Urban Histories of Rajasthan: Religion, Politics and Society (1550–1800)

By Elizabeth M. Thelen

An exploration of religious conflicts in premodern urban India.
 
Diverse peoples intermingled in the streets and markets of premodern Indian cities. This book considers how these diverse residents lived together and negotiated their differences. Which differences mattered, when and to whom? How did state actions and policies affect urban society and the lives of various communities? How and why did conflict occur in urban spaces? Through these questions, this book explores the histories of urban communities in the three cities of Ajmer, Nagaur, and Pushkar in Rajasthan, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The focus of this study is on everyday life, contextualizing religious practices and conflicts by considering patterns of patronage and broader conflict patterns within society. The book examines various archival documents, from family and institutional records to state registers, and uses these documents to demonstrate the complex and sometimes contradictory ways religion intersected with politics, economics, and society. The author shows how many patronage patterns and processes persisted in altered forms, and how the robustness of these structures contributed to the resilience of urban spaces and society in precolonial Rajasthan.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gingko
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781909942677

Book preview

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Published in the Studies in the History and Culture of the Persianate World of The British Institute of Persian Studies.

Series Editor:

Professor A.C.S. Peacock

Editorial Board:

Professor Charles Melville, Professor Houchang Chehabi, and Dr Paul Losensky

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Urban Histories of Rajasthan

Religion, Politics and Society (1550–1800)

Elizabeth M. Thelen

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First published in 2022 by

Gingko

4 Molasses Row

London SW11 3UX

Copyright © 2022 Elizabeth M. Thelen

Elizabeth M. Thelen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Note on Transliteration and Dates

Introduction

1. Mughal Endowments in Ajmer and Pushkar, 1560s–1700

2. New Rulers and New Patrons in the Eighteenth Century

3. Nagaur’s Pirzadas and the Art of Securing Patronage, 1560–1800

4. Conflict and the Limits of Shared Space

5. Property, Community and Neighbourhood Segregation

Conclusion

Appendix: Documents from Personal Libraries

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book was made possible by the support and advice of many friends, mentors and colleagues. It is a pleasure to recognise their contributions here.

Munis Faruqui taught me how to be a historian of Mughal and eighteenth-century South Asia. Alongside Munis, Jonathan Sheehan, Abhishek Kaicker and Lawrence Cohen read and commented on countless drafts of the present monograph and helped me clarify my ideas. Farhat Hasan and Sangeeta Sharma provided excellent guidance in India during my research years. I am grateful also for the mentorship and suggestions offered by Nandini Chatterjee, Prachi Deshpande, Purnima Dhavan, and the late Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph. Kailash Rani ‘Kanchan’ Chaudhary, Divya Cherian, the late Nandita Prasad Sahai and Ramya Sreenivasan shared with me their knowledge of the collections in the Rajasthan State Archives and their insights regarding Rajasthan’s history. B.L. Bhadani, Monika Boehm-Tettelbach, Surendra Bothara, Varsha Joshi, Priyanka Khanna and Dilbagh Singh also provided advice and assistance.

I am thankful for the research support of the staff at the archives and libraries I visited in India. Dr Mahendra Khadgawat, Director of the Rajasthan State Archives in Bikaner, provided access to the archival collections which formed the core of my research and I am grateful to all the staff of that institution and at the branch offices in Jodhpur and Ajmer for their assistance. Vikram Singh Bhati and Mahendra Singh Tanwar assisted me with research at the Maharaja Mansingh Research Centre at Mehrangarh in Jodhpur. Navratan Chopra of the Abhai Jain Granth Bhandar in Bikaner helped me track down rare publications. The staff of the following institutes also provided invaluable aid: the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute; the Arabic and Persian Research Institute in Tonk; the Shree Natnagar Shodh Samsthan in Sitamau; the National Archives of India; the Iran Culture House; the Andhra Pradesh State Archives (now the Telangana State Archives); and the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad.

My research on the religious institutions in Ajmer, Pushkar and Nagaur was able to proceed only through the help of the persons who provided access to the institutions and personal libraries. Syed Liyaqat Hussain Moini introduced me to the dargah of Muʿin al-Din Chishti in Ajmer, facilitated my visits to the shrine, generously shared research advice, and supported my visit to Aligarh Muslim University. The Diwan of the Ajmer shrine allowed me to consult his library of published materials on the shrine. In Pushkar, Pawan Bhardwaj, Roopchand Parashar, Thakur Prasad and Janardan Sharma among others shared information and materials related to my research. In Nagaur, I am especially grateful to the sajjada-nishin of the Sultan al-Tarikin shrine, Peer Sufi ʿAbdul Baqi Chishti Farooqi, to Pirzada Ghulam Sarwar Chishti Sulaimani Faruqi and to the sajjada-nishin of the Bare Pir Sahib Dargah, Sayed Sadaqat ʿAli Jilani, who all generously allowed me to consult their private collections of documents and provided copies and images of the documents.

