Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
The Aligarh School of History stands as one of the most significant and influential historiographical traditions to emerge from modern India. Rooted in the intellectual soil of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College and later Aligarh Muslim University, this school fundamentally reshaped how scholars understand medieval Indian history. Its practitioners, spanning several generations, moved the discipline away from chronicle based narratives of kings and battles towards a rigorous, source critical, and socially grounded analysis of structures, classes, and economic processes. At the heart of this tradition lies an unwavering commitment to primary sources, especially the vast and rich corpus of Persian chronicles, administrative manuals, and documentary records. To appreciate the school’s achievement, one must understand its origins, its methodological evolution, its key practitioners across multiple subfields, its engagement with archaeology and art history, and its enduring legacy.
The Origins and Foundational Commitment to Primary Sources
The origins of the Aligarh School lie in the late nineteenth century responses to colonial historiography. British historians, from James Mill to William Erskine, had painted Muslim rulers as fanatical despots who destroyed temples and oppressed Hindus as a matter of religious doctrine. This narrative served the colonial project by justifying British rule as a liberation of India from Muslim tyranny. In response, scholars associated with Aligarh did not simply produce a counter narrative of Muslim benevolence. Instead, they adopted the colonial empirical toolkit but turned it inside out. They accepted the importance of facts, coins, inscriptions, and revenue records, but used this positivism to dismantle colonial conclusions. The British diagnosis of medieval India was correct in its data but false in its causality.
What distinguished the Aligarh School from the very beginning was its insistence on returning to primary sources. Where earlier historians had relied on translated excerpts or secondary summaries, the Aligarh scholars demanded direct engagement with Persian manuscripts, farmans, inscriptions, and coins. This commitment was not merely technical. It was political. To read a Persian chronicle in its original language was to bypass the colonial translator who had already framed the text for British consumption. It was to recover a voice that had been mediated, distorted, and often silenced. The school produced generations of scholars fluent in Persian, trained in palaeography, and comfortable navigating the manuscript libraries of India, Pakistan, Iran, and the United Kingdom.
Mohammad Habib and the Marxian Turn
One of the first towering figure of the school was Mohammad Habib, who taught at Aligarh from the 1920s through the 1960s. Habib was the first Indian medievalist to systematically apply a materialist framework to the study of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal India. Writing when Indian historiography was still dominated by either colonial narratives of Muslim tyranny or nationalist hagiography, Habib broke new ground by asking not what rulers said they did, but what economic interests drove their actions.
His seminal work, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, first published in 1927 and revised in 1951, exemplifies this approach. Rather than debating whether Mahmud was a fanatic or a hero, Habib analysed the Ghaznavid raids as rational responses to geopolitical and fiscal pressures. The Somnath temple, he argued, was not merely a religious target but a massive banking house controlling western Indian trade routes. Its destruction served to break a rival commercial military confederacy. Habib supported this controversial thesis using numismatic evidence, trade records, and a close reading of the Muslim polymath al Biruni’s ethnographic observations. More provocatively, he used coinage to show that Mahmud’s deference to the Abbasid Caliph was purely formal, not ideological. He also reclaimed Mahmud’s patronage of al Biruni and the poet Firdawsi to argue that the Ghaznavid court was a site of rationalist inquiry, not religious bigotry.
Beyond this specific argument, Mohammad Habib developed a broader hypothesis of urban and rural revolutions in medieval India. He proposed that the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate triggered an urban revolution, meaning the rapid growth of towns, monetisation of the economy, and emergence of a cash nexus that loosened the grip of caste based occupational restrictions. This was followed by a rural revolution, where the power of intermediary chiefs and zamindars was curtailed, and the peasant was brought into more direct relationship with the state. However, as his son and later colleague Irfan Habib noted, this formulation required qualification. The liberation of peasants from caste prejudices was matched by large scale enslavement of rural populations to supply urban labour. Nor did the curtailment of intermediaries necessarily improve peasant conditions. The great peasant revolt of the Doab during Muhammad Tughluq’s reign suggested otherwise.
Crucially, Mohammad Habib deployed Marxian categories not as dogma but as heuristic tools. He rejected the rigid application of the Asiatic Mode of Production to India, arguing instead that the Sultanate represented a unique formation, centralised, cash based, with a ruling class whose composition was determined by sovereign will rather than hereditary landed control. This was neither European feudalism nor oriental despotism, but something requiring its own analytical vocabulary. His introduction of class as an analytical category, his insistence on economic causality, and his refusal to accept religious explanations at face value became the foundational commitments of the school.
The Structural Turn: From Kings to Classes
If Mohammad Habib introduced the Marxian framework, it was Irfan Habib who transformed it into a rigorous, empirical research programme. His The Agrarian System of Mughal India, published in 1963, remains the magnum opus of the Aligarh School. The historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, no uncritical admirer of the school, called its publication one of those rare occasions that fundamentally reshaped a field.
