ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Today let us discuss the history of pyrotechny which is, in many ways, a history of the movement of knowledge across civilisations. Few technologies illustrate this process as clearly as gunpowder and the various devices that came to be associated with it. What began as experiments with combustible substances in China gradually travelled across Central Asia and the Islamic world before reaching India, where it acquired military, ceremonial and eventually popular applications. Fireworks, rockets, incendiary devices and firearms were all products of this long process of experimentation and adaptation. Their history cannot be attributed to any one people or civilisation, although the contribution of each can be identified at different stages of their development.

The role of Muslims in the introduction and spread of pyrotechny in India was particularly significant. Yet this contribution can only be properly understood if we recognise that the original discovery of gunpowder took place in China. Muslim military specialists, merchants, scholars and artisans were among those who helped transmit and develop the technology as it travelled westwards and southwards. In India, the courts of the Delhi Sultans and, subsequently, the Mughals provided important settings for its adoption and refinement. Over time, however, pyrotechny moved beyond the confines of royal establishments and became part of the cultural practices of different communities.

The researches of P. K. Gode, Iqtidar Alam Khan and Irfan Habib are particularly useful in reconstructing this history. While Khan has examined the introduction and development of gunpowder weapons in medieval India, Gode’s pioneering studies drew attention to references to fireworks in Sanskrit and Marathi literature, demonstrating how widely the technology had spread beyond military establishments. Their work helps us understand not merely when pyrotechny reached India, but also how it became part of Indian society.

The story begins in China, where the earliest known formulations of gunpowder emerged from experiments undertaken by alchemists associated with Daoist traditions. Their immediate concerns were quite different from those of later military engineers. They were interested in medicinal preparations and in substances believed to prolong life or possess extraordinary powers. In the course of these experiments, they discovered that certain combinations of saltpetre, sulphur and other combustible materials could produce intense flames and violent reactions.

By the ninth century, Chinese writings were already warning against the dangers of such preparations. The Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, generally associated with this period, refers to mixtures that could cause serious fires and injuries. These observations suggest that Chinese alchemists had begun to recognise the properties of substances that would eventually form the basis of gunpowder. It was an extraordinary development, even if those responsible for the early experiments could scarcely have anticipated its future consequences.

During the Song dynasty, this knowledge began to acquire military applications. The Wujing zongyao, a military compendium completed in 1044, contains formulations for incendiary and explosive preparations. It provides some of the earliest surviving evidence of the deliberate use of gunpowder in warfare. Chinese military specialists experimented with fire arrows, incendiary bombs and devices capable of producing flames, smoke and explosions. These were not yet firearms in the modern sense, but they represented important stages in the development of gunpowder technology.

Over the following centuries, Chinese engineers devised increasingly sophisticated weapons. The fire lance, initially a tube through which flames and combustible substances were projected, gradually developed into a weapon capable of discharging solid projectiles. Improvements in gunpowder compositions and in the manufacture of suitable barrels eventually led to the appearance of early guns. By the thirteenth century, China had developed a range of gunpowder weapons that would profoundly influence military technology elsewhere.

It is important to emphasise this Chinese origin because the history of gunpowder is sometimes confused with the history of firearms in particular regions. The fact that cannon or muskets appeared relatively late in India does not mean that gunpowder itself was unknown before their arrival. Nor should the use of incendiary substances in ancient warfare be treated as evidence of gunpowder. These distinctions are essential if we are to reconstruct the chronology of pyrotechny with any degree of accuracy.

The movement of this technology beyond China was facilitated by the extensive networks of communication that connected East Asia with Central and western Asia. The routes along which silk, porcelain, horses and other commodities travelled also carried technical knowledge, medicinal substances and skilled craftsmen. The Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century accelerated these exchanges. Their armies drew upon engineers and military specialists from different regions, including China, and the movement of such personnel helped spread knowledge of gunpowder-based devices across Asia.