Heidi Pauwels first introduced me to Rajasthani and has continued to read texts with me over the years. The late Poonamchand Joiya-ji taught me to decipher the script of the Rajasthani materials held at the Rajasthan State Archives. Prem Singh and Dalpat Singh Rajpurohit tutored me in Marwari and aided me with my research in Jodhpur. Fateme Montazeri, James Pickett and Stanislaw Jaskowski advised me on countless Persian palaeography questions.

Many people opened their homes to me during my travels in India and offered me friendship that buoyed me throughout my research period. In Pushkar, Pankaj and Kiki gave me support and facilitated much of my research, and, in Bikaner, Kanchan and her family opened their home and hearts to me. I also thank Ajay and Alicia, Awadesh, Elisabeth, Habib and his family, Ishrat and her family, Jagat and his family, Michael, Muhammad Yunis and his family, Pragya and Rajat, Rama, the Rajawat family, Mia Stallone, Mary Storm and the Dhussa family and the girls at Feel Home Girl’s Hostel.

Kris Anderson, Hannah Archambault, Kashi Gomez, Zoe Griffith, Megan Hewitt and Julia Leikin joined me for countless writing sessions and discussions of this work. Kimberly Kolor and Sophia Van Zyle Warshall read earlier drafts. I learned much from Anurag Advani, David Boyk, Nicole Ferreira, Sourav Ghosh, Cristin McKnight-Sethi, Shaivya Mishra, Brent Otto, Mariam Sabri and Dominic Vendell.

The research for this book was funded by the Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Fellowship, a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Dissertation Fellowship, and a Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). AIIS also supported me for a year of intensive Urdu and Persian instruction in Lucknow and the staff of the AIIS programme centres in Lucknow and Jaipur assisted me in numerous ways and taught me much. The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation provided funding to complete the writing of the Ph.D. dissertation that preceded this book, and I am grateful to the British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS) for supporting the development of that work into this book.

The anonymous review comments helped me see this work with fresh eyes, and I appreciate the assistance of Andrew Peacock, BIPS Persian Studies series editor, and my editor at Gingko for helping me navigate the publication process.

In the pages that follow, there is a lot of discussion of family and community. Family and friends across the US, UK and around the world have inspired me, welcomed me into their homes, supported me through difficult times and cheered my successes. I am grateful for their support. My deepest thanks goes to my parents and my sisters.

Note on Transliteration and Dates

Working with both Persian and Rajasthani sources means transliterating names and technical terms from both languages. I have opted to forgo diacritical marks in both languages, other than (ʿ) for ‘ain’ in Persian words, in order to avoid ambiguity between conflicting diacritical systems. If there are common variants of terms or names used in source materials, I provide those in parentheses at the first mention.

Persian terms follow the IJMES transliteration system while excluding diacritical marks. Rajasthani and Hindi terms follow the transliteration system used by R.S. McGregor in The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, except for the unvoiced palatals ‘c’ and ‘ch’, which I render as ‘ch’ and ‘chh’ respectively, to better guide the pronunciation for non-Hindi or Rajasthani speakers and disambiguate the Hindi and Rajasthani aspirated consonant from the Persian ‘ch’. For the same reason, any occurrences of the sibilants ‘ś’ and ‘ṣ’ in Hindi or Sanskrit terms appear in the book as ‘sh’. These two sibilants do not occur in Rajasthani.

Proper nouns present further challenges. For well-known persons, I follow the common conventions of recent scholarship. For instance, I use Shinde, not Sindhia nor Scindia, to refer to the Maratha family ruling from Gwalior. However, for the personal names of people who were not major historical figures, I follow the orthography of the source text in my transliteration, which presumably reflects the pronunciation of the time and place. I have standardised the spellings of titles and caste names as needed to reflect typical contemporary usage and allow the reader to cross-reference related scholarship more easily. I have italicised titles not used commonly in English and occupational castes, but not gotra (sub-caste) names.

For place names, I follow the conventions of current maps. This is particularly important for the city of Nagaur in Rajasthan in order to distinguish it from Nagore in Tamil Nadu; both cities happen to be home to prominent Sufi shrines dedicated to two saints both of whom are called Hamid al-Din. The only exception is my use of Amber, not Amer, for the Kachhwaha Rajputs’ kingdom, which reflects the most common spelling in extant scholarship but not the spelling on most current maps.

