portugal in 1661 and transferred to the Company in 1668, provided a potentially valuable maritime base. Bengal, with its extensive production of cotton textiles, silk and saltpetre, became increasingly important to English commercial interests.

Yet the Company remained dependent upon Indian political authority. Its factories were not sovereign enclaves in the modern sense, and its commercial privileges could be challenged or withdrawn by the governments under whose jurisdiction it operated.

The significance of this dependence becomes clearer when viewed against the scale of Aurangzeb’s empire. By the 1680s, the Mughal state commanded resources vastly exceeding those of the Company. Its armies, revenue administration and political institutions extended across much of the subcontinent. Its authority was exercised through an elaborate hierarchy of mansabdars, provincial governors, revenue officials, military commanders and local intermediaries.

Aurangzeb’s empire was certainly not free from political tensions, but it remained a formidable imperial structure. The English Company was only one among several foreign commercial organisations seeking access to its markets.

Aurangzeb as sovereign, administrator and commander

To appreciate the significance of the Anglo-Mughal War, it is necessary to understand the character of Aurangzeb’s rule.

Aurangzeb had acquired extensive administrative and military experience long before his accession in 1658. As a prince, he served as governor of the Deccan, Gujarat and Multan, and participated in important military campaigns. His experiences in the Deccan were particularly significant, acquainting him with the complexities of regional politics, military logistics, revenue administration and relations with powerful local elites.

His accession followed a bitter war of succession, in which he demonstrated considerable strategic ability. His victories over the forces supporting Dara Shukoh, particularly at Dharmat and Samugarh in 1658, were not accidental achievements. They reflected his capacity to organise military resources, cultivate political alliances and exploit the weaknesses of his opponents.

Once established on the throne, Aurangzeb maintained close supervision over the machinery of government. His correspondence reveals a sovereign attentive to administrative detail and frequently dissatisfied with negligence, corruption or the failure of officials to discharge their responsibilities. He was not merely a ceremonial monarch presiding over an inherited system. He was actively involved in its operation.

The extensive documentary material relating to his reign, including the Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī of Saqi Mustaʿid Khan, the Muntakhab al-Lubāb of Khafi Khan and the collections of imperial correspondence, allows us to examine both the ideals and the practical limitations of his kingship. These sources must, of course, be read critically. Court chronicles often sought to legitimise imperial actions, while later narratives sometimes reflected the political concerns of their own times.

Aurangzeb’s military achievements were substantial. The incorporation of Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687 brought two powerful Deccan sultanates under Mughal authority. These conquests required prolonged planning, enormous logistical arrangements and the coordination of substantial military forces. At the same time, the emperor’s determination to extend Mughal authority throughout the Deccan created problems of overextension. The continuing resistance of the Marathas, the difficulties of maintaining garrisons and the strain upon imperial finances complicated his achievements.

A serious historical assessment must acknowledge both sides of this record. Aurangzeb was an exceptionally capable ruler, but his political objectives sometimes exceeded the administrative and military capacities of the empire. His achievements and failures belonged to the same ambitious conception of imperial sovereignty.

What is particularly striking is that the Anglo-Mughal confrontation unfolded precisely when Aurangzeb was engaged in some of his most demanding campaigns in the Deccan. The emperor was not personally leading troops against the English. Rather, the conflict demonstrated the ability of the Mughal political system to mobilise provincial authorities, military commanders and regional allies in defence of imperial interests. It is in this institutional capacity, as much as in individual military victories, that the strength of Aurangzeb’s government becomes apparent.

The Company’s challenge to Mughal sovereignty

During the 1680s, the English East India Company’s leadership began to pursue a more assertive policy towards Indian rulers. Sir Josiah Child, an influential director of the Company in London, believed that its commercial interests required stronger military protection and greater political autonomy. The Company’s officials complained of customs duties, restrictions upon trade and the conduct of Mughal provincial authorities. Disputes over commercial privileges were not unusual, but the Company’s directors increasingly concluded that armed force could secure concessions more effectively than negotiation.

Their ambitions extended beyond the protection of trade. They envisaged fortified settlements, independent revenues and a degree of jurisdiction that would reduce their dependence upon Indian governments. As Philip J. Stern has demonstrated in The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (2011), the East India Company was already developing political ambitions that went beyond its identity as a trading corporation. It sought to exercise forms of sovereignty within its settlements while continuing to operate in territories governed by powerful Asian states. The difficulty was that these ambitions collided directly with Mughal conceptions of political authority.

For Aurangzeb, the issue was not simply whether English merchants should pay a particular customs duty. The larger question was whether a foreign commercial organisation, whose privileges ultimately depended upon imperial permission, could employ military force against Mughal territories and subjects.

The Company’s directors believed that their naval power would provide a decisive advantage. By attacking ports, interrupting shipping and threatening maritime commerce, they hoped to compel the Mughal authorities to accept their demands. This strategy revealed a serious misunderstanding of the political and economic foundations of Mughal power. The empire was not dependent upon English trade for its survival. Nor was its military strength confined to coastal establishments vulnerable to naval bombardment. Its resources were overwhelmingly territorial, supported by an extensive agrarian revenue system and a network of inland commercial centres. The Company’s ships could inflict damage upon coastal commerce, but they could not easily translate that capacity into political control over the vast territories of the Mughal Empire.

The war in Bengal

The conflict began in Bengal in 1686, when the Company attempted to enforce its demands through military action. An English naval expedition under Admiral Henry Nicholson arrived in the Bay of Bengal with instructions to secure a more favourable position for the Company’s trade. The English also contemplated establishing a fortified base at Chittagong, whose strategic importance had already been demonstrated by its conquest from Arakan by Mughal forces in 1666. Bengal was governed by Shaista Khan, Aurangzeb’s maternal uncle and one of the most experienced administrators of the empire. His long tenure as governor had been associated with the consolidation of Mughal authority and the expansion of commerce.

Hostilities broke out at Hugli in October 1686. English forces attacked Mughal positions, while Company vessels bombarded the settlement. The confrontation quickly escalated beyond a dispute over commercial privileges. The English, however, were unable to maintain their position. Job Charnock, the Company’s senior representative in Bengal, withdrew from Hugli and eventually moved towards Sutanuti. Further attempts to establish a secure base led the English to Hijli, where their troops suffered heavily from disease, shortages and Mughal military pressure.

The English had underestimated the ability of the provincial administration to mobilise troops and sustain resistance. Their naval artillery could damage settlements, but it could not provide the territorial control necessary for a lasting military victory. The projected conquest of Chittagong also failed. The subsequent expedition under Captain William Heath achieved little, and the Company was eventually compelled to withdraw its principal forces from Bengal. The outcome was a serious setback. Far from compelling the Mughal authorities to grant additional privileges, the English had jeopardised their existing commercial position.

The Bengal campaign is particularly instructive because it reveals the effectiveness of provincial government under Aurangzeb. The emperor did not need to abandon his campaigns in the Deccan to deal personally with the English. The administrative and military institutions of the empire possessed sufficient resources to confront the challenge. As David Veevers has argued in The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750 (2020), the conflict must be understood within the complex political relationships that connected Company servants with Mughal officials. The Company’s attempt to renegotiate these relationships through military coercion failed because it misunderstood the balance of power within which it operated.

The western coast and the siege of Bombay

While the Company’s position deteriorated in Bengal, hostilities spread to the western coast. Surat was one of the principal ports of the Mughal Empire, linking Indian commerce with the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the wider Indian Ocean. It was also a major centre for pilgrims travelling to Mecca. Under Sir John Child, the Company’s leading official in western India, English vessels began intercepting and seizing ships associated with Mughal commerce. Such actions struck directly at imperial authority. They threatened the interests of merchants, shipowners and pilgrims, and disrupted maritime networks that were important to the Mughal economy.

Aurangzeb’s government responded by taking action against the Company’s establishments and personnel. English commercial activities at Surat were severely restricted, while the Mughal authorities sought to bring the Company to submission.

The decisive confrontation occurred at Bombay. In February 1689, Sidi Yakut Khan, a commander associated with the Siddis of Janjira, launched an attack upon the island. The Siddis were an established maritime and military power on the western coast, and their relationship with the Mughal state provided an important element in the imperial response to the English. The participation of Sidi Yakut’s forces illustrates the wider political networks through which Mughal authority could be exercised. The emperor’s power did not depend exclusively upon armies commanded directly from the imperial court. It also operated through alliances, subordinate authorities and regional military establishments.

The siege of Bombay continued into 1690. Sidi Yakut’s troops occupied substantial parts of the island and confined the English to their principal fortified positions. The Company’s garrison suffered from shortages of provisions, disease, desertions and the progressive weakening of its defences. The contemporary diary of James Hilton, reproduced in Margaret R. Hunt and Philip J. Stern’s The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay with Related Documents (2015), provides valuable evidence of the conditions experienced by the besieged troops. Hilton’s testimony is particularly important because it reveals the conflict from within the Company’s military establishment. It records not the confident advance of a technologically superior European power but the anxieties of soldiers struggling to survive a prolonged siege.

Margaret Hunt, in her article ‘The 1689 Mughal Siege of East India Company Bombay: Crisis and Historical Erasure’ (History Workshop Journal, 84, 2017, pp. 149–169), has demonstrated how the siege exposed weaknesses in the Company’s military organisation and challenged the loyalty of its soldiers. The English were not defeated in a single spectacular engagement. Their failure resulted from sustained military pressure, the loss of territory, inadequate supplies and the inability to maintain an effective defensive position. By 1690, the Company’s situation had become untenable. The siege demonstrated that European naval resources, however formidable, did not automatically confer superiority in the military and political conditions of seventeenth-century India.

Aurangzeb’s victory and the Company’s submission

The cumulative effects of the campaigns in Bengal and western India forced the English East India Company to abandon its attempt to secure concessions through military coercion. Its commercial activities had been disrupted, its establishments threatened and its principal western Indian settlement subjected to a prolonged siege. The Company was compelled to seek a negotiated settlement with the Mughal emperor.

The surviving documentary evidence is revealing. Among the British Library’s India Office Records is a petition associated with Sir John Child and addressed to Aurangzeb in February 1689. It provides direct evidence of the Company’s attempts to restore relations with the imperial government. The settlement reached in 1690 required the Company to acknowledge Mughal authority, make restitution and pay an indemnity generally recorded as 150,000 rupees. Aurangzeb also demanded the removal of Sir John Child, whom the Mughal authorities regarded as responsible for the Company’s hostile conduct. Child died in Bombay in early 1690 before the settlement had been fully implemented.

An imperial farmān issued in February 1690 permitted the restoration of relations under specified conditions. Sidi Yakut’s forces subsequently withdrew from Bombay in June. The result was an unmistakable political defeat for the English. The Company had begun the confrontation believing that armed force would compel the Mughal emperor to grant concessions. It ended by accepting the conditions imposed by the imperial government.

Aurangzeb’s handling of the conflict deserves attention. He neither ignored the challenge nor allowed it to divert him permanently from his larger political objectives. The Mughal response employed provincial military resources, commercial restrictions, maritime allies and diplomatic pressure. Once the Company had submitted, the emperor permitted it to resume trade. This decision should not be mistaken for weakness. It reflected an understanding of the relationship between political authority and commercial prosperity. The Mughal state benefited from overseas commerce. European merchants purchased Indian manufactures, brought bullion into the country and participated in commercial networks that generated revenue for merchants and governments alike.

Aurangzeb had little reason to destroy a potentially useful trading organisation once it had acknowledged imperial sovereignty. His objective was not the elimination of English commerce but the restoration of political authority. In this respect, the settlement reveals a ruler capable of combining military firmness with political pragmatism.

Aurangzeb beyond the contemporary caricature

The significance of the Anglo-Mughal War extends beyond the history of the East India Company. It offers a useful corrective to the increasingly simplified representations of Aurangzeb in contemporary public discourse. The emperor’s reign has become a convenient arena for modern political controversies, with complex historical developments frequently reduced to a struggle between religious communities. Aurangzeb is often represented as though his entire political existence can be explained through religious hostility. Such interpretations ignore the actual functioning of the Mughal state.

Aurangzeb ruled over a population of enormous religious, linguistic and regional diversity. His administration depended upon the cooperation of nobles, zamindars, merchants, soldiers and officials belonging to different social and religious backgrounds. Hindu nobles continued to occupy important positions within the imperial mansabdari establishment, even as relations with particular Rajput houses and other political groups became strained. His government operated through institutions inherited from earlier Mughal rulers, though these institutions underwent modifications in response to changing political circumstances.

The emperor’s personal religious convictions undoubtedly influenced his understanding of kingship. Yet his policies cannot be reduced to theology alone. Political expediency, fiscal considerations, military requirements, dynastic interests and the maintenance of imperial sovereignty were equally important elements in his decisions. The work of historians such as M. Athar Ali, particularly The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), remains fundamental to understanding the composition and functioning of the ruling elite. Satish Chandra’s studies of Mughal politics and the Deccan, together with John F. Richards’s The Mughal Empire (1993), demonstrate the need to examine Aurangzeb within the broader institutional and political history of the empire.