The Islamic world was already familiar with several forms of incendiary warfare. Muslim armies had long employed preparations generally described as naft, a term commonly associated with petroleum and other inflammable substances. Specialists known as naffāṭūn were trained in their manufacture and use, particularly during sieges and attacks upon fortified positions. Such preparations could be extremely destructive, but they should not be confused with gunpowder. The distinction is important because early Arabic and Persian references to fire weapons do not necessarily indicate knowledge of saltpetre-based explosive compositions.

By the thirteenth century, however, Muslim military specialists had begun to record more sophisticated pyrotechnic preparations. An important figure in this development was Ḥasan al-Rammāḥ, whose treatise on military technology discusses incendiary mixtures, rockets and other devices. His writings reveal that saltpetre-based compositions had become part of the technical knowledge available in the Islamic world. They also indicate that this knowledge was being adapted to existing military practices rather than merely reproduced in the form in which it had arrived.

The contribution of Muslim military specialists therefore lay partly in the adaptation and practical application of techniques acquired through wider Asian contacts. The Islamic world possessed established traditions of military engineering, chemical experimentation and specialised craftsmanship. New knowledge could be incorporated into these traditions and transmitted further through the movement of soldiers, artisans and merchants.

India was closely connected with these developments. The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate strengthened its links with Central Asia and the Persianate world. Soldiers, administrators, scholars, merchants and craftsmen moved between these regions and the subcontinent. The Mongol invasions, despite the destruction they caused, also encouraged the migration of refugees and specialists into India. Such movements created opportunities for the introduction of new technologies, including pyrotechnic devices.

Iqtidar Alam Khan’s researches have been particularly important in establishing the chronology of these developments. In his Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India, he argued that gunpowder probably reached northern India during the later thirteenth century, largely through contacts with the Mongols. He also demonstrated that the early appearance of pyrotechnic devices must be distinguished from the later introduction of cannon and muskets. This distinction is fundamental, for it places the history of gunpowder in India well before the establishment of Mughal power.

One of the earliest references suggesting familiarity with pyrotechnic devices occurs in the writings of Amir Khusrau. In a poem composed in praise of Jalaluddin Firuz Khalji, who ruled between 1290 and 1296, Khusrau refers to a hawā’ī, generally interpreted as a rocket or a device propelled through the air. Khan regarded this passage as significant evidence for the presence of pyrotechnic knowledge in northern India towards the end of the thirteenth century. Since the reference occurs in a poetic composition, however, its precise technical meaning remains uncertain. It is best treated as an indication of familiarity with such devices rather than as a detailed description of a particular weapon.

More substantial evidence becomes available during the reign of Firuz Shah Tughluq (1351–1388). Shams-i Siraj Afif, in his Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, describes the use of fireworks during the celebrations of Shab-i Barāt. His account refers to devices that produced spectacular effects, including the scattering of flowers and fragrant substances. The description suggests that pyrotechnic entertainment had become part of the ceremonial life of the Delhi court.

This is an important development. It indicates that the knowledge of combustible preparations was not confined to warfare. The Sultanate court provided patronage to craftsmen capable of manufacturing and displaying fireworks, and such entertainments became associated with royal magnificence and public celebration. The Persian term ātishbāzī, literally suggesting the playing of fire, eventually became a familiar expression for fireworks in India.

The movement from military technology to ceremonial entertainment was probably not as abrupt as it might appear. The preparation of rockets and incendiary devices required knowledge that could also be employed in the manufacture of fireworks. Craftsmen could adapt their techniques to produce different effects, whether flames, sparks, smoke or explosive sounds. Pyrotechny was therefore a field in which military and recreational applications could develop alongside one another.

The researches of P. K. Gode provide a particularly valuable insight into the subsequent history of fireworks in India. In his study The History of Fireworks in India between A.D. 1400 and 1900, first published in 1953, and in related essays on gunpowder and firearms, Gode assembled evidence from Sanskrit and Marathi literature, travellers’ accounts and historical chronicles. His contribution was to show that fireworks gradually became familiar in different regions of India and were incorporated into royal ceremonies, weddings and religious celebrations. His findings complement those of Iqtidar Alam Khan, whose principal concern was the development of military technology.