Irfan Habib’s central methodological innovation was to shift attention from the court to the countryside. Where previous historians had focused on dynastic politics, administrative manuals, and court chronicles, Habib turned to revenue records, price data, royal orders, and land measurement statistics. His question was simple but revolutionary. Who produced the surplus? Who extracted it? How was it distributed?
The answer dismantled several prevailing myths. Against the colonial image of unchanging village republics, Habib demonstrated that the Mughal peasantry was deeply stratified. At the top were village headmen and richer peasants who often acted as local exploiters. At the bottom were landless labourers, primarily from untouchable castes, constituting one sixth to one fifth of the rural population. These people, he wrote, were prevented from holding land or setting themselves up as cultivating peasants, and they lived at the brink of starvation all the time.
Against the nationalist image of benevolent Mughal rule, Habib showed that the land revenue was regressive, falling more heavily on poorer peasants than on richer ones. The state’s primary purpose was not merely as the protective arm of the exploiting classes, but was itself the principal instrument of exploitation. Peasants were not free proprietors but near serfs, bound to the land, unable to legally abandon cultivation, and often forced into flight by impossible revenue arrears.
Against Marx’s own Asiatic Mode of Production, which posited a stagnant, undifferentiated village society, Habib’s evidence revealed dynamic commercialisation, class formation, and class struggle. He identified multiple forms of peasant resistance, including flight, tax refusal, and armed rebellion. The great Doab revolt under Muhammad Tughluq was not an anomaly but a symptom of systemic contradiction.
Satish Chandra extended this class analytic approach to political history. His Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707 to 1740, published in 1959, argued that the Mughal Empire’s decline was not caused by Aurangzeb’s bigotry, a colonial and communal trope, but by structural economic crisis. He identified the jagirdari crisis, where the number of nobles grew faster than revenue yielding lands. The resulting factional warfare among Iranis, Turanis, and Hindustanis cut across religious lines. Hindu Rajputs allied with Muslim nobles based on material interest, not faith. This replaced moral decline narratives with a secular, class analytic model. His later textbooks synthesised Aligarh methods and trained generations of students to see composite culture, or Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb, as politically produced, not accidental.
M. Athar Ali brought prosopography, the collective biography of groups, to bear on the nobility question. In The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb, published in 1966, he constructed biographies of over fifteen hundred Mughal nobles. He proved that the percentage of Hindu nobles under Aurangzeb was nearly identical to that under Akbar, demolishing the thesis of a Hindu purge under the so called bigot emperor. He also showed that the jizya tax reimposed in 1679 was applied erratically, often waived, and coincided with military campaigns in the Deccan, suggesting fiscal rather than theological motives. His most original contribution was the argument that the Mughal nobility functioned as a class with common material interests in land and rank that overrode religious identity. The empire collapsed because this class became internally predatory, not because Hindus or Muslims betrayed it.
Shireen Moosvi pushed the quantitative turn further. Using the Ain i Akbari’s detailed price and wage data, she reconstructed Mughal per capita income, GDP, and standards of living in The Economy of the Mughal Empire, published in 1987. Her findings were startling. Mughal India in 1600 had real wages comparable to Elizabethan England. Peasant consumption baskets included not just grain but sugar, cloth, and spices, contradicting images of stagnant misery. She also demonstrated that tax extraction averaged twenty to thirty percent of produce, similar to contemporary Europe, not the predatory levels suggested by oriental despotism theories. Her most debated thesis was that the seventeenth century economy was proto capitalist in its commercial networks and bullion flows, but that this potential was blocked by the jagirdari system, not by religion.
The Contribution of Nurul Hasan
No account of the Aligarh School would be complete without recognising the profound contributions of S. Nurul Hasan, a historian who trained at Aligarh and later served as India’s Minister of Education but whose scholarly work remains central to the school’s legacy.
Nurul Hasan’s doctoral research, conducted under the supervision of Mohammad Habib, focused on the jagirdari system under the later Mughals. His thesis, later published in expanded form as Thoughts on Agrarian Relations in Mughal India, made several groundbreaking arguments. He was among the first historians to systematically analyse the difference between khalisa land, which was under direct state control, and jagir land, which was assigned to nobles in lieu of salary. He demonstrated that the proportion of khalisa land shrank dramatically during the seventeenth century, weakening the state’s direct fiscal base and making it increasingly dependent on jagirdars whose loyalty was always conditional.
More significantly, Nurul Hasan developed a typology of zamindari rights that moved far beyond the simplistic colonial understanding of zamindars as mere revenue collectors. He distinguished between zamindars who held ancestral rights to land, ta’alluqadars who held temporary revenue assignments, and chaudhris who functioned as village headmen. Each category had different relationships to the peasantry and to the state. This nuanced taxonomy allowed Aligarh historians to move away from the binary of state and peasant and to recognise the complex intermediary strata that shaped agrarian relations.
Nurul Hasan also pioneered the study of the Risala, a genre of administrative manuals written by Mughal officials. His analysis of works like the Chahar Gulshan and the Khulasat al Tawarikh revealed how Mughal bureaucrats themselves understood the problems of jagir administration, revenue arrears, and noble factionalism. By treating these texts as sources for bureaucratic consciousness rather than as transparent records of fact, he added a layer of intellectual history to the school’s predominantly social and economic focus.