A historically responsible assessment must recognise his contradictions. He was capable of administrative diligence and political pragmatism, but also of decisions that intensified conflict and imposed heavy burdens upon the imperial system. His military achievements were considerable, but the prolonged Deccan campaigns exposed the limits of Mughal expansion. These complexities do not diminish his historical importance. They make him a more substantial figure than the caricatures that dominate much contemporary discussion.

The Anglo-Mughal War is especially revealing because it brings into focus a dimension of Aurangzeb’s reign that is frequently neglected: his ability to defend the political and economic interests of the empire against an aggressive foreign commercial organisation. At a time when European maritime companies were extending their influence across the Indian Ocean, the Mughal government successfully resisted an attempt to impose commercial demands through armed force. The emperor understood that the privileges granted to foreign merchants could not be allowed to develop into an independent claim to political sovereignty. His response was therefore consistent with the wider objectives of Mughal kingship: the preservation of imperial authority, the protection of revenue and commerce, and the maintenance of political order.

The historical irony: from submission to supremacy

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the episode is the contrast between the Company’s position in 1690 and its subsequent political ascendancy. Following the restoration of relations, Job Charnock returned to Sutanuti in August 1690. The settlement subsequently developed into the nucleus of Calcutta. The Company’s recovery in Bengal depended upon renewed negotiations with Mughal officials and the reconstruction of commercial relationships. Its acquisition of zamindari rights over Sutanuti, Kalikata and Govindapur in 1698 took place within the existing Mughal political and revenue framework. The Company did not emerge from Child’s War as an independent territorial power. It survived because it was permitted to resume commercial activities under Mughal authority.

The situation changed considerably during the eighteenth century. Following Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Mughal Empire experienced prolonged succession struggles, increasing provincial autonomy and difficulties in maintaining effective central control. The rise of powerful regional states transformed the political landscape of the subcontinent. The English East India Company gradually expanded its military resources and developed increasingly influential relationships with Indian merchants, financiers and political elites. Its victory at Plassey in 1757 depended not merely upon European military organisation but also upon the political circumstances prevailing in Bengal, including divisions within the nawab’s establishment and the Company’s alliances with influential Indian interests.

The contrast is instructive. In 1690, the Company was unable to withstand the pressure exerted by Aurangzeb’s government and its regional allies. In 1757, it was able to exploit divisions within a regional political order that had developed in the aftermath of the weakening of central Mughal authority. The transformation cannot be explained by an assumption of inherent European superiority. It was the outcome of changing political institutions, commercial networks, military resources and alliances. Indeed, the Company’s later success should not obscure the fact that, at the end of the seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire remained one of the most formidable political powers in the world.

Conclusion

The Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690 provides an important perspective on both the history of European expansion in India and the character of Aurangzeb’s reign. The English East India Company attempted to employ military force to secure commercial and political concessions from the Mughal Empire. Its strategy rested upon confidence in maritime superiority and an underestimation of the resources available to the Mughal state. The result was a decisive failure.

In Bengal, the Company was unable to establish a secure territorial position. On the western coast, its interference with maritime commerce provoked imperial retaliation. At Bombay, its garrison was subjected to a prolonged siege that exposed serious weaknesses in its military organisation. The Company was ultimately compelled to seek Aurangzeb’s forgiveness and accept the conditions imposed by his government.

The emperor’s response revealed the strengths of the Mughal political system. Provincial governors, military commanders and regional allies were mobilised to defend imperial interests, while the final settlement combined punishment with the restoration of commercial relations. Aurangzeb emerges from this episode not as the one-dimensional figure of contemporary political polemics but as a powerful and purposeful sovereign, deeply concerned with the authority of the state and capable of employing military and diplomatic resources to defend it.

His reign was marked by contradictions, and his policies must remain open to critical historical examination. Yet it would be equally unhistorical to deny his administrative abilities, military experience, political determination and extraordinary capacity for sustained engagement with the affairs of government. The defeat of the English East India Company was not his greatest military achievement. Compared with the conquest of Bijapur and Golconda, the confrontation involved relatively limited forces. Its significance lay elsewhere: it demonstrated that a European commercial organisation could not yet challenge Mughal sovereignty with impunity.

The Company that would eventually establish British political supremacy in India had once been compelled to acknowledge the authority of an Indian emperor. That emperor was Aurangzeb Alamgir. The episode reminds us that history should not be written backwards from the eventual triumph of colonialism, just as the reign of Aurangzeb should not be interpreted through the prejudices and political requirements of the present. Both demand an examination of contemporary evidence, institutional structures and historical circumstances.

Aurangzeb was neither the flawless sovereign of apologetic tradition nor the monstrous caricature of modern political propaganda. He was one of the most consequential rulers of early modern India, a formidable administrator and commander whose political ambitions, achievements and failures profoundly shaped the history of the subcontinent. The humiliation of the English East India Company in 1690 remains a revealing testimony to the power of the empire over which he presided.

Select references

Ali, M. Athar, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Bombay, 1966.

Chandra, Satish, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–1740, Aligarh, 1959.

Hamilton, Alexander, A New Account of the East Indies, 2 vols, Edinburgh, 1727.

Hunt, Margaret R., ‘The 1689 Mughal Siege of East India Company Bombay: Crisis and Historical Erasure’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 84, 2017, pp. 149–169.

Hunt, Margaret R., and Philip J. Stern (eds), The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay with Related Documents, Boston, 2015.

Khafi Khan, Muntakhab al-Lubāb, Persian chronicle of the Mughal period.

Richards, John F., The Mughal Empire, The New Cambridge History of India, I.5, Cambridge, 1993.

Saqi Mustaʿid Khan, Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī, translated by Jadunath Sarkar, Calcutta, 1947.

Sarkar, Jadunath, House of Shivaji, and Bengal in the Reign of Aurangzib, 1658–1707.

Stern, Philip J., The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Oxford, 2011.

Veevers, David, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750, Cambridge, 2020.

Archival source: British Library, India Office Records, IOR/E/3/47, fol. 226, additions to the petition of Sir John Child addressed to Aurangzeb, February 1689.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The violence exists, the modes of violence have changed.

The Old Violence

For most of independent India’s history, communalism announced itself through the riot. Cities burned, curfews fell, and neighbourhoods barricaded themselves. Aligarh, Meerut, Moradabad, Sambhal, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bhagalpur, Bhiwandi, Hyderabad, each acquired its own history of conflagration.

The official vocabulary was ritualistic: “clashes between two communities,” curfew imposed, peace committees formed, normalcy declared. Yet research consistently showed that such violence was rarely spontaneous or symmetrical. Political organisations, local networks, electoral calculations and police behaviour determined whether a quarrel became a conflagration.

Crucially, the riot was understood as a breakdown of order, something the state was expected to prevent, stop and investigate. Hence the long succession of commissions: Shiv Dayal Srivastava (Jabalpur, 1961), Raghubar Dayal (Ranchi-Hatia, 1967), Jaganmohan Reddy (Ahmedabad, 1969), D.P. Madon (Bhiwandi-Jalgaon-Mahad, 1970), B.P. Sinha (Aligarh, 1961), M.P. Saxena (Moradabad, 1980), Srikrishna (Bombay, 1992-93), Liberhan (Babri Masjid), Nanavati-Mehta (Gujarat, 2002).

These inquiries were imperfect. Reports were delayed, suppressed, ignored. Recommendations went unimplemented. Yet they performed a democratic function: they produced an official archive, examined witnesses, scrutinised police records, and acknowledged that something abnormal had occurred. The underlying question was constitutionally vital: How did we allow this to happen?

The New Repertoire

Since 2014, something has changed – not the disappearance of violence, but its character. The classical riot no longer occupies the same central place. Majoritarianism has developed a wider repertoire: lynching, vigilantism, economic exclusion, attacks on religious structures, disputes over graveyards and shrines, administrative demolition, challenges to minority institutions, cultural marginalisation, and the communalisation of ordinary public space.

The older riot concentrated fear into a few terrifying days. Contemporary majoritarianism distributes fear across everyday life. A Muslim man suspected of possessing beef may be assaulted. A cattle trader intercepted on a highway. An interfaith couple harassed. A shopkeeper faces boycott calls. A procession becomes an assertion of territorial possession.

None of this requires a city-wide riot.

The lynching occupies a distinctive place: it needs neither thousands of participants nor sustained breakdown of public order. An accusation, a victim, a small crowd, sufficient confidence, and a camera. The victim becomes a message. Exemplary violence works precisely because it is unnecessary to attack everybody if enough people can be persuaded to regulate their behaviour through fear. The records are maintained.

The minority citizen’s question changes. No longer simply, “Will there be a riot?” but: Can I transport cattle? Can I sell meat? Can I rent a house here? Can I conduct business under my own name? Can I marry whom I choose? Can I pray here? Will an allegation circulating on social media bring a crowd to my door?

This is the movement from exceptional violence towards everyday insecurity.

The Bulldozer as Political Symbol

No object symbolises this transformation more vividly than the bulldozer.

Ostensibly an administrative machine, clearing encroachments, removing illegal construction, it has acquired political meaning, particularly when properties belonging to persons accused of protest or communal disturbance are demolished soon after the alleged offence.

There is nothing inherently communal about removing illegal structures. The constitutional issue arises when demolition appears to become punishment, especially when guilt has not been established by a court. In November 2024, the Supreme Court held that the executive could not assume the role of judge, pronounce guilt, and punish through demolition. It laid down nationwide safeguards concerning notice and due process.

The contrast with the classical riot is revealing. The riot represented a breakdown of law. “Bulldozer justice” threatens to present punishment as law.

Sacred Space Under Contest

The question becomes more sensitive when demolition touches places of worship.

Mosques, madrasas, dargahs and mazars have increasingly figured in demolition drives, encroachment disputes and administrative action. In Haldwani in February 2024, demolition of a mosque and madrasa during an anti-encroachment operation was followed by serious violence and deaths. Documented cases span multiple states.

The issue cannot be that a mosque automatically stands above the law. An illegal structure does not become legal merely by becoming sacred. The proper questions concern consistency, proportionality and due process. Are equivalent encroachments treated equivalently? Is notice provided? Are legal remedies available? Why does administrative urgency arise in particular cases? And why, occasionally, is demolition publicly celebrated rather than reluctantly undertaken?

A mosque is more than bricks and mortar. An old mosque records generations of presence. The same is true of the dargāh or mazār. Its disappearance can acquire meaning far exceeding the removal of a physical structure. That too when most of them have existed even before the concept of the new laws, or even the Constitution was ever established.

Even the dead have not remained outside communal politics. The political juxtaposition of shamshan and qabristan is revealing. Equal provision for cremation and burial is legitimate. But when these become rhetorical symbols of competing claims upon public resources, even death is drawn into majoritarian politics.

A qabristān is an archive without paper. Its gravestones preserve names and dates, record generations of occupation, demonstrate that a community has belonged to a locality not merely for an electoral cycle but sometimes for centuries. A dispute over a graveyard can become a dispute over historical belonging itself.

The mazār raises an even more complicated question. India’s sacred geography has historically refused to conform to modern communal boundaries. Dargāhs were visited by Hindus as well as Muslims, people tied threads, offered chādars, sought blessings without seeing these practices as contradictions of their religious identities. This shared culture should not be romanticised; pre-modern India knew conflict as well as accommodation. Yet it produced sacred spaces whose constituencies crossed formal boundaries. The attack upon such a shrine potentially erases something different from the attack upon a mosque: not merely masonry, but a memory of coexistence.

Festivals, Markets, and the Discipline of Everyday Life

The same transformation is visible in festivals. Indian festivals were historically far less hermetically sealed than modern categories suggest. Muslims participated in Holi and Diwali; Hindus in Muharram. Artisans of one community manufactured objects used by another. A Muslim participating in his neighbour’s festival did not cease to be Muslim, any more than a Hindu visiting a Sufi shrine ceased to be Hindu.

Attempts to exclude Muslim traders from Hindu festivals challenge the older understanding of festival, market and neighbourhood as overlapping social spaces. The paradox is worth noting: a politics claiming to defend Indian tradition can undermine precisely those habits of borrowing and coexistence through which Indian traditions historically developed.

Economic exclusion represents another important development because it can discipline a community without visible violence. Calls to boycott Muslim businesses, demands that names revealing religious identity be displayed – these transform ordinary commerce into an arena of communal identification. No shop has to burn. Customers need only be persuaded not to enter it.

This is potentially more enduring than riot because economic marginalisation can occur beneath the surface of apparently normal civic life. Markets remain open, traffic continues, no curfew is required. Yet the social geography of the city changes.

Education, Culture, and Memory

The same process reaches institutions of learning. Minority educational institutions occupy a special constitutional position: Article 30 recognises the right of religious and linguistic minorities to establish and administer educational institutions. Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia illustrate the complexity, both became important centres of modern Indian education. AMU’s continuing minority-status litigation demonstrates how questions of institutional history and constitutional protection remain contested.

Madrasas occupy an even more vulnerable position. Reform, regulation and scrutiny of educational standards are legitimate. But regulation is different from treating an entire category of institutions as intrinsically suspect. In October 2024, the Supreme Court stayed recommendations that could have closed government-aided madrasas not complying with particular RTE requirements. More recently, drives against allegedly unauthorised madrasas and mosques have continued in parts of Uttar Pradesh. Authorities describe these as actions against unrecognised institutions and illegal constructions; critics question their scale and selectivity.