Gode was also interested in the Chinese antecedents of pyrotechny. He examined the possibility that Chinese techniques had reached India through different routes and were subsequently modified by Indian craftsmen. He suggested that some Chinese pyrotechnic formulations may have reached India around the beginning of the fifteenth century. This should not be understood as establishing the first arrival of gunpowder in the subcontinent, since the evidence from the Delhi Sultanate points towards an earlier acquaintance with pyrotechnic devices. Rather, it raises the possibility that different forms of technical knowledge continued to arrive and circulate over several centuries.

One of the important accounts discussed by Gode is that of Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi, the Persian ambassador who visited Vijayanagara in 1443 during the reign of Devaraya II. Describing the magnificent Mahanavami celebrations, Abd al-Razzaq referred to elaborate fireworks and other pyrotechnic entertainments. His observations indicate that by the middle of the fifteenth century, fireworks had become part of the ceremonial culture of one of the most powerful Hindu kingdoms of southern India.

The significance of this account extends beyond the spectacle itself. It demonstrates how a technology that had travelled through international networks could be adopted by societies with different political and religious traditions. Fireworks were not regarded as belonging exclusively to the communities through which they had been transmitted. They were valued for the splendour they added to royal celebrations and for the technical skill displayed by the craftsmen who produced them.

Gode also examined the Kautukacintāmaṇi, associated with the court of Gajapati Prataparudradeva of Odisha in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This Sanskrit work contains descriptions of pyrotechnic preparations and provides evidence that the manufacture of fireworks had become a subject of technical knowledge recorded in an Indian literary tradition. Its importance lies in showing that pyrotechny was no longer confined to the Persianate world of military and courtly specialists. It had entered Sanskrit technical literature and was being adapted to local requirements.

Another source discussed by Gode was the Ākāśabhairavakalpa, a Sanskrit text preserved in manuscript form at Thanjavur. It contains references to firearms and to arrangements for pyrotechnic displays organised before kings. Gode drew attention to descriptions of structures apparently intended for launching rockets or bāṇas, which produced spectacular effects. Such references suggest that fireworks had become an elaborate form of courtly entertainment, requiring specialised knowledge and careful preparation. The precise dating of this material, however, requires caution, since the age of a manuscript or its individual passages cannot always be established with certainty.

Evidence from Gujarat further illustrates the spread of fireworks beyond royal establishments. The Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa, writing in the early sixteenth century, described the use of fireworks during a Brahmin wedding. His account refers to rockets and explosive devices employed as part of the festivities. This suggests that pyrotechnic entertainments were becoming available to prosperous sections of urban society and were no longer restricted to the courts of rulers.

Gode’s examination of Marathi literature adds another dimension to this history. In Eknath’s Rukmini Svayamvara, composed during the sixteenth century, fireworks appear in the description of the marriage of Krishna and Rukmini. Such references are particularly revealing because they introduce practices familiar to contemporary audiences into narratives of a mythological past. Their presence suggests that fireworks had become sufficiently well known in western India to be employed as recognisable elements of festive celebration.

References in the writings associated with Ramdas during the seventeenth century similarly suggest that pyrotechnic entertainments were becoming familiar in regional cultural traditions. These literary sources do not necessarily provide detailed information about the manufacture of fireworks, but they are valuable evidence of their place in the social imagination of the period.

The development of gunpowder technology in India was, meanwhile, proceeding along military lines. The Deccan kingdoms maintained extensive commercial and political connections with Iran, the Persian Gulf and other parts of western Asia. These contacts facilitated the movement of military specialists and technical knowledge. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gunpowder weapons were becoming increasingly important in the military establishments of the Bahmani kingdom and its successor states.

The establishment of Mughal power in northern India marked another significant stage. Babur’s victory over Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat in 1526 demonstrated the effectiveness of combining field artillery and matchlockmen with carefully organised defensive positions. His artillery specialists, Ustad Ali Quli and Mustafa Rumi, brought expertise associated with the Ottoman military tradition.

It would, however, be misleading to suggest that Babur introduced gunpowder or firearms into India. Both were already known in different parts of the subcontinent. Duarte Barbosa and Garcia da Orta mention this in their respective accounts, as does Mirāt e Sikandari. His achievement lay in their systematic organisation and effective employment within a coordinated military strategy. Panipat demonstrated the potential of gunpowder weapons when combined with appropriate tactics, rather than marking their first appearance in India.