His influence on the school extended beyond his own writings. As a teacher at Aligarh before entering politics, he mentored a generation of students who would carry forward the school’s methods. And his later career in government, though it removed him from active research, ensured that Aligarh style historical thinking had a voice in policy circles, particularly in matters of land reform and educational policy.
Writing People’s History: Peasants, Artisans, Technology, and the Middle Classes
The logical culmination of the structural turn was the writing of history from below. If classes and processes mattered, then the people who constituted those classes, peasants, artisans, merchants, and professionals, could no longer remain invisible.
Iqtidar Alam Khan pioneered the study of military technology as a window into social history. His work on gunpowder and firearms challenged the gunpowder empire thesis by demonstrating that Indian sultanates adopted firearms based on political need, not cultural openness or religious prohibition. More significantly, he showed that technology transfer was not a one way street from Europe to Asia but involved complex negotiations. Hindu gunners served in Muslim armies. Portuguese mercenaries served in Mughal service. His method was to use military technology history as neutral ground to prove that religious labels were irrelevant to state function.
Ahsan Jan Qaisar extended this technological focus to the study of everyday material life. His The Indian Response to European Technology, 1498 to 1700, published in 1982, argued that the Mughal state was technologically curious, not conservative as colonial historiography had claimed. Using letter writing manuals and official news reports, he showed that Aurangzeb’s court actively studied Portuguese naval designs. Mughal artisans selectively adopted European shipbuilding, mining, and clockmaking while rejecting what was inferior or culturally irrelevant. This was a rational, not passive, response. He also wrote a monograph on Building technology under the Mughals. I followed it up by exploring the organisation of building construction under the Mughals. I also wrote on the development of paper technology during the Mughal period.
Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui turned to textual criticism to recover subaltern voices. By cross reading Persian court chronicles against Sufi discourses and saint biographies, he reconstructed a picture of everyday Hindu Muslim coexistence. He found shared markets, temple repairs, and joint commercial ventures, a lived reality that elite chronicles ignored. His most provocative claim was that Sultan Muhammad Tughluq’s supposedly mad policies, like token currency and capital transfer, were rational experiments that failed due to logistics, not ideology.
Ishrat Alam carried forward the work of Irfan Habib on the field of technological innovations and focused on the history of craft production from the bottom up. Habib had contributed a number of incisive papers on the history of technology, ranging from military technology to textile technologies. Alam’s doctoral work on textile craft and trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as his later research on textile tools as depicted in Ajanta and Mughal paintings, reconstructed the actual techniques of weaving, dyeing, and silk manufacture. By analysing Persian glossaries and miniatures showing pit looms, treadles, and spinning wheels, he brought the artisan into view, not as an abstraction but as a worker with specific skills, tools, and social conditions. All these works demonstrated that Mughal India had sophisticated textile technologies, including draw looms spread from China via royal workshops, and that artisans were not passive recipients of state orders but active agents in technological transfer.
Khaliq Ahmad Nizami balanced the school’s materialist emphasis by recovering the role of Sufi ethics in shaping social relations. Using Sufi discourses and letters, he argued that Sufi saints like Nizamuddin Auliya did not merely preach harmony but actively criticised rulers for injustice, not for religious identity. The Sufi hospice was a space where peasants, artisans, and merchants interacted with spiritual authorities outside the court’s control. This added a moral ethical dimension to the school’s rationalist materialist core.
Zahiruddin Malik made important contributions to the study of the late Mughal period, a phase often dismissed as mere decline. His The Reign of Muhammad Shah, 1719 to 1748, published in 1977, used neglected sources like the Ahkam i Alamgiri and Ibratnama to argue that cultural and economic life flourished under Muhammad Shah, with remarkable achievements in poetry, painting, and music, despite political fragmentation. His thesis was that political decline and cultural efflorescence can coexist, and that equating state power with civilisational health is a colonial error.
A significant gap in Aligarh historiography, despite its class focus, was the systematic study of the urban middle classes. Marxist historiography had naturally concentrated on the two antagonistic classes, the ruling class of nobility and zamindars, and the exploited direct producers of peasants and artisans. But what of the groups in between? The petty bureaucrats, lawyers, physicians, teachers, master artisans, and merchants who were neither noble nor labourer.
The French traveller Francis Bernier, writing in the seventeenth century, famously claimed that there was no middle state in India. This statement was accepted by the British economic historian W.H. Moreland and many subsequent scholars. The mid twentieth century scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith challenged this, arguing that the Mughal Empire’s prosperity and monetisation necessarily created a substantial middle class. But systematic empirical work was lacking.
My own research, after Iqtidar Alam Khan, culminating in a doctoral dissertation on urban middle classes in Mughal India and subsequent publications, attempted to fill this gap. I defined the middle class operationally as a class between the two antagonistic classes, neither nobility nor peasant or artisan, drawing livelihood from the sale of skills or services rather than direct control over land or primary production.