The distinction must be preserved. Regulation is a function of government. Stigmatisation is a function of majoritarian politics. Demolishing a house intimidates a family. Weakening an educational institution can affect generations.

Majoritarianism reaches further still when cultural inheritance itself becomes divided according to religious identity. Urdu provides an obvious example. Historically it cannot sensibly be described simply as a Muslim language. Its literary culture was created by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike – Mir, Ghalib, Munshi Tek Chand Bahār, Daya Shankar Nasim, Ratan Nath Sarshar, Brij Narain Chakbast, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Rajinder Singh Bedi. To identify Urdu exclusively with Muslims does violence not merely to Muslims but to the history of Urdu itself.

The same is true of Indo-Persian architecture, Hindustani music, Sufi traditions, culinary culture. Centuries of interaction created forms whose ingredients can be traced historically but cannot now be separated without doing violence to the whole. Majoritarianism nevertheless demands ownership. A monument constructed under a Muslim ruler can cease to be regarded primarily as Indian heritage and be recast as evidence of conquest. A Persian inscription can become foreign. A shared cultural form can retrospectively be assigned to one community.

The struggle is not merely over territory. It is over memory.

The Battle over History

This is why the rewriting of history and changes in school curricula cannot be regarded as separate from contemporary majoritarianism. Majoritarianism requires a usable past. If one community is to appear as the natural and continuous owner of the nation, minorities must somehow be explained – assimilated, tolerated, or represented as descendants of outsiders.

The medieval period is particularly vulnerable. Seven centuries of transformation can be compressed into a simple narrative of invasion and resistance. But the evidence refuses to cooperate. Shivaji’s military world included Muslim commanders. Aurangzeb’s imperial service contained large numbers of Hindu nobles, including Rajputs. Mirza Raja Jai Singh commanded the Mughal campaign that defeated Shivaji. Akbar’s Sulh-i Kul cannot be understood within a simple Hindu-Muslim binary.

History becomes inconvenient precisely because the past was more entangled than majoritarian memory wishes it to have been.

The Structural Difficulty

We can now return to the commissions of inquiry, for they help us understand what has structurally changed.

A riot was an event. It had a date, a location, a casualty figure. A commission could reconstruct its causes, identify failures, recommend action.

But how does one appoint a commission to investigate an atmosphere?

Who investigates hundreds of separate acts of intimidation, boycott calls, contested demolitions, attacks upon shrines, disputes over graveyards, inflammatory speeches and instances of cultural exclusion when each can be presented as an isolated occurrence?

This is one of the distinctive strengths of contemporary majoritarianism. Its parts can be defended individually even when their cumulative effect is transformative. One demolition becomes an encroachment matter. One lynching becomes a criminal case. One hate speech becomes an irresponsible individual’s remark. One boycott becomes a private commercial choice. One madrasa closure becomes educational regulation. One dispute over a mazar becomes a land question. One alteration in a textbook becomes curriculum reform. One challenge to a monument becomes an archaeological controversy.

Each can therefore be discussed separately. The historian’s task is to ask whether they form a pattern when viewed together.

The commission of inquiry was designed to investigate the event. Constitutional democracy now faces the harder problem of recognising and investigating the process.

From Composite Culture to Parallel Societies

This brings us to what may ultimately be the most serious consequence.

India’s composite culture was never created by government proclamations about communal harmony. It arose through ordinary encounters. People shared languages, markets, occupations, neighbourhoods, music, foods, shrines and festivals. They borrowed words, clothes, architectural forms, recipes, melodies and rituals from one another.

None of this eliminated conflict. But it ensured encounter.

Majoritarianism threatens this world when it makes such encounters increasingly difficult. If Muslims withdraw from Hindu festivals, Hindus cease visiting Muslim shrines, neighbourhoods become religiously segregated, children grow up in socially homogeneous educational environments, interfaith relationships become dangerous, businesses acquire religious identities, and historical monuments are classified according to the religion of their builders, communities may continue to inhabit the same city while ceasing to inhabit the same social world.

That possibility may ultimately be more consequential than the riot. A riot ends. Curfew is lifted. Markets reopen. Segregation can reproduce itself for generations.

The Constitutional Question

None of this requires us to invent a secular golden age before 2014. Such an age never existed. Independent India witnessed terrible communal violence. Governments failed minorities. Police forces behaved partially. Delhi in 1984, Bhagalpur in 1989, Bombay in 1992-93 and Gujarat in 2002 make any romanticisation of the past historically untenable.

The argument is subtler. What appears to be changing is the repertoire, distribution and sometimes legitimacy of majoritarian power.

The Constitution did not promise minorities merely physical survival or tolerance at the pleasure of the majority. It promised citizenship. Tolerance and citizenship are not synonyms. Tolerance is extended by somebody possessing power towards somebody who does not. Citizenship presumes equality.

This is why the protection of a mosque from arbitrary demolition is not merely a Muslim question. The protection of a Christian school is not merely a Christian concern. The preservation of Urdu is not a concession to Muslims. The protection of a qabristān, mazār, madrasa, library or university from discriminatory treatment is ultimately a defence of constitutional equality.

The Supreme Court’s intervention against arbitrary “bulldozer justice” is important precisely for this reason. The Court emphasised that executive power could not substitute itself for judicial determination and that due process remained indispensable. The principle extends much further than demolition.

The question is whether citizenship remains independent of religious identity.

From the Riot to the Atmosphere

The changing character of majoritarianism can be summarised through a series of transformations:

The riot burned the shop; the boycott can empty it. The mob demolished the house; administrative power can demolish it while invoking regulation. The riot attacked the mosque; litigation and administrative proceedings can contest its very right to occupy the landscape. The mob desecrated the graveyard; politics can transform qabristan and shamshan into competing communal claims.

The riot temporarily prevented neighbours from celebrating together; segregation can persuade them that they should no longer celebrate together at all.

The mob could burn a library; cultural marginalisation can make its language irrelevant to the next generation.
The riot could close a university for a few weeks; sustained suspicion can place the very legitimacy of a minority institution permanently on trial. The riot could damage a monument; majoritarian memory can leave the monument standing while teaching future generations to regard it as somebody else’s history.

And this is perhaps the crucial distinction.

The communal riot was an explosion. Majoritarianism can become an atmosphere.

An explosion is immediately recognisable as an emergency. An atmosphere is more difficult to confront because people gradually become accustomed to breathing it.

For this reason, the relative absence of the old-style communal riot cannot by itself be treated as evidence of communal peace. We have to ask different questions. Are minorities secure in their homes? Are their places of worship equally protected by law? Are their graveyards secure? Can their educational institutions function without their religious identity automatically making them suspect? Can their languages and cultural traditions be accepted as parts of India’s common inheritance? Can their traders participate naturally in markets and festivals? Can their children grow up believing that the monuments, histories and memories of this country belong as much to them as to anybody else?

Above all, does public space still belong equally to every citizen?

That was the radical promise of the Republic. It did not envisage a country in which a Hindu majority generously permitted Muslims, Christians, Sikhs or others to remain. It envisaged a country in which nobody required the permission of another community to belong.

The gravest transformation of majoritarianism may consequently be neither the riot nor even the bulldozer. It is the gradual normalisation of the proposition that the majority possesses the nation naturally while minorities inhabit it conditionally.

The older communal riot sought temporarily to drive the minority from the street. Majoritarianism becomes far more formidable when it begins to determine the conditions upon which the minority may return to that street, worship upon it, trade upon it, study upon it, celebrate upon it, bury its dead beside it, preserve its memories within it and, ultimately, claim that street and the nation around it as equally its own. Today most of the minority institutions and spaces in the country are either burning or stand restricted and repressed.

That is why the silence of the streets must never, by itself, be mistaken for communal peace. We simply exist in more dangerous times.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

There are neighbourhoods in India whose religious identity announces itself before one encounters a mosque, hears the call to prayer, or notices the beards and skullcaps of their inhabitants. The broken roads, overflowing drains, heaps of uncollected rubbish, tangled electricity wires, overcrowded houses and conspicuous absence of civic amenities often tell you that you are entering a predominantly Muslim locality. What ought to be an indictment of municipal administration has gradually become an accepted feature of the Indian urban landscape. Poverty, neglect and religious identity have become so closely associated in the public imagination that the condition of a neighbourhood is frequently mistaken for a characteristic of the community inhabiting it.

This is not to suggest that every Muslim locality is impoverished, or that civic neglect is confined to Muslims. There are affluent Muslim neighbourhoods, just as there are appallingly neglected Hindu and Dalit settlements. Yet the geographical concentration of Muslims in poorly serviced urban spaces, their difficulties in securing accommodation elsewhere, and the suspicion with which their neighbourhoods are regarded point towards a particular form of exclusion, one in which religious prejudice, economic inequality and administrative indifference reinforce one another.

Reading Rakhshanda Jalil’s deeply personal essay, “Living in Jamia, Coping with Ghettoisation”, reproduced in her collection But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim (HarperCollins, 2019), which she shared once again recently on social media, I was struck by how closely her experiences corresponded with what I have observed elsewhere. Jalil writes of her move from the relatively privileged surroundings of Gulmohar Park in South Delhi to the neighbourhood adjoining Jamia Millia Islamia. What she initially imagined would be a simple change of residence became an encounter with an entirely different social reality.

The most revealing incident concerns her young daughter’s birthday party. Children who had happily attended celebrations at their previous home suddenly found themselves unable to visit the new one. Their parents were reluctant to venture into the Jamia neighbourhood, notwithstanding Jalil’s offers to provide directions or arrange transport. When subsequent birthday celebrations were organised at a McDonald’s elsewhere, the reluctance disappeared. The problem, clearly, was not distance. It was the address.

Jalil recounts similar experiences with landlords who declined to rent accommodation to Muslims, often invoking the familiar preference for “vegetarian tenants”, as though a biryani recipe might somehow contaminate the property deed. Delivery services, dry cleaners and other businesses serving neighbouring affluent colonies refused to cross an invisible boundary into Jamia Nagar. Even more disturbing was the contrast in civic amenities between adjoining localities. One side of the road enjoyed the benefits of organised urban living; the other was left to negotiate inadequate infrastructure and administrative neglect. Her essay is particularly valuable because it demonstrates that ghettoisation is not necessarily the consequence of a community’s desire to live separately. Frequently, it is the outcome of a society’s unwillingness to allow that community to live anywhere else.

What Jalil describes is by no means peculiar to Jamia Nagar, Batla House, Zakir Nagar or Abul Fazal Enclave. It is a phenomenon encountered across large parts of India, and even beyond the towns and cities of the Hindi-speaking belt. Indeed, it has roots extending well into the twentieth century, although the forms of exclusion have changed over time.

I am reminded of an experience in Kolkata several decades ago, probably when Jyoti Basu was still alive. I had gone there to participate in a seminar. At the conclusion of the programme, I requested my hosts to arrange for me to be dropped at a particular street in the Park Circus area. One of the organisers, a gentleman belonging to the city’s educated bhadralok milieu and sympathetic to its long-established communist culture, kindly offered to take me in his car.

As we approached Park Circus, the surroundings began to change. The streets appeared increasingly congested, the environment less orderly, and the visible presence of men wearing beards and skullcaps became more pronounced. The neighbourhood, as it were, began to announce its religious identity.

My companion grew visibly uncomfortable. Finally, he turned towards me and asked, with unmistakable nervousness, “Is it safe for you to go there?”

The question has stayed with me all these years.

Here was a member of Kolkata’s educated, ostensibly progressive middle class, someone shaped by a political environment that had for decades proclaimed its commitment to secularism, class solidarity and opposition to communalism. Yet the sight of a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood was sufficient to produce anxiety. The area had become, in his imagination, a place of possible danger. What made the incident particularly revealing was that his apprehension was not based on anything that had happened to us. We had encountered no hostility, no disturbance, no threatening situation. The anxiety arose entirely from the neighbourhood’s appearance and the identity of its inhabitants. The beards and skullcaps were not evidence of danger. They were merely signs through which a deeply embedded social prejudice found expression.

I have often wondered whether my companion would have experienced the same unease had we been entering a similarly congested Hindu neighbourhood. Perhaps he would have complained about the roads, the traffic or the filth. But would he have questioned my safety merely because of the religious appearance of its residents? The distinction is important. A neglected Muslim neighbourhood is not merely perceived as poor. It is often perceived as dangerous. Its poverty becomes a sign of backwardness, its congestion a sign of disorder, and its religious identity an explanation for both.

And this was Kolkata, the city of the bhadralok, of intellectual debate, progressive literature, trade unionism and a powerful communist movement. If such anxieties could survive within that social and political environment, one can imagine how deeply they had penetrated societies where communal divisions were more openly articulated.

There was another encounter, perhaps more than a decade or so ago, which revealed a different but equally disturbing dimension of the same prejudice. I was travelling from Delhi to Hyderabad by the Rajdhani Express, in an AC two-tier compartment. Seated near me was a young woman who appeared well educated, affluent and thoroughly at ease with the world around her. We struck up a conversation. Speaking fluent English, she told me that she worked for a multinational company in Delhi, had recently visited the United Kingdom, and was now travelling to Hyderabad for the first time.