Under Akbar, the manufacture of firearms and artillery became an important concern of the imperial establishment. Abu’l Fazl’s Ā’īn-i Akbarī provides descriptions of the imperial workshops and the attention devoted to the production of weapons. The Mughal court employed skilled metalworkers, carpenters and other specialists whose expertise contributed to improvements in military equipment.

The production of gunpowder also had important economic implications. India possessed considerable resources of saltpetre, particularly in the Gangetic plains, and its extraction and refinement became important occupations. The manufacture of firearms and fireworks created demand for raw materials, specialised labour and technical knowledge. These activities formed part of the wider world of crafts and professions in Mughal India, connecting military requirements with artisanal production and commercial networks.

At the same time, fireworks continued to occupy an important place in courtly celebrations. Mughal weddings, royal festivities and other ceremonial occasions were frequently accompanied by illuminations and spectacular displays. The marriage celebrations of Prince Dara Shikoh in 1633, for example, were associated with elaborate festivities, while Mughal and later Indian paintings provide visual evidence of fireworks as an element of courtly entertainment.

The Deccan courts were equally enthusiastic patrons of such displays. Accounts of celebrations under Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur refer to lavish expenditure upon fireworks. These spectacles were not merely diversions. They formed part of the visual expression of kingship, intended to impress spectators and demonstrate the wealth and magnificence of the ruler.

The growing popularity of fireworks also encouraged specialised craftsmanship. Their manufacture required practical familiarity with combustible materials, their preparation and the techniques necessary to produce different effects. Such knowledge was often transmitted through apprenticeship and experience, sometimes within families and occupational communities. Fireworks thus became part of the expanding artisanal economy of Indian towns.

The association of fireworks with Diwali is particularly interesting in this context. The festival itself, with its emphasis upon lamps and illumination, is much older than the discovery of gunpowder. Firecrackers and other pyrotechnic devices were later additions. It would therefore be historically inaccurate to assume that fireworks had always formed part of Diwali celebrations.

Gode’s research helps trace this gradual development. He drew attention to descriptions in later Marathi historical literature, including the Peshwayanchi Bakhar, which refers to elaborate Diwali celebrations at Kota involving large numbers of lamps and displays of fireworks. By the eighteenth century, pyrotechnic entertainment had become an established feature of Diwali celebrations in at least some royal and urban settings.

This development illustrates how an existing religious festival could absorb new forms of entertainment without losing its older significance. Fireworks did not create Diwali, nor did they determine its religious meaning. They added a new dimension of spectacle to celebrations already associated with light, prosperity and rejoicing. A technology whose earliest known origins lay in Chinese alchemy had, through centuries of transmission and adaptation, become part of Indian festive culture.

The later history of military rockets provides another striking example of indigenous innovation. During the eighteenth century, Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore employed iron-cased rockets with considerable effectiveness against British forces. Their construction represented an important technological improvement, since the iron casing enabled greater pressure to develop during combustion. The British subsequently studied captured Mysorean rockets, and these contributed to the development of the Congreve rocket in the early nineteenth century.

This episode reminds us that technological knowledge did not always travel in one direction. India was not merely a recipient of techniques developed elsewhere. Indian military specialists could modify existing technologies and produce innovations that subsequently influenced developments in Europe.

The combined researches of P. K. Gode, Iqtidar Alam Khan and Irfan Habib help us appreciate the complexity of this history. Khan’s work establishes the importance of the Mongol and Islamic worlds in the transmission of gunpowder and clarifies the chronology of its military applications. Gode demonstrates how pyrotechnic knowledge gradually entered Sanskrit technical literature, Marathi poetry, royal ceremonies, weddings and religious festivals. Habib’s work places these developments within the broader history of technological change in medieval India and reminds us that different routes of transmission, including maritime connections with China, must also be considered.