My work examined several professional groups. There were bureaucrats and administrators below the mansabdar level, revenue officials, clerks, and record keepers who formed a nascent service class recruited based on skill rather than birth. There were legal professionals, judges and lawyers who practised civil law. Moreland had denied the existence of lawyers in Mughal India, but Persian documents from Gujarat and other regions revealed a functioning legal profession with practitioners who argued cases, drafted contracts, and advised clients. There were medical professionals, physicians and surgeons. I documented the existence of medical colleges, institutions imparting formal medical education, as well as systems of recruitment, salaries, and private practice. There were architects and engineers, the builders of Mughal cities, forts, and gardens. Although Mughal sources frustratingly rarely name individual architects, I reconstructed their social position through building inscriptions, wage records, and the physical evidence of structures themselves. There were artists and calligraphers, painters in the imperial atelier and private workshops of nobles, along with the paper makers, scribes, and apprentices who supported them. Miniature paintings themselves became sources, revealing not only artistic techniques but the self representation of professional groups through their clothing, housing, and tools.
This work also analysed the material culture of these middle classes, the types of housing they occupied as revealed through miniatures and archaeological evidence, the symbols and signatures they used revealing self perception and group identity, and their depiction in contemporary visual sources. The conclusion challenged Bernier’s dismissal. Mughal India did possess a substantial urban middle class, not identical to the European bourgeoisie but functionally analogous. This was a class of professionals and skilled workers whose existence was predicated on monetisation, urbanisation, and the cash nexus, and who possessed a degree of autonomy from both the nobility and direct producers.
The Visual Turn: S.P. Verma and Mughal Paintings
One of the most innovative developments within the Aligarh School was the systematic use of Mughal paintings as historical sources. This was pioneered by S.P. Verma, whose work Art and Material Culture in the Paintings of Akbar’s Court and subsequent publications transformed how historians understand Mughal visual culture.
Verma argued that Mughal miniature paintings were not merely illustrations accompanying chronicles. They were, in themselves, rich repositories of historical evidence. A painting of a court scene, properly analysed, could reveal details about clothing, jewellery, furniture, architecture, weapons, and even social hierarchies that no text described. He developed a rigorous methodology for reading paintings against texts, comparing the visual record with the written record to identify discrepancies, exaggerations, and silences.
His most striking finding concerned the representation of non elite groups. In the paintings of Akbar’s court, Verma noticed that servants, guards, and minor officials were depicted with consistent attention to their dress and deportment, even when the chronicles that accompanied the paintings said nothing about them. This suggested that the painters, working from direct observation, were recording social reality that the court chroniclers chose to omit. The paintings thus provided a kind of visual subaltern history, showing us how power was performed and reproduced at the everyday level.
Verma also used paintings to trace technological change. The appearance of European guns, clocks, and globes in Mughal paintings, often before these objects were described in texts, showed that the Mughal court was acquiring and displaying European technology earlier and more enthusiastically than the chronicles admitted. Similarly, changes in architectural style, the introduction of the curved Bengali roof or the Persian arched doorway, could be traced through paintings more precisely than through standing buildings, many of which had been altered over the centuries.
His work influenced a generation of art historians who recognised that Mughal paintings were not just aesthetic objects but historical documents. The Aligarh School, through Verma, extended its source critical approach to visual evidence, insisting that images too could be interrogated for class, power, and material life.
Epigraphy and Documentary Sources: Pushpa Prasad and Lekhapadhiti
The Aligarh School’s commitment to primary sources extended naturally to epigraphy, the study of inscriptions. Pushpa Prasad made foundational contributions in this area, particularly through her work on Lekhapadhiti, a collection of Sanskrit and Prakrit documentary formulas from medieval India.
Prasad argued that inscriptions on temple walls, copper plates, and stone pillars provided evidence for local society that Persian chronicles, focused on the court, entirely missed. A temple inscription recording a land grant revealed not only who gave the grant and to whom, but also the administrative terminology in use at the local level, the weights and measures, the categories of land, and the witnesses to the transaction. These details, when collected systematically, could reconstruct the texture of everyday life in a way that no court chronicle could match.
Her work demonstrated that the Mughal Empire did not impose a uniform Persianate administrative system everywhere. In Rajasthan, in the Deccan, and in South India, local documentary practices continued alongside Mughal institutions. The coexistence of Persian farmans and Sanskrit copper plates showed a state that was pragmatic, willing to work through local elites and local languages rather than displacing them. This finding complicated the Aligarh School’s earlier emphasis on centralised state power and pointed toward the negotiated, layered character of Mughal governance.
Prasad also trained a generation of epigraphists who continued the work of collecting, editing, and interpreting inscriptions from across the subcontinent. Without her work, the rich documentary record of medieval India, written in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and regional languages, would remain largely inaccessible to historians.
Urban History and Port Towns: The Work of M.P. Singh
Urban history, particularly the study of port towns, received significant attention from M.P. Singh. His research on the maritime cities of Mughal India, including Surat, Cambay, Daman, and Masulipatnam, filled a major gap in Aligarh historiography, which had tended to focus on inland agrarian relations.