The conversation proceeded pleasantly until she discovered that I was a Muslim and taught history at Aligarh Muslim University. Her tone changed almost immediately. Looking at me with an expression of genuine surprise, she exclaimed, “But you don’t look like a Muslim!”

I was momentarily taken aback. What, I wondered, was a Muslim supposed to look like? Perhaps she expected me to sport a beard, wear a skullcap, have surma in my eyes and dress in the manner in which Muslims have so often been stereotypically portrayed in popular Hindi cinema, presumably with a permanently villainous expression and a background score to match. Apparently, my appearance, my manner of speaking and my professional identity did not correspond to the image of a Muslim she carried in her mind.

After a brief silence came another question, equally revealing: “In Aligarh, do you teach in Urdu?”

Imagine a young, educated, English-speaking professional, employed by a multinational corporation in Delhi, widely travelled and familiar with life in Britain, yet knowing so little about a university situated barely two or three hours from the national capital! That Aligarh Muslim University is a modern institution of higher education, where English is widely employed as a medium of instruction, seemed to be entirely outside her understanding. For her, the word “Muslim” apparently suggested a particular appearance, a particular language and, by implication, a world quite separate from the modern professional environment she herself inhabited.

What struck me was not merely her ignorance – ignorance can be corrected through information. More troubling was the confidence with which she carried these assumptions, without apparently recognising that they were prejudices. Her education, professional success and exposure to the wider world had done little to challenge the stereotypes she had absorbed.

In many ways, she reflected a mentality that extends well beyond any single individual. Within significant sections of India’s majority community, Muslims continue to be imagined through a narrow collection of visual and cultural stereotypes. Their identity is reduced to beards, skullcaps, Urdu, religious observances and supposed cultural separateness. A Muslim who does not conform to this image becomes an object of surprise, almost an exception requiring explanation.

This is precisely what makes the title of Rakhshanda Jalil’s book, But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim, so telling. The seemingly innocuous remark contains an entire history of stereotyping. It assumes that Muslims possess a recognisable and uniform appearance, that their religious identity must necessarily dictate their language, dress and cultural habits, and that those who do not conform are somehow unusual.

The young woman on the train and my bhadralok companion in Kolkata belonged to different social worlds, but their reactions sprang from a similar conditioning. One associated a Muslim neighbourhood with danger; the other associated Muslim identity with a predetermined appearance and linguistic culture. Neither seemed conscious of the assumptions underlying their responses. Indeed, the two encounters illuminate different dimensions of the same phenomenon. The Kolkata incident revealed the geography of prejudice; the Rajdhani encounter revealed its psychology. In one case, the Muslim was imagined as belonging to a threatening space; in the other, he was expected to conform to a fixed cultural stereotype. Both involved an inability to recognise Muslims as ordinary, diverse participants in India’s shared social and intellectual life.

And herein lies a larger problem. Ghettoisation is not merely the physical concentration of a community within particular neighbourhoods. It also exists in the minds of those who regard that community as fundamentally different from themselves. The walls separating communities are constructed as much through inherited prejudices, cultural representations and everyday conversations as through discriminatory housing markets and unequal civic development.

In the towns of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and elsewhere, the spatial separation of Muslims has long been visible. In many places, older Muslim residential quarters grew around mosques, markets, shrines, artisanal occupations and networks of kinship. Their origins cannot always be explained through discrimination. Medieval and early modern Indian towns frequently developed around occupational, caste, religious and familial clusters. The mohalla was an important unit of urban social organisation.

But there is a fundamental difference between a historically evolved neighbourhood and a modern ghetto. The former may represent social proximity, occupational association or cultural preference. The latter increasingly reflects restricted choices, unequal opportunities and the fear of exclusion or violence. A neighbourhood becomes a ghetto not simply because members of one community live together, but because the wider society erects barriers around them, both visible and invisible.

The communal violence accompanying Partition in 1947 profoundly altered the social geography of many north Indian towns. Subsequent riots, including those in Jabalpur, Ahmedabad, Moradabad, Meerut, Bhagalpur and other cities, contributed to new anxieties about residential security. In some places, families moved towards areas where members of their own community were concentrated, believing that numerical strength offered some protection against communal attacks. Such movements were not always voluntary in any meaningful sense. When a family abandons a mixed neighbourhood because it fears violence, or because its neighbours no longer regard it with trust, the resulting segregation cannot reasonably be described as a free choice.

The process has continued into the twenty-first century. The violence in Gujarat in 2002, for instance, accelerated the concentration of Muslims in particular residential areas of Ahmedabad. Juhapura became emblematic of a larger phenomenon: the growth of substantial Muslim settlements whose residents included professionals, traders, teachers and prosperous families, but who nevertheless encountered the disadvantages associated with a segregated urban space.

The existence of well-to-do households within such localities should not obscure the larger problem. Economic success does not necessarily secure freedom of residence. A Muslim professional may possess the means to purchase a house in an affluent mixed neighbourhood and still find that no one is willing to sell or rent to him. The vocabulary employed to justify such exclusion is often deceptively innocuous. Landlords prefer vegetarians. Housing societies speak of maintaining their cultural character. Property dealers invoke the preferences of other residents. Sometimes the refusal is blunt; more often it is conveyed through evasions, suddenly unavailable flats or conditions introduced after the applicant’s name becomes known. In this manner, discrimination is practised without necessarily being acknowledged. Politeness, it turns out, has always been an excellent disguise for prejudice.

The consequences extend far beyond housing. Once a neighbourhood acquires a communal identity, commercial institutions may hesitate to invest there, banks may regard it as undesirable, private schools may become inaccessible, and municipal services may remain inadequate. The very conditions produced by exclusion are then used to justify further exclusion. A vicious circle develops. Muslims are discouraged from settling in mixed neighbourhoods; they concentrate in areas where accommodation remains available; those areas become overcrowded; public investment fails to keep pace; and the resulting deterioration reinforces the prejudice that Muslim localities are inherently disorderly or backward. The inhabitants are blamed for the circumstances into which they have been pushed.

This process was recognised by the Sachar Committee, appointed to examine the social, economic and educational condition of India’s Muslims. Its report, submitted in 2006, documented serious disadvantages in education, employment, access to credit and urban infrastructure. It also drew attention to the residential insecurity of Muslims and the relationship between their concentration in particular localities and inadequate public facilities. The implications are disturbing. If two neighbourhoods of comparable economic standing receive different levels of public attention, poverty alone cannot explain the disparity. We must also examine the priorities of the institutions responsible for distributing civic resources.

There is, moreover, a political dimension to this neglect. Municipal administrations respond not only to need but also to influence, visibility and pressure. Areas inhabited by politically influential citizens are often better placed to demand services. Poorly organised or politically marginalised neighbourhoods may find their complaints repeatedly ignored. In Muslim localities, this disadvantage can be aggravated by communal prejudice and the tendency of political parties to regard their residents primarily as electoral constituencies rather than citizens entitled to equal services.

One should also recognise that the responsibility does not rest with any single political party. The conditions described by Jalil, and those I witnessed in Kolkata, developed long before the present phase of Indian politics. Congress governments, regional parties, Left administrations and other political formations have all presided, at different times and in different places, over unequal urban development. Secular declarations have not always translated into equitable civic administration.

Yet the political developments of the past decade have introduced an additional anxiety. Where Muslims were once frequently treated as a neglected minority, they are now also increasingly subjected to public suspicion. Campaigns around religious identity, disputes over places of worship, communal rhetoric and the selective use of demolition drives have deepened insecurities in several parts of the country. In such an atmosphere, residential concentration may become not merely a matter of convenience or social preference but a strategy for survival.

It is important, however, not to confuse the condition of a locality with the character of its inhabitants. Muslim neighbourhoods are not homogeneous spaces. They contain differences of class, occupation, education, sect, caste and political outlook. The prosperous trader, the university professor, the artisan, the daily-wage labourer and the unemployed young man may share the same neighbourhood while inhabiting very different social worlds. Nor should one romanticise life within these settlements. Community solidarity can provide security, mutual assistance and cultural continuity, but it cannot substitute for functioning institutions. A community may establish its own schools, clinics, charitable organisations and welfare associations, yet it cannot reasonably be expected to provide everything that the modern state is constitutionally obliged to ensure.

The problem is not that Muslims live together. The problem arises when living together becomes the only realistic option, and when the resulting concentration is used to justify their exclusion from the wider city.

Urban scholars have drawn attention to precisely these distinctions. Raphael Susewind, in his study Muslims in Indian Cities: Degrees of Segregation and the Elusive Ghetto (2017), demonstrated that residential concentration alone does not necessarily constitute a ghetto. What matters equally are the histories of insecurity, restrictions on residential choice, and the ways in which people perceive and experience their urban surroundings. Such research helps explain why the phenomenon is both historical and contemporary. Its roots lie partly in older patterns of urban settlement, but its persistence and intensification reflect modern structures of discrimination.

There is another consequence of this separation that deserves attention. When people inhabit increasingly segregated spaces, they gradually lose opportunities for ordinary social interaction. The shared neighbourhood, the neighbourhood school, the marketplace and the everyday encounters through which communities once came to know one another begin to disappear. Ignorance then takes the place of familiarity. A locality becomes known not through the people who inhabit it but through rumours, newspaper headlines, political speeches and occasional sensational incidents. Popular cinema and television have frequently reinforced these impressions by reducing Muslims to a limited repertoire of appearances, accents, occupations and religious practices. The Muslim neighbourhood becomes a place to be feared rather than a part of the city to be understood.

This brings me back to my two encounters, separated by years and circumstances but connected by the same underlying prejudice. In Kolkata, a communist-minded bhadralok was apprehensive about entering a Muslim neighbourhood. On the Rajdhani Express, an educated, internationally travelled young professional was astonished that a Muslim university teacher did not resemble the stereotype she had inherited. Neither incident involved overt aggression. Neither person necessarily considered himself or herself communal. Yet both revealed how deeply the idea of the Muslim as the unfamiliar, the different, and sometimes the threatening, had penetrated everyday consciousness.

That is perhaps what makes such prejudices particularly difficult to confront. They are not always expressed through hatred. Sometimes they appear as curiosity, surprise, nervousness or seemingly innocent questions. But beneath them lies an assumption that Muslims constitute a separate category of Indians whose appearance, language, neighbourhoods and way of life must necessarily differ from those of the majority.

Jalil’s essay exposes precisely this invisible geography. Her move from Gulmohar Park to Jamia Nagar did not change her education, cultural outlook, professional standing or her family’s aspirations. Yet her new address altered the way others perceived her. It affected who would visit her home, which services would reach her doorstep and how her neighbourhood was situated within the city’s social hierarchy.

What she experienced in Delhi, I recognised in Kolkata and aboard a train travelling towards Hyderabad. And what these experiences reveal can be encountered, with regional variations, across much of urban India.

The tragedy is that these divisions have become so familiar that they seldom provoke outrage. We have learnt to accept that certain localities will have broken roads, inadequate sanitation, poor schools and unreliable public services. We have even learnt to identify the religious composition of neighbourhoods through these signs of neglect. But there is nothing natural or inevitable about this geography. It has been shaped by history, political decisions, discriminatory housing practices, unequal public investment and, above all, the failure to regard every citizen as equally entitled to the city.

What is particularly telling is how little has changed in Jamia Nagar itself, despite the passage of years and the arrival of the Delhi Metro. The neighbourhood is now well connected to the rest of the capital, a fact that would suggest, on paper at least, that the old isolation should have diminished. Yet the perception persists. Auto-rickshaw drivers and taxi operators still hesitate to pick up or drop passengers there, as though crossing an invisible border into another country, one that requires a separate visa and perhaps a change of currency. Many amenities routinely available elsewhere in Delhi remain denied to the residents of the area. The metro may have shortened the distance, but it has not altered the distance in people’s minds. If anything, the only visible transformation is that people now flock to the area for its excellent variety of non-vegetarian food, because nothing unites Indians quite like a good kebab, even if the same Indians would rather not live next door to the people serving it.

The answer cannot simply be to improve roads and drains within Muslim neighbourhoods, although that is urgently necessary. It must also involve dismantling the barriers that prevent Muslims from living elsewhere, ensuring fair access to housing and credit, strengthening public institutions, and restoring the possibility of genuinely shared urban spaces. Equally important is the need to confront the stereotypes perpetuated through education, popular culture, political discourse and everyday social interactions.

For what use is the physical integration of a city if its inhabitants remain mentally segregated? A metro line may connect Jamia Nagar to the rest of Delhi, but it cannot by itself persuade a landlord to rent his flat to a Muslim family, or convince an educated professional that a Muslim need not wear a skullcap or speak Urdu. Such changes require something more fundamental: a willingness to recognise fellow citizens without first imprisoning them within inherited religious categories.

A secular society cannot be judged merely by the assurances contained in its Constitution or the declarations of its political leaders. It must also be judged by the everyday geography of its cities, by who can live where, who receives public services, who feels secure, and whose neighbourhoods are regarded as belonging to the city.