In the main body of the text, I use dates according to the Gregorian calendar. In the footnotes, I provide the dates according to the Islamic and Vikram Samvat calendars as they are given in the documents referenced and conversions where possible.

Introduction

The diverse nature of the population of South Asian cities has long been documented. From the thirteenth century onwards, descriptions in literature of Indian cities have included a wide array of peoples found in the streets and markets. Such diversity has been variously conceptualised, by ethnicity, language, religion and occupation, evoking a sense of wealth and abundance in the city and signifying its connection to regional and global networks of trade and production.¹ But it also raises questions on how the residents lived together and negotiated their differences: which differences mattered, when and to whom? How did state actions and policies affect urban society and the lives of various communities? How and why did conflict occur in urban spaces? In considering these questions, this book explores the histories of urban communities and conflict between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, with respect to religion, caste and political economy in three cities in Rajasthan: Ajmer, Nagaur and Pushkar.

Although medieval and early modern portrayals of South Asian cities have a capacious definition for diversity, studies of social conflict in the Mughal Empire tend to focus on religion. This is in part in response to the existing religious violence and communal clashes in India in recent decades, from the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 to right-wing Hindu attacks on Muslim neighbourhoods in Delhi in February 2020. Still, for more than two decades, some scholars have resisted nationalist and populist histories that reify the categories of Hinduism and Islam and the identities of Hindus and Muslims, and which project the conflicts of the present onto the past. These studies have shown the localised and contingent nature of religious identities by emphasising the multiplicity of practices, the importance of intra-religious debates and differences, and the vernacularisation of religion.² In analysing interreligious interactions, and especially conflict, these historians argue that conflict is mostly driven by political or economic causes, or by ethnic identities.³ While such works have significantly expanded our understanding of social identities and led to more nuanced readings of conflict that question the rhetoric of sources, they also can minimise the significance of religion and religious rhetoric in early modern society. As Shankar Nair observes, this approach at times becomes an overcorrection that underemphasises the religious context of Hindu–Muslim encounters.⁴ Indeed, such approaches deny the full history of conflict negotiation in medieval and early modern South Asia. Shahid Amin argues that ‘the focus on syncretism sans conflict amounts to taking only half a step… because our concentration on intercommunal goodwill and harmony, though necessary, leaves the field of sectarian strife as the special preserve of sectarian and communal historians’.⁵ He therefore calls for more non-sectarian histories of conflict. It is in this spirit that in this work I discuss how people interacted across social differences, including but not limited to religion, in Rajasthan’s urban spaces.

Though this is now the scholarly consensus, it bears repeating that to speak of Hindus, Muslims, or the practitioners of any other religion is not to speak of a unified, monolithic group, nor singular unchanging identity, but rather to consider the histories of particular individuals or groups in a given place or time and how they related to religion. Instead of taking religious identities – and more importantly, their significance for community identity and action – as fixed or given, this book aims to show when and how such identities might become relevant or powerful, in contrast with other axes of social identity and politics. For this purpose, I focus on everyday life instead of doctrine, and contextualise religious practices and conflicts in two main ways. First, I draw comparisons between religious institutions, practices and the actions of people – both commoners and royals – across and within different religious traditions. Second, I contextual-ise moments of religious conflict and communal tensions by investigating urban social conflict more broadly, and examining how inter- and intra-religious conflict interacted with patterns of community conflict that referenced corporate identities like caste, ethnicity and occupation.

The cities at the heart of this study, Ajmer and Nagaur, are located in the arid and semi-arid tracts lying to the west of Delhi and were home to kingdoms ruled by regional kings known as Rajputs since at least the tenth century. In the 1570s, after the Mughal Emperor Akbar subdued most of the regional Rajput kings and princes through a combination of military might, treaties and alliances, he combined the lands of local powers into a single provincial administrative and revenue unit called Subah Ajmer. One of twelve main subahs (provinces) of the Mughal Empire, the region was overseen by a subahdar (governor) based in the city of Ajmer, but the Rajputs retained claim to areas within the province recognised as their traditional homelands (watan jagir). Most Rajput kings served as nobles in the Mughal court. From the sixteenth century onwards, the kings of Amber (Amer, Jaipur), Marwar (Jodhpur) and Mewar (Udaipur) were the most prominent and powerful Rajput leaders. In the nineteenth century, the British designated an area almost identical to the territory of Subah Ajmer as an administrative unit known as the Rajputana Agency. Both of these political formations, Subah Ajmer and the Rajputana Agency, map almost perfectly onto the territory of the modern Indian state of Rajasthan. I have opted to use the name Rajasthan throughout to refer to this region because of its dominant usage in related scholarship and the geographical coherence of these political boundaries over the past 450 years.⁶