The contribution of Muslims to the introduction and development of pyrotechny in India was therefore substantial, but it was neither exclusive nor confined to warfare. The Delhi Sultanate provided an early setting for the employment of pyrotechnic devices, while Muslim military specialists and artisans helped transmit and adapt technical knowledge acquired through wider Asian contacts. The courts of the Sultans and Mughals provided patronage that encouraged the manufacture and use of gunpowder weapons and fireworks.

At the same time, the evidence from Vijayanagara, Odisha, Gujarat and Maharashtra demonstrates that the technology was adopted and developed by different communities. Once introduced, it crossed religious and political boundaries, acquiring new applications in courtly entertainment, weddings and festivals. The craftsmen who manufactured fireworks belonged to a world in which practical knowledge could circulate independently of the religious identities of rulers and patrons.

The history of pyrotechny thus offers a useful corrective to attempts to explain technological developments through narrowly religious or national narratives. The Chinese discovery of gunpowder provided the essential foundation. Mongol and Islamic networks facilitated its transmission across Asia, while Indian rulers, military specialists and artisans contributed to its subsequent development. The technology was repeatedly adapted to different circumstances, acquiring meanings that its earliest inventors could scarcely have imagined.

What began as experiments with combustible substances in China eventually reached the courts and battlefields of medieval India and became a familiar element of the country’s festive culture. The history of pyrotechny is therefore not simply a story of invention or technological diffusion. It illustrates the wider process through which societies exchange knowledge, adapt techniques and incorporate new practices into their own traditions. In that sense, the role of Muslims in its transmission to India forms an important chapter in a much larger history of cultural interaction and shared technological achievement.

Select Bibliography

Primary Sources

Abu’l Fazl, Ā’īn-i Akbarī, Persian text and English translation by H. Blochmann and H. S. Jarrett.

Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi, Maṭlaʿ al-Saʿdayn wa-Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn, Persian text, various editions.

Amir Khusrau, poems composed during the reign of Jalaluddin Firuz Khalji.

Babur, Bāburnāma, translated by Annette Susannah Beveridge, London, 1922.

Barbosa, Duarte, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, translated by Mansel Longworth Dames, London: Hakluyt Society, 1918–1921.

Shams-i Siraj Afif, Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, Persian text, various editions.

Secondary Works

Gode, P. K., The History of Fireworks in India between A.D. 1400 and 1900. Bangalore: Indian Institute of Culture, 1953.

Gode, P. K., Studies in Indian Cultural History, vol. II. Poona: Professor P. K. Gode Collected Works Publication Committee, 1960. Particularly relevant are his essays on the use of guns and gunpowder, the manufacture of firearms and the history of fireworks in India.

Habib, Irfan, Medieval Indian Technology. Aligarh: Aligarh Historians Society, 2008.

Khan, Iqtidar Alam, ‘Origin and Development of Gunpowder Technology in India: A.D. 1250–1500’. Indian Historical Review, vol. 4 (1977–78).

Khan, Iqtidar Alam, ‘The Coming of Gunpowder to the Islamic World and North India: Spotlight on the Role of the Mongols’. Journal of Asian History, vol. 30 (1996).

Khan, Iqtidar Alam, Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Needham, Joseph, et al., Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Partington, J. R., A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1960.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The celebration of Diwāli under the Mughal emperors offers a revealing glimpse into the cultural history of medieval India. Although the Mughals were Muslims, their court remained closely connected to the religious and social traditions of the people they ruled. Hindu festivals, particularly Holi, Diwali, Basant and Raksha Bandhan, became familiar features of the imperial cultural environment. Their observance reflected the interaction between the ruling elite and wider society, though the degree of imperial participation varied from one reign to another.

Diwali, with its associations of light, prosperity and renewal, occupied a distinctive position among these festivals. Its celebration was not confined to religious rituals. It was also an important social and commercial occasion, particularly among merchants, bankers and other urban communities. At the Mughal court, the festival became associated with illuminations, festive gatherings and, in later periods, fireworks. Its history therefore reveals how a festival rooted in Hindu religious tradition became part of the broader cultural life of Mughal India.