Until those questions are confronted, the invisible boundary described by Rakhshanda Jalil will remain firmly in place.

And perhaps the most damning indictment of our urban civilisation is this: in a country that constitutionally promises equality to all its citizens, one can still often recognise a Muslim neighbourhood not by its mosque, but by the neglect surrounding it. And even when a Muslim steps outside that neighbourhood, he may discover that the ghetto continues to exist in the minds of those he encounters – waiting for him at the metro station, or a house which will not be rented to him.

Note:

This essay draws upon:

• Rakhshanda Jalil’s “Living in Jamia, Coping with Ghettoisation”, reproduced in But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim (HarperCollins, 2019),

• Susewind, R., “Muslims in Indian cities: Degrees of segregation and the elusive ghetto.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49(6), 2017, pp. 1286–1307 which is a work on Muslim residential segregation in Indian cities.

• Report of the High Level Committee on the Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India, chaired by Justice Rajindar Sachar, submitted on 17 November 2006, and tabled in Parliament on 30 November 2006.

• Personal Recollections

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The history of Aligarh is generally associated with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the establishment of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875, and the subsequent emergence of Aligarh Muslim University. Yet long before it acquired its modern educational identity, Aligarh, or Kol, as it was then known, had been an important centre of political and military activity in northern India. During the eighteenth century, its fort and surrounding territories witnessed the struggles between a declining Mughal establishment, the Jats of Bharatpur, the Marathas and, eventually, the expanding East India Company.

One of the most fascinating chapters of this history concerns Aligarh’s association with European military adventurers, particularly Benoît de Boigne and Pierre Cuillier-Perron. Their careers were closely intertwined with the rise of Mahadji Scindia, the transformation of Maratha military organisation, and the continuing political importance of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. Under these European commanders, Aligarh became a major military and administrative centre, housing regular infantry formations, artillery establishments and the headquarters of an extensive territorial command.

The surviving fortifications, the historic gateway associated with Sahib Bagh, and the Persian inscription recording Perron’s titles provide tangible reminders of this remarkable period.

What makes the story particularly interesting is that these European officers were not initially representatives of European colonial rule. They served Indian rulers, commanded armies composed overwhelmingly of Indian soldiers, and operated within an Indo-Persian political culture in which Mughal titles and imperial legitimacy continued to matter. Their presence in Aligarh thus represents a fascinating intersection of Mughal sovereignty, Maratha political power and European military expertise.

From Muhammadgarh to Aligarh: The Earlier History of the Fort

The fort of Aligarh, situated to the north of the old town of Kol, had a history considerably older than the arrival of the French officers. Its importance arose from its strategic position in the Upper Ganga-Yamuna Doab, along routes connecting Delhi, Agra, Mathura and the territories further east.

Although local traditions associate the site with earlier fortifications, its more clearly recorded history begins during the reign of Ibrahim Lodi. Around 1524–25, Muhammad, son of Umar, who held authority over Kol, is said to have constructed or rebuilt a fortress that came to be known as Muhammadgarh.

During the reigns of Farrukhsiyar and Muhammad Shah, Sabit Khan, an important Mughal noble and governor associated with Kol, undertook substantial reconstruction of the fort, which thereafter became known as Sabitgarh. Sabit Khan also left a significant architectural legacy in the town, most notably the Jama Masjid, completed around 1728. The mosque, with its Persian inscription, remains an important monument of eighteenth-century Mughal Aligarh.

As central Mughal authority weakened, the fort became an object of contention among competing regional powers. The Jats of Bharatpur, particularly under Maharaja Suraj Mal, extended their influence into the Upper Doab during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The fort passed into Jat possession and became known as Ramgarh.

Its subsequent history was shaped by the attempts of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II and his leading commanders to recover territories that had slipped from imperial control.

Among these commanders, Mirza Najaf Khan occupies a particularly important place. An Iranian-born noble who had risen to prominence in Mughal service, Najaf Khan emerged as one of the most capable military and political figures of the emperor’s later reign. He attempted to restore a measure of discipline to the imperial army, reorganise its finances and recover strategically important territories.

In 1775, Najaf Khan’s forces moved against the Jat-held fortress of Ramgarh. The operations were conducted principally under his subordinate Afrasiyab Khan, who secured the fort after a prolonged siege and negotiations. The campaign formed part of Najaf Khan’s wider efforts to re-establish Mughal authority over the Doab.

It was around this period that Ramgarh acquired the name Aligarh. The renaming has commonly been attributed to Najaf Khan, whose Shi’i background has encouraged an association between the new name and reverence for Imam Ali. Other accounts attribute the actual naming to Afrasiyab Khan, who conducted the military operations. The distinction is significant, and the precise circumstances of the renaming deserve closer examination through contemporary Persian records.

The new name was itself suggestive. Ali and garh, combining a personal or religious association with the Indic word for fort, reflected the cultural and linguistic environment in which Indo-Persian political traditions interacted with local forms of nomenclature.

Following Najaf Khan’s death in 1782, factional rivalries weakened the attempted restoration of Mughal power. Afrasiyab Khan, who had emerged as an influential figure at the imperial court, was assassinated in 1784. Meanwhile, Mahadji Scindia, the powerful Maratha chief, was extending his authority over Delhi and the surrounding territories.

Aligarh consequently passed into the expanding sphere of Maratha influence. It was this already established fortress, with its successive Lodi, Mughal and Jat phases, that would become one of the principal military centres of Scindia’s European commanders. And the fort continued to be known as Aligarh under Mahadji and his European commanders.

De Boigne and the Transformation of Maratha Military Power

Born in Chambéry in Savoy, De Boigne was not strictly French by birth, although his language and cultural background connected him with the wider French-speaking European world. His varied military experiences eventually brought him to India, where he entered the service of Mahadji Scindia.

Mahadji Scindia had recognised the importance of reorganising his military forces. The traditional Maratha cavalry remained formidable in mobile warfare, but the changing military environment required disciplined infantry formations supported by effective artillery. The successes of the East India Company’s armies had demonstrated the advantages of coordinated infantry drill and battlefield firepower.

De Boigne became one of the principal architects of this transformation. He organised regular battalions trained in European-style manoeuvres, equipped with firearms and supported by artillery. These formations gradually expanded into powerful brigades, which became central to Scindia’s military establishment.

It would, however, be misleading to regard this as a simple transplantation of European military methods into India. Indian armies had long possessed sophisticated artillery traditions, and Indian rulers had repeatedly experimented with new methods of military organisation. The brigades raised by De Boigne were composed predominantly of Indian soldiers, recruited from various regions and communities. Their maintenance depended upon Indian revenues, merchants, bankers, artisans and administrators.

Aligarh became one of the principal centres of this military experiment. Here De Boigne established facilities for training, provisioning and maintaining his troops. The surrounding territories supplied the revenues necessary to sustain the regular brigades. Military organisation was therefore closely connected with fiscal administration.

De Boigne’s forces played decisive roles in Scindia’s campaigns against rival powers, particularly at Patan and Merta in 1790. Their successes strengthened Maratha influence over northern India and contributed to Mahadji’s predominance at the Mughal court.

The relationship between Scindia and Shah Alam II was especially revealing. Although the emperor retained his imperial titles and ceremonial authority, effective military power increasingly rested with the Maratha chief. Yet Scindia did not seek to abolish Mughal sovereignty. Instead, he operated within its framework, deriving prestige and legitimacy from the emperor while exercising substantial control over imperial affairs.

De Boigne’s military establishment was thus sustained by a political arrangement in which Mughal sovereignty, Maratha authority and European military expertise coexisted.

Perron and the Rise of Aligarh as a Military Capital

Perron, a Frenchman of comparatively modest origins, arrived in India in search of military employment. After joining De Boigne’s establishment, he gradually rose through its ranks and, following De Boigne’s retirement, succeeded him as commander of Scindia’s northern forces in 1796.

Under Perron, Aligarh acquired even greater importance. It became not merely a military cantonment but an administrative headquarters from which an extensive territory was governed. His authority extended across substantial portions of the Upper Doab and connected Aligarh with the political affairs of Delhi and Agra.

Perron’s position was extraordinary. Formally, he remained a servant of Scindia, but he commanded considerable military resources, supervised revenue collection, administered territories and negotiated with powerful political figures. He exercised a degree of autonomy unusual even in the fluid political circumstances of late eighteenth-century India.

His establishment included European officers of different nationalities, although the soldiers themselves were overwhelmingly Indian. The army was maintained through territorial assignments, revenue arrangements and an elaborate system of supply.

Aligarh consequently developed into a centre of military expenditure and commercial activity. The maintenance of regular infantry and artillery formations required large quantities of grain, cloth, leather, metal, timber, gunpowder and other materials. Merchants, bankers, transporters, artisans and revenue officials must all have participated in this military economy.

The growth of the military establishment therefore affected the surrounding agricultural and commercial communities. The history of De Boigne and Perron cannot be separated from the social and economic history of Kol.

It is also worth noting that De Boigne’s economic activities extended beyond military command. He encouraged European indigo planters to settle in the Aligarh district, and several established factories in the surrounding parganas. Among them, a certain Longcroft operated a concern at Jalali, and the indigo vats associated with that enterprise are said to survive in a village near the present-day town—a modest but tangible trace of the commercial networks that sustained the military establishment. These planters were not merely agricultural entrepreneurs; their operations formed part of the wider fiscal and commercial infrastructure upon which Scindia’s brigades depended.

Sahib Bagh: The French Residence within Today’s AMU

One of the most remarkable surviving reminders of Aligarh’s French connection is Sahib Bagh, the garden residence associated first with De Boigne and subsequently with Perron.

Situated between the fort and the old town, Sahib Bagh was a substantial residential and administrative establishment. A description reproduced by H. G. Keene from the Delhi Gazette of 5 June 1874 records that De Boigne had occupied the mansion and that Perron subsequently improved both the residence and its gardens.

The garden was reportedly planted with fruit trees obtained from different regions and was considered by some French officers to rival the celebrated Ram Bagh at Agra.

Such descriptions suggest that Sahib Bagh was not simply a military commander’s residence. It represented the adoption of elite Indo-Persian traditions of garden planning, architectural display and aristocratic living.

The complex combined residential, administrative and defensive functions. Its enclosure, gateways and associated buildings reflected the position of a powerful military governor who held court and exercised authority over a substantial territory.

Its importance for the history of Aligarh is enhanced by the fact that the site subsequently became part of Aligarh Muslim University. The property was converted into a university residential complex in the twentieth century and is now associated with Sir Shah Sulaiman Hall. The historic gateway and surviving structures preserve a physical connection between eighteenth-century military history and the modern educational institution.

An important photographic record also survives in the British Library’s Archaeological Survey of India collection. Catalogued as Aligarh. Entrance gate of de Boigne’s House, it bears the reference Photo 1007/16(3581) and belongs to the Northern Circle photographs of 1916–20.

Comparison of this photograph with the present gateway could reveal alterations in the masonry, parapet, arches and decorative details. It could also help establish how much of the original eighteenth-century architectural fabric survives.

Perron’s Persian Inscription: Mughal Titles for a French Commander

Perhaps the most historically revealing feature of Sahib Bagh is the inscription associated with its gateway.

The bilingual tablet records Perron’s name and the year 1802 in English, while the Persian inscription identifies him through a series of honorifics, including Nāṣir al-Daula, Intiẓām al-Mulk, Bahādur and Muẓaffar Jang. The date 1217 AH is also recorded.

The inscription is significant for several reasons.

First, it demonstrates the continued importance of Persian as the language of political authority in northern India. Although Perron was a Frenchman commanding troops organised along European lines, the public representation of his status employed the vocabulary of Mughal nobility.

Second, the titles reveal how European military commanders could be incorporated into the ceremonial hierarchy of the Mughal Empire. Nāṣir al-Daula conveyed the idea of a supporter of the state, while Intiẓām al-Mulk referred to the ordering or administration of the realm. Muẓaffar Jang evoked victory in battle.

Third, the inscription reflects the distinction between effective political power and imperial legitimacy. Perron’s authority depended upon Scindia’s military establishment, yet the language through which his status was publicly acknowledged remained Mughal.

This was characteristic of the later eighteenth century. Even when the emperor lacked the resources necessary to exercise independent authority, imperial titles and honours continued to possess political value.

The inscription therefore provides an unusually clear material expression of the relationship between Mughal sovereignty, Maratha dominance and European military service.

Its architectural context is equally important. The gateway appears to draw upon late Mughal traditions of monumental entrances rather than a purely European architectural vocabulary. It would be anachronistic to classify it uncritically as Indo-Saracenic, a term more commonly associated with the eclectic architectural practices of the later nineteenth century.

A detailed epigraphic examination of the tablet, including an accurate Persian transcription, palaeographic analysis and comparison of the English and Persian sections, would be a valuable contribution to the architectural history of AMU.

It should be noted that no comparable building inscription survives for De Boigne. His presence in the documentary record is attested instead by a Persian seal impression reading Karnail Dubain Itmad-ud-daula Shamshir-Jung Bahadur 1208, found on Persian documents of the period. The seal—rather than an architectural tablet—is the principal epigraphic trace of his authority, and its wording reveals the same incorporation of a European commander into Mughal honorific conventions that the Perron inscription displays in stone.