Singh argued that port towns were not simply appendages to the agrarian economy but had their own dynamics. The merchants, brokers, shippers, and bankers of Surat, he showed, operated with a degree of autonomy from the Mughal state that would have been unthinkable for peasants or artisans. They maintained their own legal systems, their own credit networks, and even their own armed militias. The Mughal state, for all its power on land, could not simply command the port cities. It had to negotiate with them, offering tax concessions, trading privileges, and political favours in exchange for cooperation.
His study of Cambay, once a major port and then a silting, declining city, revealed the vulnerability of these urban centres to environmental change. The shifting course of rivers, the silting of harbours, and the arrival of European shipping all reshaped the fortunes of port towns in ways that no amount of imperial policy could control. Singh thus brought environmental history into the Aligarh framework, showing that material conditions included not just class relations but also geography and ecology.
Singh also used the records of European trading companies, the Dutch and English East India Companies, to supplement Persian sources. These company records, kept in meticulous detail, provided information on shipping volumes, commodity prices, and commercial credit that Persian chronicles, uninterested in such matters, never recorded. By reading European and Persian sources together, Singh was able to reconstruct the rhythms of maritime trade with unprecedented precision.
His work inspired later studies of other port cities, including Hughli, Chittagong, and Cochin, and established the study of maritime history as a respected subfield within the Aligarh tradition.
Medieval Archaeology and the Aligarh School
One of the most important but often overlooked dimensions of the Aligarh School is its contribution to the development of medieval archaeology in India. Traditionally, Indian archaeology had focused overwhelmingly on ancient civilisations, the Indus Valley, the Mauryas, the Guptas, with the medieval period left to textual historians. The Aligarh historians recognised that archaeology could provide evidence that texts alone could not, particularly for the lives of ordinary people, for technology, and for the material fabric of towns and villages. Iqtidar Alam Khan’s explorations along the Mughal highway from Amritsar to Allahabad, and his explorations of the Indigo vats at Bayana, coupled with my work on Fathpur Sikri, and a rural site, Kuldhara, in Jaisalmer established Aligarh as a prominent centre for Medieval Archaeology. RC Gaur’s excavations at Fathpur Sikri was a prominent contribution to this field. My Fathpur Sikri Revisited went on to demonstrate that the written sources were not enough, the past could be best reconstructed if along with them one uses material and archaeological evidence as well.
Irfan Habib was instrumental in promoting this turn. He argued that the uncritical acceptance of textual sources, even Persian chronicles, needed to be balanced by material evidence. Coins, pottery, architectural remains, and even the layout of medieval settlements could reveal patterns of trade, craft production, and urbanisation that chroniclers either ignored or misrepresented. His Atlas of the Mughal Empire, published in 1982, was not merely a cartographic exercise but a work of historical geography that integrated archaeological survey data with textual sources. The maps he produced, based on field surveys and site visits, remain the foundation for any serious study of Mughal urban and rural settlement.
Iqtidar Alam Khan’s encouragement to his students to use architectural evidence to understand noble factionalism. He pointed out that the distribution of noble built mosques, caravanserais, and gardens across the subcontinent correlated closely with the regional power bases of different noble factions. A Turani noble built in the north, an Irani noble in the west, a Hindustani noble in the central Deccan. The stones and bricks of Mughal architecture, he argued, were not silent. They spoke of political geography. His book Researches in Medieval Archaeology contains much of his work on the field.
Shireen Moosvi incorporated archaeological data into her economic history. She, and later myself, worked with excavation reports from medieval towns like Fatehpur Sikri, Champaner, and Vijayanagara to estimate house sizes, storage capacities, and consumption patterns. The physical remains of markets, warehouses, and residential quarters provided evidence of commercial activity that supplemented the price data in the Ain i Akbari. Moosvi also pioneered the use of numismatic finds, the distribution of hoards, to map the circulation of money across the Mughal Empire. A dense cluster of coin hoards indicated high monetisation and trade; a sparse cluster indicated barter economies or political instability. Manvendra Kumar Pundhir extensively surveyed medieval monuments of Agra, Meerut and certain places in Rajasthan and contributed to the knowledge of the material remains of the Medieval centuries in India.
The Department of History at Aligarh, under the influence of scholars like Nurul Hasan, RC Gaur and Iqtidar Alam Khan, established a small but active archaeological laboratory. Students were trained in basic field survey techniques, pottery classification, and numismatic analysis. Several doctoral dissertations produced during this period combined textual and archaeological methods. One studied the medieval town of Sasaram through its surviving buildings and inscriptions. Another mapped the fortifications of the Deccan sultanates using both Persian chronicles and on the ground survey. A third analysed the ceramic sequences of medieval Gujarat to trace patterns of trade with the Persian Gulf. Perhaps Aligarh emerged as the only institution where since the last three decades Medieval Archaeology was introduced as a course at post graduate level.