The reign of Akbar (1556–1605) marked an important stage in the accommodation of Indian festivals within imperial culture. His policy of ṣulḥ-i kul, or universal peace, encouraged an atmosphere in which the customs of different religious communities could receive recognition at court. Abu’l Fazl, in the Ā’īn-i Akbarī and Akbarnāma, describes Akbar’s interest in Indian religious practices, auspicious occasions and the symbolism of light. His reverence for the sun and fire as manifestations of divine illumination is particularly significant in understanding the cultural environment in which festivals associated with light could acquire an imperial presence.

Harbans Mukhia, in The Mughals of India (2004), has emphasised the importance of cultural accommodation in the development of Mughal kingship. Akbar’s willingness to engage with the traditions of his subjects was closely connected with his conception of sovereignty. The recognition of festivals such as Diwali formed part of this larger process, although the precise arrangements for its celebration during Akbar’s reign are not described in sufficient detail to reconstruct the festivities with certainty.

Under Jahangir (1605–1627), Diwali continued to be recognised at the imperial court. His memoirs, the Jahāngīrnāma, contain references to the festival and its association with the commercial communities of India. Jahangir was familiar with the practice of merchants settling accounts and commencing new financial transactions on this auspicious occasion. He also referred to the custom of gambling during Diwali, which was regarded by some participants as a means of inviting good fortune.

These observations are important because they demonstrate that Diwali was not merely a religious celebration. It was also closely connected with the commercial calendar of Mughal India. In cities such as Agra, Lahore, Ahmedabad, Surat and Delhi, merchants and bankers marked the occasion by opening new account books, worshipping Lakshmi and seeking prosperity for the coming year. Irfan Habib’s studies of the Mughal economy and Shireen Moosvi’s work on its commercial and financial structure provide a useful background to understanding the importance of these communities. The festival’s association with commercial renewal helped ensure its continued observance irrespective of changes in imperial policy.

During the reign of Shah Jahan (1628–1658), Diwali became associated with the elaborate culture of illuminations and festivities that characterised the Mughal court. The palaces and courtyards of the imperial establishment provided impressive settings for ceremonial displays. Lamps, candles and fireworks were already familiar features of Mughal celebrations, and Diwali offered a particularly appropriate occasion for such illuminations.

The construction of Shahjahanabad and the Red Fort created a magnificent architectural setting for royal festivities. Later accounts associate Diwali with the lighting of palace buildings and public spaces, although it is necessary to distinguish these recollections from contemporary evidence specifically relating to Shah Jahan’s reign. Ebba Koch, in Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology (2001), has demonstrated the importance of architecture and ceremonial display in the representation of Mughal sovereignty. Her observations help explain the significance of the illuminated palace as a setting for imperial celebration, even though her work does not specifically document Diwali festivities.

The Mughal imperial household also played an important part in the ceremonial life of the court. Ruby Lal, in Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (2005), has shown that the domestic establishment of the Mughal dynasty was closely connected with its political and cultural activities. Her work too offers a useful perspective from which to consider the participation of women and other members of the imperial household in courtly celebrations. The presence of women holding sparklers and participating in festive gatherings in Mughal paintings suggests the importance of such occasions within elite domestic culture. These images, however, cannot invariably be identified as depictions of Diwali, since fireworks were also used during other celebrations.

Under Aurangzeb (1658–1707), the official attitude towards certain public festivities became more restrictive. Contemporary evidence refers to limitations imposed upon illuminations in particular places, including an order concerning Diwali lighting in the bazaars of Ahmedabad in 1665. Such measures indicate that imperial policy could affect the public celebration of the festival. They do not, however, establish that Diwali was prohibited throughout the empire. Hindu merchants, nobles, officials and ordinary subjects continued to observe their religious and social customs. The distinction between restrictions imposed in particular circumstances and a general prohibition is important in assessing the history of the festival during Aurangzeb’s reign.

Diwali appears prominently in accounts of the later Mughal court, particularly during the eighteenth century. Under Muhammad Shah (1719–1748), a ruler remembered for his patronage of music, painting and festive culture, illuminations and fireworks became important features of courtly entertainment. The festival is associated in later traditions with Jashn-i Chirāghān, or the celebration of lights.