Aligarh Fort and the French Military Engineers

Although the fort had passed through several phases of construction and reconstruction, its association with De Boigne and Perron marked a particularly important stage in its military development.

The French officers strengthened the existing fortifications and adapted them to the requirements of contemporary artillery warfare. The surviving enclosure, with its polygonal plan, projecting bastions, deep ditch and defensive approaches, reflects the increasing importance of artillery and coordinated infantry operations.

The Imperial Gazetteer of India specifically acknowledges that De Boigne and Perron devoted considerable attention to strengthening the fort.

The bastions enabled defenders to direct flanking fire along the adjoining walls, while the ditch and outer works complicated attempts to approach the principal defences. The arrangement was intended to make an assault difficult even for a disciplined army supported by artillery.

Yet these developments should not be attributed exclusively to European military ingenuity. Indian fortifications had long incorporated bastions, artillery platforms, deep ditches and multiple defensive lines. The French contribution lay in the adaptation and reinforcement of an existing fortress according to the requirements of Scindia’s regular army.

It is also important to distinguish between the different construction phases. The fort visible today cannot be treated as an entirely French creation. Its fabric reflects earlier Mughal and Jat interventions, Maratha-period reconstruction, British military alterations after 1803 and subsequent changes.

A proper architectural study would therefore require a measured survey of the bastions, curtain walls, gateways, masonry and defensive works, supported by historical maps and contemporary military descriptions.

The Other Europeans of Aligarh

De Boigne and Perron were not the only European officers associated with the military establishment of Aligarh.

Colonel Pedron, who commanded the fortress during the British assault of 1803, maintained a residence and garden in the town. According to the nineteenth-century account reproduced by Keene, the property subsequently became associated with the Judges’ Court.

Another officer, the Chevalier Dudernaque, possessed a house on the edge of the town. The same account also refers to European officers of English, French and Italian origin serving in Perron’s military establishment.

These details suggest that Aligarh contained a wider European military community, with residences, gardens and commercial connections extending beyond the fort and Sahib Bagh.

The phenomenon was not confined to Scindia’s service. Elsewhere in India, European officers were employed by various Indian rulers. Michel Joachim Marie Raymond served the Nizam of Hyderabad, while the military establishment of Begum Samru at Sardhana included European commanders and Indian troops. George Thomas, John Hessing and James Skinner similarly belonged to the wider world of military entrepreneurs who moved between competing political establishments.

Their careers challenge the conventional distinction between European and Indian military history. These men did not invariably represent European imperial states. Their loyalties were often contractual and personal, and their fortunes depended upon the Indian rulers who employed them.

At the same time, their military expertise became increasingly important in a political environment characterised by intense competition for territory, revenue and military resources.

The Fall of Aligarh, 1803

The fortunes of Perron and the Maratha military establishment changed dramatically with the expansion of British power.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the East India Company had become increasingly concerned about Scindia’s military strength and the employment of French officers in his service. The wider conflict between Britain and France during the Napoleonic period gave these concerns an additional strategic dimension.

The British frequently represented French military influence in Indian states as a potential threat to their interests. Such arguments also provided justification for intervention against Indian rulers who sought to strengthen their armies through European expertise.

The Treaty of Bassein, concluded between the East India Company and the Peshwa in December 1802, altered the political balance within the Maratha confederacy. The resulting tensions contributed to the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Maratha War in 1803.

Aligarh became one of the principal objectives of the British campaign in northern India.

Perron, whose relations with Scindia’s ministers had deteriorated, found his position increasingly precarious. Internal divisions, uncertainty among subordinate officers and the difficulties of maintaining his extensive military establishment weakened his capacity to resist the British advance.

Rather than conducting a sustained defence, Perron withdrew and subsequently surrendered to the British. His conduct has been interpreted differently by historians. Some contemporary British accounts represented his withdrawal as evidence of the unreliability of European officers in Indian service, while other interpretations emphasise the political pressures and personal insecurity that influenced his decisions.

The fortress itself, however, continued to resist.

On 4 September 1803, British forces under General Gerard Lake stormed Aligarh Fort, which was defended by troops commanded by Colonel Pedron. The assault was fiercely contested, and the formidable defences imposed substantial difficulties upon the attackers.

The capture of Aligarh opened the way for the British advance towards Delhi, which fell later that month. The Mughal emperor Shah Alam II subsequently came under British protection, marking a decisive change in the relationship between imperial sovereignty and effective political authority.

The fall of Aligarh was therefore much more than a local military defeat. It formed part of the larger struggle through which the East India Company displaced the Marathas as the dominant power exercising influence over the Mughal court and northern India.

The Forgotten Military Landscape of Kol

The history of Aligarh’s French connection becomes even more interesting when we move beyond the fort and the residences of its European commanders to examine the wider urban landscape.

The nineteenth-century accounts refer to several establishments associated with the military community, including gardens, residential buildings, commercial premises and the locality known as Perronganj. The continued survival of names such as Sahib Bagh and Perronganj suggests that the presence of these European officers left traces in the town’s historical geography long after their political authority had disappeared.

Aligarh was not simply a fortified military station. It was a centre where military organisation, fiscal administration, commerce and urban development intersected. The provisioning of Scindia’s regular brigades would have required an extensive network of suppliers, bankers, merchants, artisans and transporters.

The revenues of the surrounding countryside sustained the military establishment, while the presence of a large army stimulated demand for agricultural produce, textiles, metal goods, animals and other commodities. The military economy must therefore have affected the social and economic life of Kol and its hinterland.

This aspect of the French connection remains insufficiently explored. Much of the surviving literature concentrates upon the personalities of De Boigne and Perron, their military campaigns and their eventual confrontation with the British. Far less attention has been devoted to the Indian soldiers who served under them, the revenue officials who financed their armies, or the merchants and artisans who supplied their establishments.

There is also a historiographical problem. A substantial portion of the English-language narrative was produced during or after the consolidation of British rule. British accounts frequently portrayed European officers in Indian service as adventurers, mercenaries or potential agents of French influence. Such descriptions need to be examined critically, particularly when explaining Perron’s withdrawal and the defeat of Scindia’s forces.

The history of Aligarh during this period was not simply a contest between British and French military interests. It was fundamentally a struggle among Indian political powers in which European officers participated.

The French Legacy and Aligarh Muslim University

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this history is the survival of its architectural remains within the landscape of Aligarh Muslim University.

The historic gateway associated with Sahib Bagh, the Persian inscription recording Perron’s titles and the surviving structures connected with the old garden residence establish a direct link between the eighteenth-century military establishment and the modern university.

The transformation is striking. A site once associated with a powerful military commander, his administrative headquarters and the political intrigues of the late Mughal world eventually became part of an institution devoted to modern education.

Yet these structures are more than picturesque survivals. They constitute valuable historical evidence. The Persian inscription reveals the continuing importance of Mughal political conventions. The gateway illustrates the architectural tastes of European officers operating within an Indian cultural environment. The fortifications demonstrate the adaptation of military technology during a period of intense political competition.

Together, they provide an opportunity to reconstruct a neglected chapter of Aligarh’s history.

A systematic architectural and epigraphic survey of the gateway and inscription at Sir Shah Sulaiman Hall, supported by the historical photographs preserved in the British Library, could help establish the original character of Sahib Bagh. Similarly, a detailed examination of the fort’s masonry, bastions, gateways and defensive arrangements could distinguish the various phases of its construction.

The older history of the fortress, particularly its association with Sabit Khan, Suraj Mal, Mirza Najaf Khan and Afrasiyab Khan, must remain central to such an investigation. Without this background, the French contribution risks being presented as the beginning of Aligarh’s military importance rather than one phase in its long evolution.

Aligarh at the Crossroads of Empires

The story of Aligarh’s French connection brings together several major developments in the history of eighteenth-century India: the weakening of central Mughal authority, the rise of regional powers, the expansion of Maratha influence in northern India, the reorganisation of military establishments and the eventual emergence of the East India Company as the dominant political power.

From Muhammadgarh and Sabitgarh to Ramgarh and Aligarh, the successive names of the fortress reflected changing political circumstances. Under Mirza Najaf Khan and Afrasiyab Khan, it became an important centre in the attempted restoration of Mughal authority. Under Mahadji Scindia and his European officers, it emerged as a major military establishment of the Marathas. Its capture by the British in 1803 marked another decisive transition.

De Boigne and Perron stood at the intersection of these developments. Their careers demonstrate the extraordinary opportunities available to European military entrepreneurs in an age of shifting political allegiances. Yet their achievements were inseparable from the Indian political institutions, fiscal resources and military personnel that sustained them.

The Persian inscription of Perron is perhaps the most eloquent expression of this historical complexity. A French commander, serving a Maratha chief, proudly displayed titles derived from the Mughal emperor. Few objects could better illustrate the intertwined character of political authority in late eighteenth-century northern India. De Boigne’s Persian seal, though a less conspicuous artefact, belongs to the same world: a European commander adopting the titulature and documentary conventions of the Mughal state.

Today, thousands of students pass through the precincts of Aligarh Muslim University, often without realising that parts of its landscape were once associated with one of the most powerful military establishments of the Marathas.

The fort, the gateway of Sahib Bagh and Perron’s inscription remind us that Aligarh’s historical importance did not begin with the educational movement of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Long before that, it had occupied a significant position in the political and military transformations of northern India.

Aligarh’s French connection is therefore not merely the story of two European adventurers. It is a chapter in the history of Mughal sovereignty, Maratha power, military innovation and the making of colonial India.

Select references and further reading

Edwin T. Atkinson, Statistical, Descriptive and Historical Account of the North-Western Provinces of India, Vol. II (1875), for the earlier history of Kol, the fort, the European establishments and the indigo factories of the district.

H. G. Keene, The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan, particularly the sections concerning Scindia, De Boigne, Perron and the French residences at Aligarh.

Herbert Compton, A Particular Account of the European Military Adventurers of Hindustan, from 1784 to 1803 (London, 1893).

H. R. Nevill, Aligarh: A Gazetteer (1909).

Imperial Gazetteer of India, entry on Aligarh Fort and its successive phases of reconstruction.

Archaeological Survey of India, Aligarh. Entrance gate of de Boigne’s House, photograph 1007/16(3581), British Library, Northern Circle Collection.

Rehan Asad, “Aligarh’s French Connection”, Live History India, 22 February 2019, particularly for Sahib Bagh, the Persian inscription and the surviving architectural remains.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

There are moments in history when governments appear almost invincible. They command the machinery of the state, control the police and administrative apparatus, enjoy parliamentary majorities and exercise considerable influence over institutions that shape public opinion. Political opposition may appear fragmented, intellectuals hesitant, institutions submissive and ordinary citizens increasingly powerless. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that political authority, however formidable, is never beyond challenge. Sometimes the most unexpected challenge comes not from established politicians or organised opposition parties, but from young men and women who abandon their classrooms, gather in university corridors and eventually occupy the streets.

What makes these movements particularly fascinating is the enormous imbalance of power between those who govern and those who protest. On one side stand the institutions of the state, supported by laws, administrative structures, security forces and political patronage. On the other are students, unemployed graduates, young workers and ordinary citizens, frequently possessing little beyond their numbers, determination and capacity for collective action. Yet the balance sometimes changes with astonishing speed. A demonstration dismissed as a minor disturbance becomes a nationwide agitation. A police crackdown intended to suppress dissent produces wider public anger. A university protest becomes a political movement, and a government that appeared unassailable suddenly finds itself compelled to defend its legitimacy.

This pattern is not new, but it has acquired fresh intensity in the present moment. What is especially striking is the contrast between the willingness of sections of the younger generation to confront authority and the caution, accommodation or silence visible among sections of established society. At a time when some institutions appear increasingly reluctant to question those in power, young people have continued to raise uncomfortable questions about education, employment, constitutional rights and democratic accountability. The history of student unrest is therefore not merely a history of youthful rebellion. It is also a history of the limits of political power, and of the capacity of ordinary people to challenge its excessive exercise.

The student uprising in Paris in May 1968 remains one of the most striking illustrations of this phenomenon. What began as protests against university regulations and the authoritarian character of educational institutions developed into a much wider confrontation with the French political establishment. Students occupied universities, erected barricades and confronted the police. When the authorities attempted to suppress the demonstrations, public sympathy expanded and millions of workers joined strikes. Factories were occupied, transport was disrupted and the government of Charles de Gaulle faced a profound crisis. De Gaulle, one suspects, had not anticipated that a dispute over dormitory visiting hours would eventually threaten his government. The students did not overthrow the French Republic, nor did their movement produce the political revolution some participants anticipated. Nevertheless, May 1968 exposed the vulnerability of apparently stable institutions and transformed debates about education, authority, gender, individual freedom and social hierarchy.