This engagement with archaeology gave the Aligarh School a distinctive empirical edge. While the Cambridge and subaltern historians debated theory and discourse, Aligarh scholars continued to insist that history ultimately rests on evidence, and evidence includes not just what chroniclers wrote but what people left behind in the earth. The school at one time developed a full fledged archaeological wing, complete with a Chemical laboratory, like the Archaeological Survey of India, but its practitioners howsoever remained historians who used archaeology rather than professional archaeologists. But the turn was real and productive. It ensured that Aligarh history remained grounded in the material, not just the textual, world.
Another field promoted at Aligarh was the field of Cartography. Nurul Hasan established a Cartographic Lab which was promoted by Irfan Habib. With the help of Zahoor Ali Khan, as the Cartographer, and Faiz Habib as the assistant, a large number of maps were produced which found place in a number of publications throughout the world. Irfan Habib compiled two very important atlases on Indian history, the first, an Atlas of Medieval India, followed by an Atlas of Ancient India.
Works on Regional History
The Aligarh School is too rich and diverse to be captured by even a long list of names. Several other scholars deserve mention for their contributions to specific subfields.
Syed Jabir Raza went deep into sources of the Ghaznavid period in Punjab and wrote on this early period of Medieval History of India. His re-interpretation of Iqta, the use of elephants in warfare etc opened new vistas of study.
Mohibbul Hasan, though better known for his work on the history of Kashmir and the Mughal Empire, also contributed to the Aligarh tradition through his meticulous editing of Persian texts. His edition of the Tarikh i Kashmir provided scholars with a reliable text of a crucial source for the history of the Himalayan region. Satya Prakash Gupta opened new vistas in Agrarian System of Eastern Rajasthan and he along with his students delved deep in Rajasthani archival sources. His students like Muhammad Parvez and Sumbul Halim Khan are still carrying forward the field initiated by him and contributing to the field of Regional History. Muhammad Parvez also wrote and explored the history of Assam and the Northeast. Jamal Muhammad Siddiqui wrote in the history of District Aligarh and carried out extensive surveys of not only archaeological and architectural remains, but also inscriptions of the region. His book was a micro study of District Aligarh and a pioneering work in the field.
Other Notable Scholars
The pioneering work of Rafat Zahra Bilgrami on Religious and Quasi-Religious Departments of the Mughal Period (1556–1707, set the tone for legal studies to follow. This work went on to show that the religious and quasi-religious administrative apparatus of the Mughal Empire underwent significant shifts under different rulers, balancing the interests of a large non-Muslim populace with the Islamic principles of the state. Some others like Aziza Hasan and Najaf Haider worked on the coinage of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, producing meticulous catalogues that remain the standard reference works. They demonstrated that changes in coinage, including metal content, weight standards, and iconography, correlated closely with fiscal crises and political instability. Their numismatic evidence often contradicted the chronicles, showing, for example, that periods described as prosperous by court historians were in fact marked by currency debasement and inflation.
Afzal Husain studied the administrative functioning of the Mughal Empire, producing in-depth study of Irani, Turani and Indian Shaikhzada nobles of Jahangir’s reign. His and M Athar Ali’s work made the technical language of Mughal bureaucracy accessible to non specialists and revealed the conceptual categories through which Mughal officials understood their world. Terms like zat, sawar, jagir, and khalisa were not merely technical but embodied a particular way of thinking about rank, obligation, and territory.
S.M. Azizuddin Husain worked on the history of education in medieval India, using the Malfuzat literature to reconstruct the curriculum of madrasas and the social background of students. He showed that medieval Indian education was more widespread and more socially diverse than previously believed, with students from artisan and trading families attending schools alongside the sons of nobles.
S. Liyaqat Hussain Moini contributed to the study of Sufi orders in the Medieval period, using Persian hagiographies to trace the spread of the Chishti and Qadiri orders into the southern peninsula. His work revealed that the Deccan had its own distinct Sufi traditions, shaped by local conditions and not merely derivative of north Indian models.
Ruquia Kazim Husain contributed to the undertaking of Armenian merchants and their trade activities. Abha Singh’s contribution to agrarian history, the Jats and the medieval canals, apart from her excellent contributions to the preparations of the IGNOU textbooks on Medieval Indian history have been much appreciated.
Recently Shadab Bano, Lubna Irfan and some others have started work on Gender and masculinity. Enayatullah, following the works of Irfan Habib, has been writing on environmental history. Moosvi too had contributed papers on climate and environmental issues like earthquakes.
The Persian Sources and Documentary Base
What united all these scholars, across subfields and generations, was their commitment to primary sources, and above all to Persian sources. The Aligarh School trained its students to read Persian manuscripts in the original, to understand the conventions of Persian historiography, and to recognise the biases and limitations of each text.
The most important Persian sources included the great court chronicles, such as Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama, Badauni’s Muntakhab al Tawarikh, and Shah Jahan’s official history, the Padshahnama of Abdul Hamid Lahori. These texts provided the narrative backbone of Mughal political history, but Aligarh historians read them critically, comparing them against each other and against non chronicle sources.