The Red Fort at Shahjahanabad became particularly associated with these festivities. Descriptions of Diwali celebrations speak of rows of lamps illuminating the palaces and courtyards, while fireworks added to the spectacle. One of the more striking features mentioned in later accounts was the ākāsh dīyā, an elevated lamp placed upon a tall pole so that its light could be seen from a distance. The precise arrangements and dimensions described in popular recollections require verification, but the tradition itself reflects the importance attached to illumination in the festive culture of Mughal Delhi.

The organisation of fireworks also involved specialised craftsmen. The Mughal court possessed considerable expertise in pyrotechnics, and the mīr-i ātish, associated primarily with the imperial artillery establishment, belonged to the administrative world in which knowledge of gunpowder and related technologies was maintained. Fireworks were used on several ceremonial occasions, and their association with Diwali formed part of a wider tradition of spectacular courtly displays.

The paintings produced during the later Mughal period provide further glimpses of this festive atmosphere. Scenes showing women with sparklers, illuminated courtyards and gatherings accompanied by fireworks suggest the popularity of such entertainments. These visual representations are particularly valuable when read alongside written accounts, although their identification with particular festivals must be made cautiously.

The tradition of Diwali celebrations continued into the nineteenth century, when the political authority of the Mughal emperors had been greatly diminished. During the reign of Bahadur Shah Zafar (1837–1857), the Red Fort remained an important centre of Delhi’s ceremonial and cultural life. Diwali was celebrated throughout Shahjahanabad, particularly in its bazaars and residential neighbourhoods, while the imperial household continued to be associated with the festive traditions of the city.

Stephen P. Blake’s Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739 (1991) provides a useful understanding of the relationship between the Mughal court and the urban society surrounding it. The festivities of the palace were closely connected with the commercial and social life of the city. Diwali was therefore not simply a celebration confined to the emperor and his nobles. It was equally a festival of merchants, shopkeepers, artisans and ordinary households.

What is particularly striking about the history of Diwali under the Mughals is the continuity of its celebration despite changes in the religious outlook and political priorities of successive emperors. Akbar’s accommodation of Indian religious traditions, Jahangir’s familiarity with the commercial customs associated with the festival, the culture of illumination under Shah Jahan and the later Mughals, and the continuation of celebrations in nineteenth-century Delhi all reveal different aspects of this history.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that every Mughal emperor celebrated Diwali with equal enthusiasm or that the festival enjoyed uninterrupted imperial patronage. The evidence does not support such a generalisation. Yet it is equally difficult to sustain the notion that Hindu religious festivals remained entirely outside the cultural world of the Mughal court.

The history of Diwali under the Mughals reminds us that religious identity and cultural participation were not necessarily mutually exclusive. A Muslim emperor could acknowledge or participate in a Hindu festival without abandoning his own religious beliefs. Similarly, the celebration of Diwali by Hindu merchants, officials and nobles formed part of the everyday social and economic life of an empire in which communities were connected through numerous relationships.

The festival thus offers an important example of the cultural interactions that characterised Mughal India. Its lamps illuminated not only temples and private homes, but also, at different moments, the palaces and public spaces associated with the imperial establishment. The history of Diwali under the Mughals is therefore not merely a story of emperors celebrating a Hindu festival. It is also a reminder of the shared cultural practices that developed in India over centuries, without necessarily erasing the distinct religious identities of those who participated in them.

Select References

Abu’l Fazl, The Ain-i Akbari, translated by H. Blochmann and H. S. Jarrett, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1873–1894).

Jahangir, The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, translated and edited by Wheeler M. Thackston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Mukhia, Harbans, The Mughals of India (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

Lal, Ruby, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Blake, Stephen P., Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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, Studies and Documents on Maratha History, Royal Period (Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar & Sons, 1940

Sarkar, Jadunath, History of Aurangzib: Based on Original Sources, 5 vols (Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar & Sons, 1912–19

Sarkar, Jadunath, The Mughal Administration: Six Lectures (Patna: Patna University, Superintendent, Government Printing, Bihar and Orissa, 19

Chatterjee, Anjali, 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