The movement formed part of a worldwide wave of youthful mobilisation. American students protested against the Vietnam War and racial discrimination. In West Germany, young activists questioned authoritarian traditions. In Mexico, students demanding democratic reforms faced violent repression, culminating in the Tlatelolco massacre. In Prague, students and young intellectuals participated in the movement for political liberalisation, although the Prague Spring extended far beyond the universities. These movements were neither ideologically identical nor equally successful. Yet they demonstrated that students could transform apparently local grievances into wider political questions. University campuses became laboratories of political thought, while the streets became arenas in which the legitimacy of established authority was contested. The young were not merely demanding a place within the existing order. Many were asking whether that order deserved to survive unchanged.

That question has returned with renewed urgency in the present decade. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina had governed continuously since 2009. Her administration commanded the state apparatus, and opposition parties had faced extensive restrictions. Yet in 2024, a movement that began with student opposition to quotas in government employment developed into a nationwide uprising. The initial demands concerned fairness in recruitment. But the government’s response, particularly the violence accompanying attempts to suppress the demonstrations, broadened the agitation. What had begun as a dispute over employment opportunities became a confrontation over political authority and accountability. In August 2024, Hasina resigned and left the country. Student leaders subsequently participated in discussions concerning the political transition. The uprising demonstrated the capacity of students to mobilise wider sections of society, although the difficulties of the subsequent transition also revealed that removing a government and establishing durable democratic institutions are very different undertakings. Toppling a regime, it turns out, is considerably easier than governing one.

Nepal witnessed a similarly dramatic development in September 2025. Protests against restrictions on social media rapidly expanded into a wider movement against corruption, nepotism and limited economic opportunities. Young demonstrators questioned the privileges enjoyed by political elites while ordinary citizens struggled with unemployment and insecurity. The government’s attempt to suppress the demonstrations resulted in deaths and intensified public anger. Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli resigned, and an interim administration subsequently took office. In Serbia, students organised sustained protests following the deadly collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, a movement that eventually culminated in the ousting of President Aleksandar Vučić in parliamentary elections. In Kenya, young people played an important role in the demonstrations against proposed taxation in 2024. In Indonesia, student and youth protests have raised questions concerning economic inequality and political privilege.

These movements differ considerably in their political objectives and consequences. Their importance lies not in proving the existence of a single worldwide revolution, but in revealing recurring tensions between younger generations and institutions perceived as insufficiently responsive to their aspirations. The new generation has also acquired means of mobilisation unimaginable to its predecessors. A demonstration can be organised through a mobile telephone, filmed within seconds and transmitted across the world. Images of police action in one country can generate sympathy and discussion among young people thousands of miles away. But technology alone does not explain the phenomenon. Beneath these movements lie years of accumulated grievances concerning employment, education, inequality, corruption and the concentration of political power.

The Indian story of student unrest finds an unexpected echo across Europe, where the same combustible mix of neglected institutions, squeezed futures and a political class seemingly deaf to both has produced a continent-wide convulsion. What began in France over broken classroom boilers has spiralled into something considerably more existential. The French eruption began in mid-September 2026 with almost comically modest demands. High schoolers in the Paris suburbs wanted working heating, substitute teachers who actually spoke the language they were hired to teach, and toilets with doors. Within weeks, the dispute had metastasised into a nationwide confrontation involving students, trade unions and the resurrected gilets jaunes, with some 550,000 people taking to the streets on 17 October alone. The interior ministry counted nearly 2,400 arrests and almost 1,000 injured police officers, while a 15-year-old lost a hand to a police stun grenade. The imagery was stark: burning barricades in Lille, looted shops in Paris, and the 143-year-old town hall in Limoges reduced to a charred shell. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu offered a billion euros for education; students demanded ten. President Macron condemned the “sowers of chaos” while conceding that intelligence had failed to anticipate the scale of the unrest. One Lille organiser, aged sixteen, explained the logic with unnerving clarity: “If everything is burning, the government can’t ignore us.”

The Italian variant arrived with its own theatrical flourish. Students occupied high schools across Rome, draping banners reading “School, not barracks” from the windows. By late October, thousands had marched through Milan, Rome and Turin, with some briefly breaching the Colosseum itself, a gesture that would have impressed even the most ambitious tourist. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government responded by deploying soldiers in Milan and approving a sweeping security decree. The Italian grievances mirrored the French but with a distinctly Mediterranean twist: crumbling classrooms with falling plaster, soaring rents, and a defence budget expanding while education funding shrinks. As one seventeen-year-old in Athens put it, referring to his school’s peeling walls, “It’s not acceptable for classrooms to be dangerous.” In Madrid and Barcelona, the protest took a different physical form: tent camps. Hundreds pitched themselves in Puerta del Sol and Plaça Catalunya, demanding rent freezes and an end to evictions. The trigger was the eviction of an 87-year-old woman after her rent rose by 230 per cent, a figure that manages to be both absurd and entirely unsurprising to anyone who has glanced at a European housing market recently. In Lisbon and Porto, protesters carried a slogan that captured the predicament of an entire generation: “I want to move out from my parents before I’m 50.” It is difficult to satirise a housing crisis that has already satirised itself.

Brussels saw thousands of teenagers hurling firecrackers and road signs at police, with twenty-one detained including thirteen minors. In Greece, students in Athens’ Exarchia neighbourhood protested the contrast between military spending and the state of their classrooms, while fishermen and farmers blocked ports and highways. Albania experienced outright riots in Tirana, with thousands building burning barricades and demanding the prime minister’s resignation. What unites these disparate eruptions is not a single organisation or ideology but a shared diagnosis. As the International Sociological Association’s president observed, young Europeans “do not just feel like they do not have a place in politics, they feel they are not being heard at all.” A twenty-year-old in Bordeaux articulated the logic of the ballot box with brutal simplicity: “We don’t believe in it anymore.” The European movements are also watching each other. Italian students adopted the slogan “do as in France,” while Spanish organisers fielded enquiries from across the continent about how to build a tent camp. The Jolly Roger pirate flag has become a shared emblem, which is at least a more cheerful symbol than a burning town hall.

The European eruption sharpens the point. What began in France over broken classroom boilers spiralled within weeks into a nationwide confrontation involving students, trade unions and the resurrected gilets jaunes, with some 550,000 people on the streets on 17 October alone. The students’ demands were not merely expensive; they were systemically expensive. France is not a poor country forced into austerity by international creditors. Public expenditure exceeds 57 per cent of GDP, tax collections run at roughly 44 per cent, and the fiscal deficit sits near 5 per cent. Yet the money still falls short, and the reason is pensions. The French retire at 62 while most Europeans retire at 67; pensions replace about 70 per cent of working wages; life expectancy is 82.5, and those who reach 60 can expect on average another 26 years. Because the system is pay-as-you-go rather than fully funded, an ageing population means fewer taxpayers supporting more pensioners for longer, compressing the funds available for schools and universities. The students asking for working heating are asking a state that has already promised its money to its grandparents.

Beneath the fiscal squeeze lies a second fracture. About 9 per cent of the French population is foreign-born, and a much larger share are the children of immigrants, mostly from former African colonies. Some have risen to the heights of French academic and artistic life; many have not, and live in underfunded districts where poverty and crime are entrenched and reinforced by brutal, racialised policing. A rallying cry of the protesters has been “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres”—literally, “In the name of God, it is the darkness.” According to one account, the phrase began when a police operative tried to infiltrate a protest group by prefacing his request for information with “Bismillah.” Protesters seized on the amateurishness of the attempt and turned the phrase into a slogan, mocking both the infiltration and the racialised policing it betrayed. It is a small detail, but it captures something the boiler-repair framing misses: humour, linguistic ingenuity and shared mockery are themselves forms of power available to those who have little else. As pointed out earlier, Italian students occupied high schools with banners reading “School, not barracks,” some briefly breached the Colosseum’s vicinity, and in Madrid and Barcelona hundreds pitched tent camps demanding rent freezes. Brussels saw teenagers hurling firecrackers at police; Tirana saw burning barricades. What unites these eruptions is not an organisation but a diagnosis, captured by a twenty-year-old in Bordeaux: “We don’t believe in it anymore.”

India possesses its own long tradition of student participation in political movements, and the contemporary Gen Z mobilisation belongs to that history while possessing distinctive characteristics. During the struggle against colonial rule, students abandoned classrooms to join nationalist demonstrations, boycotts and campaigns of civil disobedience. The Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22 and the Quit India Movement of 1942 witnessed extensive student participation. Independent India experienced equally significant mobilisations. The Nav Nirman movement in Gujarat and the Bihar movement of 1974, subsequently associated with Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for Sampoorna Kranti, demonstrated the capacity of students to challenge established political authority. These movements contributed to the wider political confrontation preceding the Emergency of 1975. Universities were not simply centres of learning. They were also spaces where competing visions of India’s future were debated.

Today’s young people have grown up in a world of expanding educational opportunities and increasingly uncertain employment prospects. They have been encouraged to acquire qualifications and aspire to professional success, yet many confront unemployment, recruitment delays, examination irregularities and the declining accessibility of quality education. Their frustration is not confined to economic insecurity. It extends to questions about political representation, constitutional rights, institutional accountability and the relationship between citizens and the state. A generation that has been encouraged to aspire is increasingly questioning why the institutions responsible for fulfilling those aspirations appear unable or unwilling to respond.

One of the most visible figures in this mobilisation is Neha Bora, the national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), a doctoral researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University and a theatre practitioner. Bora’s political journey is revealing. Their early involvement in theatre helped develop an interest in social questions. The protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019–20 provided an important political turning point. Subsequently, years of campus organising, distributing pamphlets, addressing meetings and participating in demonstrations prepared Bora for a larger public role. During the demonstrations at Jantar Mantar over alleged examination irregularities, Bora participated in protests demanding accountability from the Union Education Ministry. The movement subsequently broadened into questions concerning electoral processes, political representation and the exercise of state authority.

Bora became a familiar presence at demonstrations, sometimes addressing protesters from behind barricades, sometimes being carried away by police personnel, and sometimes reappearing at another location after attempts to prevent gatherings. In October 2026, Reuters described Bora as one of the most visible faces of India’s youth unrest. When police prevented protesters from reaching Jantar Mantar, Bora urged them to regroup elsewhere. Even after detention, Bora insisted that the movement would continue. What makes Bora particularly interesting is not simply the dramatic imagery of confrontation with the police. It is the insistence that political mobilisation emerges from years of accumulated grievances rather than sudden excitement. Speaking to Reuters, Bora observed that fear could spread through society, but hope could spread as well. The remark captures an important psychological dimension of collective action. When people see others questioning authority despite the possibility of arrest or intimidation, their own sense of helplessness may diminish. Bora has also resisted attempts to portray the movement as the achievement of a single charismatic personality, a refreshing departure in a political culture where individual leaders are frequently elevated above the movements that sustain them.

If Neha Bora represents the organisational spine of the movement, Neha Singh Rathore represents its soundtrack. A Bhojpuri folk singer and political satirist who describes herself as Gen Z, Rathore rose to national prominence through her UP Mein Ka Ba series, which took aim at governance failures, unemployment, inflation and paper leaks with a sharpness that conventional commentary rarely musters. When she spoke about the Gen Z protests at Jantar Mantar, she did so with the clarity of someone who had already spent years absorbing the cost of asking questions: police complaints, legal notices and a steady stream of online abuse. Her support for the movement was neither uncritical nor performative. She described the Cockroach Janta Party as a reaction to what many young people felt was the public humiliation of their aspirations, while cautioning that youthful enthusiasm could be both a movement’s greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability to manipulation. It is the kind of observation that comes from experience rather than distance.

What makes Rathore significant to the story of Gen Z mobilisation is the role she illustrates: the cultural amplifier. Student organisers build the infrastructure of protest – the hunger strikes, the legal aid, the negotiations. But movements also need voices that carry beyond the barricades, into WhatsApp groups and family gatherings and the wider public imagination. When a viral video emerged from Jantar Mantar showing a young woman being mistreated, Rathore’s response was immediate and unsparing, connecting the incident to a broader pattern of hostility toward women who dare to question authority. She asked why those accused of attacking student protesters were not being sent to the border to defend the country instead. It was the kind of remark that would be reckless from a politician and is merely honest from a folk singer. Her presence in the movement also complicates any tidy narrative about who belongs to Gen Z and what they want. Rathore is not a student leader, nor does she claim to be. She is a cultural worker who has made a career of translating grievances into songs that travel further than press releases. When she appeared alongside Rahul Gandhi at a youth outreach event, she spoke about the harassment and legal pressure she had faced for raising social and political concerns, and about what genuine respect for women would look like in a society that punishes those who ask questions. The contrast with the students fasting outside Jantar Mantar is instructive: different platforms, different methods, same underlying insistence that accountability is not an unreasonable demand. The students provide the courage; the singers provide the language that carries it further.