Equally important were the administrative manuals and revenue documents. The Ain i Akbari, part of the Akbarnama, was a statistical gazetteer of the Mughal Empire, containing detailed information on provinces, districts, revenues, and prices. The Chahar Gulshan, the Khulasat al Tawarikh, and other manuals provided additional data. The farmans, royal orders preserved in archives and published in collections, revealed the state in action, granting land, issuing instructions, and resolving disputes.
The Malfuzat, discourses of Sufi saints, and the Maktubat, letters of Sufi masters, provided access to religious and social life outside the court. The Waqai and Akhbarat, news reports and official newsletters, recorded events day by day, offering a granular view of politics and society that the grand chronicles smoothed over.
Beyond Persian, Aligarh scholars also worked with sources in Arabic, particularly for the early Sultanate period, and in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and regional languages for local history. Pushpa Prasad’s work on Lekhapadhiti and other documentary collections showed that a full history of medieval India required mastery of multiple linguistic traditions. The school’s emphasis on Persian never became exclusive. It remained a portal to other sources.
Critiques and Internal Debates
The Aligarh School’s emphasis on centralised, structural analysis did not go unchallenged. From the late 1970s onward, a new generation of historians raised significant critiques. Some of these critics came from outside the Aligarh tradition entirely. Others, more interestingly, were themselves products of the school who later moved away from its core assumptions. This internal critique carried particular weight precisely because it came from scholars who had mastered the Aligarh method before questioning its limits.
C.A. Bayly, trained at Cambridge and Oxford, in his book Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars published in 1983, argued that Aligarh historians had overemphasised the state’s power and underemphasised the agency of local actors. Merchants, bankers, and intermediate groups, he showed, shaped the economy from below, not merely in response to state extraction. Bayly was an outsider to the school, but his respectful engagement with its work gave his critique force.
More significant was the case of Muzaffar Alam. Alam completed his M.Phil. and Ph.D. at Aligarh Muslim University. His doctoral work bore all the marks of the Aligarh method, rigorous source criticism, quantitative analysis, and a materialist framework. Yet as his career progressed, first at Jawaharlal Nehru University and later at the University of Chicago, Alam began to question the school’s emphasis on centralised state power and structural determinism.
Together with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who was trained at the University of Delhi and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and thus came from a different intellectual lineage, Alam argued for a processual understanding of the Mughal state. In a series of influential essays and edited volumes, they proposed that rather than a centralised road roller imposing its will from above, the Mughal Empire was more like a spider’s web, strong in some places, weak in others, constantly negotiated and renegotiated through alliances, gift exchanges, matrimonial ties, and local accommodations. The state did not simply command obedience, it had to produce it through everyday interactions with regional powers, zamindars, and local chieftains. This perspective, sometimes called the New Cambridge History approach, did not reject the Aligarh School’s findings so much as complicate them. Alam and Subrahmanyam accepted the importance of class and economic structure but insisted that these structures were always mediated by local politics, cultural practices, and contingent historical processes.
Farhat Hasan, another scholar who engaged deeply with the Aligarh tradition being a direct product of it, pushed this critique further in his book State and Locality in Mughal India. He argued that the Mughal state did not simply command obedience from below but had to manufacture it by embedding itself within local networks of power. Using documents from the port cities of Surat and Cambay, he showed that even subordinate groups like women, artisans, and petty merchants could use the ambiguities of Islamic law to defend their interests. Resistance, in other words, was not always outside the system in the form of peasant rebellions or noble conspiracies. It could also take the form of ritualised participation within the system, using the state’s own legal and administrative procedures to push back against exploitation.
These critiques enriched rather than demolished the Aligarh tradition. The school’s focus on class and structure remained indispensable. What was added was a sensitivity to negotiation, process, and locality, the recognition that the Mughal state was not a static machine but a dynamic, contested field. And significantly, the most effective critiques came not from hostile outsiders but from scholars like Muzaffar Alam who had internalised the Aligarh method, mastered its sources, respected its achievements, and then gently pushed beyond its limits. This is the mark of a mature historiographical tradition. It produces not just followers but thoughtful dissenters who carry its questions forward even as they offer new answers.
The Enduring Legacy
The Aligarh School transformed medieval Indian history from a discipline of chronicles and dynasties into a social science. Its key contributions can be summarised in several points.
Methodologically, the school insisted that every historical claim be grounded in source criticism, coins, inscriptions, revenue records, price data, paintings, archaeological evidence, not merely textual assertion. The Aligarh historian was trained to be sceptical of chronicles, to cross check one source against another, and to privilege documents produced for administration over those produced for courtly praise. The school produced more critical editions of Persian texts, more translations, and more source based studies than any other Indian historical tradition.
Analytically, the school demonstrated that religious identity is rarely the primary cause of historical events, and that material interests, class relations, and structural contradictions are more powerful explanatory tools. This was not a dogmatic secularism but an empirical finding. Again and again, when Aligarh historians looked closely at the evidence, they found that Hindus and Muslims cooperated or conflicted based on class position, fiscal interest, or political calculation, not on the basis of their faith alone.