Both Ajmer and Nagaur were longstanding urban centres, sites of medieval forts and possibly much older cities.⁷ Located on the edge of the Thar Desert, Nagaur was a regional military and political base, the one-time capital of a sultanate and, from the seventeenth century, the base of the junior lineage of the Rathor Rajput maharajas of Jodhpur. The city was home to administrators in charge of taxation and security in the surrounding agricultural areas, merchants who traded goods regionally and along routes stretching to Delhi and Multan, and artisans who were particularly renowned for ironwork, cloth-printing and woollen blanket weaving. Nagaur was also an important religious centre from at least the twelfth century onwards, housing Jain temples and a large manuscript library, several Sufi shrines and lodges established in the thirteenth century, and numerous Hindu temples visited by local devotees. Nestled in the Aravalli Mountains in the centre of Rajasthan, Ajmer shared many of Nagaur’s characteristics. It too was a political, mercantile and religious centre; however, as the capital of the Mughal subah, Ajmer was more prominent in transregional contexts than Nagaur. Ajmer’s most famous Sufi shrine, that of the twelfth-century saint Muʿin al-Din Chishti, drew pilgrims and patrons from across the Indian subcontinent. In discussing Ajmer, it is pertinent to draw comparisons to the Hindu pilgrimage site of Pushkar, a small town on the shores of a lake about 14 kilometres west of Ajmer that was the site of a large gathering of pilgrims, traders and political figures every fall during the annual mela (fair). Given Pushkar’s proximity to Ajmer, the histories of these two locations are often interlinked.

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Map 1: Selected cities and modern political boundaries of Rajasthan

My exploration of the histories of urban society in the places featured in the following chapters offers multiple vantage points into considering how communities lived together. These plural histories are tied together through their shared focus on how urban society was affected by political economy and religious institutions. Just as important are the similarity in contexts, as these cities, while different in scale, shared such urban characteristics as trade hubs, political capitals and pilgrimage centres. That is to say, they were linked to each other economically, politically and religiously. Because of their interconnected nature, at times I suggest that trends and tendencies observed in one place may be applicable to the others, since the unevenness of the archive does not allow us to have knowledge of certain aspects of every city. In accounting for the nature of urban society in Ajmer and Nagaur, it is also crucial to consider how these cities were part of regional and transregional networks that tied them to historical developments and cultural exchanges far beyond city walls.

Persianate Rajasthan

In recent years, Marshall Hodgson’s concept of what constitutes ‘Persianate’ has received renewed scholarly interest. In Hodgson’s work, the Persianate consists of ‘cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration’.⁸ Hodgson introduced this term to describe literary and court culture in the context of the spread and influence of Persian as a high literary language in Western and Central Asia during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Part of his aim was to disrupt the tendency to identify the Islamicate exclusively or primarily with Arabic texts. While Hodgson’s definition begins with the use of Persian and the influence of Persian styles on elite literature in other – especially Turkic – languages, throughout the book, his use of the term expands both through repeated reference to the Persianate zone – the geographical area where Persian held sway as a primary or secondary language of elite culture – and through extending the application of Persianate to cultural products beyond literature, such as art.⁹

In the past decade, a wide range of scholars have taken up the term ‘Persianate’ and appended ‘world’ instead of ‘zone’ to it, perhaps in response to new trends in global and transnational history. These studies have attempted to define the Persianate world concretely, offering chronologies (early, middle/high, late), and testing and establishing geographical boundaries extending from the Balkans to Bengal, Xinjiang to Istanbul, and Malaysia to Baku.¹⁰ At the same time, the Persianate world has become a frame not only for studies of literature, but also for trade and travel, architecture and bureaucracy.¹¹ Such studies explore connected styles and vocabularies, often moving beyond the purely linguistic. In this sense, the Persianate world is a means towards understanding the scope and mechanism of cultural encounter and exchange; it frames a set of cultural influences that extend to the adoption and adaptation of Persian stylings in other languages that Middle Periods, Chicago 1975, 293.

The Persianate world is a productive concept in the way it suggests routes of cultural exchange and transmission of sets of shared concepts, helping to define in geographic and chronological terms broad trends shared across state structures and religion. It also provides tools for analysing zones of linguistic encounter as cultural borderlands – ones that can be patchy, uneven and best defined in terms of a spectrum of usage patterns – and offers a lens for comparing these borderlands. One such borderland of the Persianate world was Rajasthan, and I understand the events narrated in this work against the backdrop of the Persianate world.