The growing attention surrounding Bora and Rathore should not obscure the contribution of the young people working alongside them. Danish Ali, Joint Secretary of the JNU Students’ Union, and Anjali, associated with AISA’s Delhi University unit, have been prominent participants in the agitation. Both have appeared alongside Bora during demonstrations and public discussions concerning the treatment of protesters. Danish participated in the hunger strike and has spoken about the years of patient organisational work underlying Bora’s emergence. Anjali’s experience illustrates another dimension of the movement. During the demonstrations, Anjali reportedly suffered a leg injury following police action. Yet the injury did not end her participation in student politics, a reminder that commitment is not measured in comfort. Other organisers, including AISA general secretary Prasenjeet Kumar, N. Sai Balaji and several young activists associated with other student organisations, have also contributed to the movement. The Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, has added another distinctive element. Emerging through satire, digital communication and youth mobilisation, its organisers have worked with AISA on particular demands while retaining their own identity. The role of other hunger strikers and volunteers should also be recognised. The Jantar Mantar agitation was sustained not only by speeches but by prolonged fasting, coordination, publicity, legal assistance and the everyday work of maintaining a protest. These contributions remind us that movements are rarely the achievements of a single individual, however prominent that person may become. The face seen on television represents a much larger network of organisers, volunteers and supporters.

The power of the present youth movement becomes particularly visible when we turn from Jantar Mantar to India’s university campuses, where the conflict is often not over the overthrow of governments or even the replacement of university administrations. It concerns something more fundamental: the right of students to organise, elect representatives, express disagreement and participate in decisions affecting their institutions. The protests at Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University in December 2019 remain important landmarks. During the demonstrations against the Citizenship Amendment Act, police entered Jamia’s campus, and students at both institutions reported serious injuries and excessive force. The incidents generated widespread concern and brought students from JNU, Jadavpur and other universities into solidarity demonstrations. These events revealed how quickly a university protest could become a national controversy. They also raised questions about the relationship between academic autonomy, policing and the constitutional right to peaceful assembly.

The most recent developments at Jamia Millia Islamia are particularly revealing. In October 2026, students began an indefinite hunger strike demanding the restoration of their elected Students’ Union, whose elections had not been held since 2006. The demand was hardly revolutionary in itself. They wanted an institution through which students could participate in university affairs, raise grievances and negotiate with the administration. Yet the response produced a confrontation of remarkable intensity. Students alleged that security personnel assaulted and forcibly removed hunger strikers in the early hours of 17 October. Some protesters were detained, while others faced suspension and rustication orders. The administration maintained that disciplinary and security measures were necessary, but student organisations questioned both their proportionality and their legality. As the agitation continued, the university shifted teaching online and restricted access to the campus. Police and paramilitary personnel were deployed around the institution. Students reported being prevented from entering, while others attempted to cross barricades and campus walls to reach their fellow protesters. By 26 October, the confrontation had become even more serious. According to The Indian Express, more than 700 security personnel were deployed and over 40 students were briefly detained. The administration issued a notice ordering protesters to vacate their protest site, warning of possible disciplinary action. The images of security personnel surrounding a university while students demanded an elected union raised an obvious question: why should a dispute over democratic representation require such extensive security arrangements? One might reasonably ask whether the barricades were protecting the university from the students or the students from the university.

The administration was eventually forced to issue an order promising elections within fifteen days of the approval of a new Students’ Union constitution. It also announced the withdrawal of suspension and show-cause notices and an inquiry into the conduct of security personnel. But the students pointed out that the order contained no definite deadline for approving the constitution. It also included conditions concerning public apologies and the removal of allegedly defamatory statements. The dispute was therefore far from resolved. Among those who continued the hunger strike were Ebin Basil and Rehan Khan, whose determination had become an important feature of the agitation. Their position was that an assurance without a clear and enforceable timetable did not adequately meet the students’ demands. What is particularly striking is that the students continued their agitation despite detentions, disciplinary proceedings, restricted campus access and the physical strain of prolonged fasting. Their demands concerned representation and accountability, but the methods used to contain the movement transformed the dispute into a wider debate about academic freedom and the use of coercive authority.

Jamia’s experience is not an isolated episode. At Aligarh Muslim University, students undertook a prolonged agitation in September and October 2026, including an indefinite hunger strike, demanding the restoration of Students’ Union elections and changes in the university’s proctorial administration. The movement eventually resulted in an announcement restoring elections after eight years. Aligarh possesses a particularly important tradition of student politics. From the debating culture of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College and the Siddons Club to the later Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union, the institution has long served as a training ground for public speaking, political debate and civic participation. Its history has not been free from factionalism or political interference. Yet these problems cannot automatically justify the indefinite suspension of representative institutions. The agitation at Aligarh was significant because it demonstrated that students could sustain collective pressure over an institutional demand. The eventual administrative concession showed that negotiation and protest could produce results without necessarily involving a change in government. Allahabad University, Lucknow University and Banaras Hindu University have also witnessed recurring protests over student representation, educational policy, examinations, recruitment and campus facilities. At Jadavpur University, student politics has long been associated with questions of academic autonomy, democratic rights and broader social movements. The use of police or disciplinary measures varies across these institutions, and it would be inaccurate to describe every confrontation as identical. Nevertheless, allegations of excessive force, arbitrary disciplinary action and restrictions upon peaceful assembly have repeatedly accompanied campus disputes. The central question is whether universities regard student representation and dissent as legitimate parts of academic life or as disturbances to be managed through administrative control. For those of us who have spent decades teaching in universities, the question is especially important. Education is not simply the acquisition of degrees or the preparation for employment. It involves learning to question, reason, disagree and participate responsibly in public life. A university that teaches constitutional democracy while denying students meaningful opportunities for representation risks creating a contradiction between its intellectual purpose and its administrative practices, a rather awkward position for an institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

The recurring confrontation between young protesters and security forces deserves serious historical attention. Governments possess legitimate responsibilities to maintain public order, protect citizens and regulate demonstrations. Universities likewise have responsibilities to safeguard students and ensure that academic activities continue. But these responsibilities do not eliminate the right to peaceful dissent. The use of coercive authority must remain proportionate, lawful and subject to independent scrutiny. When peaceful protesters are met with excessive force, preventive detention or arbitrary disciplinary proceedings, the consequences can extend far beyond the immediate demonstration. Such actions may discourage participation, weaken confidence in public institutions and transform relatively limited grievances into wider political controversies. The recent experience of Jamia illustrates this danger. A demand for elected representation became a prolonged confrontation involving police deployment, hunger strikes, detentions, administrative notices and restrictions upon campus access. The same tension is visible in the demonstrations associated with Neha Bora and other young organisers. Repeated detentions did not necessarily end the protests. Instead, they sometimes became part of the movement’s public narrative. This does not mean that protesters are exempt from legal obligations or that every allegation against the authorities is necessarily established. It means that the exercise of state power, particularly against peaceful political activity, requires careful justification. A constitutional democracy must be capable of distinguishing between disagreement and disorder. It must also recognise that the presence of dissent does not, by itself, signify a failure of governance.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of the present mobilisation is the contrast it invites with the behaviour of sections of established society. Universities, professional organisations, cultural institutions and public intellectuals possess resources, experience and institutional standing that students often lack. Yet their responses to controversial public questions are sometimes marked by caution, silence or accommodation. Such behaviour can arise from different circumstances. Individuals may fear professional consequences, institutional retaliation, financial insecurity or damage to their careers. Others may genuinely disagree with the protesters or prefer quieter forms of engagement. Silence, therefore, cannot automatically be equated with submission. Nevertheless, there is a legitimate question about the responsibilities of those who possess institutional influence. When students risk disciplinary proceedings, interrupted education or detention to raise public questions, what responsibilities fall upon teachers, intellectuals and professional bodies whose very work depends upon freedom of inquiry and expression? This contrast becomes particularly significant within universities. Students may have much to lose. Their degrees, scholarships, accommodation and future employment can all be affected by prolonged confrontation. Yet some continue to participate despite these risks. The courage displayed by such students deserves recognition without suggesting that confrontation is the only legitimate form of civic engagement. Equally important are the quieter contributions of teachers, lawyers, journalists and citizens who defend due process, investigate allegations of abuse and provide opportunities for dialogue. The strength of democratic society depends not upon one generation alone, but upon the willingness of different generations and institutions to uphold the principles they profess.

The word revolution is frequently invoked when young people fill the streets. But history requires us to distinguish between political upheaval, institutional reform and deeper social transformation. The students of Paris in 1968 did not overthrow the French government, yet their movement contributed to lasting changes in social attitudes. The temptation to read every youth eruption as a prelude to progressive renewal should be resisted. The disruptions in France do not automatically deliver the country to Marine Le Pen, but neither do they automatically produce a new republic liberated from neoliberalism. Macron may well become one of the most unpopular figures in recent French history as he contains the protests, yet he remains the most articulate and credible liberal-democratic leader France has. The headline writer who invoked Fahrenheit 451 understood the stakes: the fear is not that students are burning books, but that a state which cuts school maintenance, apprenticeship programmes and university funding while spending ever more on pensions and defence is quietly extinguishing the institutions that make democratic citizenship possible. The students of Bangladesh in 2024 helped bring down a long-established administration. Nepal’s youth mobilisation precipitated a political transition in 2025. In India, the 2026 demonstrations have brought educational opportunity, student representation and electoral accountability into renewed public discussion. Across Europe, the French prime minister survived a confidence vote while students demanded ten times his education budget, Italian students occupied the Colosseum’s vicinity, and Spanish youth erected tent camps in the heart of Madrid. These are different kinds of achievements. Their long-term consequences cannot be measured by the size of demonstrations alone. Revolutionary change also raises difficult questions. Can movements that challenge arbitrary authority create institutions that respect disagreement? Can youthful energy be translated into lasting improvements in education, employment and public accountability? Can organisations that mobilise through protest also negotiate, compromise and govern responsibly? The answers are not predetermined. Nor should youth itself be romanticised. Young people can mobilise for democratic rights, but they can also support exclusionary or authoritarian causes. The historical significance of a movement depends upon its principles, methods and consequences rather than the age of its participants. Nevertheless, the present wave of youth activism reveals an important shift in political participation. Many young people no longer regard public affairs as the exclusive domain of established leaders or political parties. They are claiming the right to question decisions affecting their lives, whether those decisions concern university elections, recruitment procedures, public expenditure or constitutional institutions.

The spectacle of young people challenging established authority is not entirely new. What is new is the speed with which their movements can communicate, organise and acquire international visibility. A student protest in Delhi can be watched in Dhaka, Kathmandu, Paris or London within minutes. The experience of one movement becomes part of the political imagination of young people elsewhere. French students burn barricades; Italian students raise banners; Spanish students pitch tents; Indian students fast outside Jantar Mantar. The methods travel faster than the grievances, but the grievances are never far behind. Yet the ultimate test remains unchanged. Can the energy of protest be translated into durable institutions, accountable leadership and greater opportunities for participation? Can movements that challenge arbitrary authority avoid reproducing it within their own ranks? Can the desire for fundamental change coexist with respect for democratic procedures and the rights of those who disagree? These questions will determine the longer historical significance of the present wave of youth mobilisation.

For the moment, however, the participation of Neha Bora, Neha Rathore, Danish, Anjali and numerous other young activists has become part of India’s contemporary political story. So have the hunger strikes at Jamia, the struggle for student representation at Aligarh and the recurring demands for institutional accountability at Jadavpur and other universities across the country. Their experiences differ, and not every participant belongs to the same organisation or shares the same political outlook. But collectively they illustrate the continued importance of youth participation in public affairs. The recent events at Jamia are particularly instructive. Students demanding an elected union encountered extensive security measures, detentions and disciplinary proceedings. Yet they continued to organise, negotiate and insist upon a definite response. Their determination does not settle every question about the movement’s demands or methods. It does, however, challenge the assumption that young people are politically indifferent or incapable of sustained collective action.

The power of Gen Z lies not in its ability invariably to overthrow governments, but in its capacity to challenge decisions that appear beyond question and to insist that institutions remain accountable to those whose lives they govern. The young do not always make history in the manner they intend. Their victories may be incomplete, their movements divided and their hopes disappointed. Yet the history of modern societies would have been profoundly different had successive generations of students always accepted the world exactly as they found it. And perhaps that is the enduring significance of the present generation. At a time when sections of established society appear hesitant to question power, these young people are demonstrating that civic participation need not wait for age, office or permission. They are not merely waiting to inherit the future. They are demanding a voice in its making.

The deeper question in the end, however, is not why the young are angry but why they have been given so much to be angry about and disillusioned. The answer lies in the long ascendancy of a governing logic that has spent four decades treating citizens as consumers, public institutions as cost centres and education as an investment expected to pay for itself. Neoliberalism promised that opportunity would follow effort, that qualifications would guarantee security and that the market would distribute rewards fairly to those who worked hard enough. For a generation raised on that promise, the arithmetic has simply failed. They have been encouraged to accumulate debt for degrees that no longer guarantee employment, to compete for housing they cannot afford and to enter labour markets that offer flexibility to employers and precarity to everyone else. The result is not apathy but disillusionment of a particular kind: a generation that still believes in the promise, and is furious that the adults who made it have quietly abandoned it. This is why the protests in Paris, Dhaka, Kathmandu and Delhi share a common grammar despite their different languages. They are not merely demanding better schools or fairer recruitment. They are questioning a settlement that has turned the future into a commodity and then priced it beyond the reach of those expected to inherit it. The young are dissatisfied because they were promised a world that the neoliberalism of their elders never intended to deliver, and disillusioned because they have now noticed the gap between the rhetoric and the receipts. Whether they can close that gap is the political question of the coming decade.