Empirically, the school created a vast body of quantitative data on prices, wages, land revenue, noble composition, technology, settlement patterns, coin hoards, and painting conventions that remains the foundation for all subsequent scholarship. The Agrarian System, the Atlas, the prosopographical studies of the nobility, the work on urban middle classes, the studies of port towns, the epigraphical collections, the numismatic catalogues, these are not just arguments but repositories of evidence that any future historian must engage with.
Normatively, the school embodied an implicit commitment to secularism and social justice. By showing that Muslim rule was not uniformly oppressive and that exploitation was class based rather than communal, Aligarh historians provided intellectual ammunition against both colonial and Hindu nationalist narratives. They also, by focusing on peasants, artisans, labourers, and the urban middle classes, aligned their scholarship with the concerns of the dispossessed. This was not accidental. Many of the school’s leading figures came from backgrounds that were neither elite nor privileged. Their history writing was an act of solidarity with those who left few records of their own.
The school’s limitations are also real. There is a tendency toward state centrism, even in its agrarian history, the state remains the primary actor. There is a relative neglect of gender and cultural history. The questions of how women experienced Mughal rule, how religious identities were performed and negotiated in daily life, how art and literature shaped political consciousness, these received less attention than they deserved, despite the important work of S.P. Verma on paintings and Khaliq Ahmad Nizami on Sufi literature. And in its early phases, there was an under theorisation of why the Mughal state, despite its rational fiscal apparatus, ultimately failed to generate capitalist transformation. Irfan Habib himself addressed this last question in his later essays, identifying the jagirdari system and the absence of secure property rights as structural barriers, but a full explanation remains elusive.
Nevertheless, these limitations do not diminish the achievement. The Aligarh School, more than any other historiographic tradition in modern India, taught us to ask of any historical event a simple, rigorous, and relentlessly democratic question. Who benefited materially? That question remains its most valuable gift to the study of the past.
The school’s practitioners, from Mohammad Habib and Nurul Hasan in the founding generation, to Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra, M. Athar Ali, Mohibbul Hasan and Khaliq Ahmad Nizami in the second, to Shireen Moosvi, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Ahsan Jan Qaisar, Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, S.P. Verma, Pushpa Prasad, M.P. Singh, Zafarul Islam, Afzal Husain, S.M. Azizuddin Husain, S. Liyaqat Hussaini,, Zahiruddin Malik, and others in the third, and to the present generation including my own work on the urban middle classes, S Jabir Raza on the political and administrative history of the Ghaznavid period, and Ishrat Alam on Technology, have shown that history writing is not a neutral recording of events but a political act. The names and works enumerated here are not complete and there is much more which is not being mentioned here. All of them have shown that the most powerful political act a historian can perform is to tell the truth about exploitation, class, and the material foundations of human life. This is why the Aligarh School matters, not only for students of medieval India but for anyone who believes that understanding the past is essential to building a more just future. The school has produced not just scholarship but a way of seeing the world, one that is sceptical of power, attentive to suffering, and committed to evidence. That is a legacy worth defending.
The Present
Yet it must be said, with regret rather than satisfaction, that the Aligarh School today is in severe decline. The intellectual energy that once flowed through the Department of History, producing generation after generation of rigorous, source critical, and socially engaged scholarship, has largely dissipated. Where once a student could find dozens of colleagues engaged in Persian paleography, numismatic analysis, or the quantitative study of agrarian systems, today one finds few. The institutional infrastructure that supported this work, the libraries, the manuscript collections, the archaeological laboratory, the doctoral fellowships, has withered under decades of neglect, underfunding, and shifting priorities within Indian higher education. More importantly, the intellectual culture itself has frayed. Few young scholars today choose to specialise in medieval Indian history with the same commitment to primary sources and materialist analysis that defined the school’s golden age. Those who do often find themselves isolated, without mentors, without peer review networks, and without the institutional backing that their predecessors enjoyed. The great names of the school are no longer being replaced. Mohammad Habib, Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra, M. Athar Ali, Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Nurul Hasan, Shireen Moosvi, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Ahsan Jan Qaisar, Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, S.P. Verma, Pushpa Prasad, Afzal Husain, Mohibbul Hasan, Zahiruddin Malik. These are names from the past. The present generation produces hardly any works that can stand beside theirs. The reasons are many, the rise of new fashionable theories from the West that dismiss materialist history as outdated, the pressure to publish quickly and superficially, the collapse of Persian language training in Indian universities, and a broader cultural retreat from the secular, rationalist, and socially committed values that animated the Aligarh project. One can only hope that this decline is a phase and not an ending. Historiographical traditions have a way of surprising us. They lie dormant, and then, in changed conditions, they revive. But for now, the observer of Indian historiography must record a painful truth. The Aligarh School, which once stood as a beacon of rigorous, democratic, and evidence based history, has fallen quiet. Its libraries grow dusty. Its methods are untaught. Its questions go unasked. And the history of medieval India is poorer for it.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 