Thus far, the history of Rajasthan has not been studied explicitly in terms of the Persianate, though much of the scholarship of early modern Rajasthan makes extensive use of Persian sources. The region’s ties to the Persianate world were robust, if spread unevenly throughout the region. These links were primarily formed in two manners: through intellectual and religious ties to a united world of Persian discourse established in the thirteenth century following the arrival of Sufis in the region; and through a broad expansion of the use of Persian and Persianate forms for matters of state through the region’s integration into the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, from a methodological perspective, the overlapping histories of the use of Persian and Rajasthani in the region in the medieval and early modern periods necessitates research across and between these two languages.

One pathway to the Persianate in Rajasthan was through Sufism. Thirteenth-century Rajasthan emerged as a centre of Chishti Sufism in the wake of the establishment of a prominent khanaqah (lodge) in Ajmer by Muʿin al-Din Chishti and the settlement of Sufis of other lineages, including the Qadiri and the Suhrawardi, in the region.¹² Although much Islamic scholarship was composed in Arabic, Sufi adepts and their followers began writing extensively in Persian from the tenth and eleventh centuries. These compositions formed specific literary genres including malfuzat, or collection of sayings from the saint, and tazkirahs, or biographical dictionaries, as well as poetry, treatises and letters concerning Sufi beliefs and practices. Writings attributed to Muʿin al-Din Chishti in Ajmer are of doubtful authorship; however, other Sufis in Rajasthan in the thirteenth century certainly composed extensively in Persian. Thus, from Nagaur, one finds the Surur al-Sudur, the posthumous malfuzat of Sufi Hamid al-Din Nagauri (d. 1278), and the Tawali al-Shumus, Risala-yi ʿIshqiya, Lawayih and Lawani of Qazi Hamid al-Din Nagauri (d. 1246).¹³ In addition to their own compilations, Sufi adepts and adherents often compiled vast libraries of Persian manuscripts that were taught, discussed and cited in their own works.¹⁴ Sufis also composed verses in vernaculars like Hindawi and Dakhani, and a number of Persianate Sufi romances composed in Hindawi gained popularity across north India in the fifteenth century.¹⁵ Persianate Sufi discourse influenced – and was in turn influenced by – Bhakti discourses in the medieval and early modern periods. While this was a trend across much of the subcontinent, it is worth noting that Rajasthan was both home to a number of important Sufi shrines and a prominent centre of Bhakti sects.¹⁶

Rajasthan also became part of the Persianate world through state administration. As Nile Green has recently argued, Persian was an influential language not only in literary and aesthetic spheres, but also in bureaucratic and functional matters, seeing as how widely it was adopted as a language of statecraft.¹⁷ In parts of Rajasthan, the use of Persian in governance began around the same time that Sufism was established. Some areas of Rajasthan, including Nagaur and Ajmer, were provincial capitals and important cities under the rulers of the Delhi sultanates in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, until Timur’s invasion in 1398–1399 weakened Delhi’s control over the provinces. From the early fifteenth century, Nagaur became the capital of a sultanate established by Shams Khan, with close political ties to the Gujarat Sultanate.¹⁸ Although records have not survived, administration in Nagaur and its environs in this period may have taken place in bilingual documents; this appears to have been the case under the Delhi-based Lodi and Sur Sultanates of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.¹⁹ Along with an administrative usage, Persian circulated as a language of courtly prestige and scholarship in the Delhi Sultanates as well as regional sultanates, including the Gujarat Sultanate. Shihab al-Din Nagauri, a fourteenth-century hakim (physician) and the author of two Persian treatises on tibb (Islamic medicine), and his forefathers had served in Nagaur’s bureaucracy since shortly after Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam’s conquests of the area in 1192–1193. At the end of his 1388 treatise, Shifa al-Maraz (Cure of Illness), Shihab al-Din recounts how he and his father turned away from administrative writing and accounting after embracing the teachings of a religious scholar. Shihab al-Din’s medical training, which included studying with a hakim from Kabul and with yogis, is suggestive of the types of intellectual circulation that existed in this corner of the Persianate world.²⁰ From the end of the twelfth century, Persian was also written into public spaces across Rajasthan through inscriptions on both sectarian and non-sectarian buildings and monuments that recorded the patronage of rulers and notables.²¹ Such inscriptions were often part of architectural projects that reflected transregional styles and cultural exchange, connecting these structures to the wider Persianate world.²²

After the middle of the sixteenth century, the use of Persian as the language of administration, diplomacy and statecraft became more widespread in Rajasthan through Mughal rule. Although the place of Persian in day-to-day administration was always uneven because of the complicated political structures of incorporation into the Mughal Empire, that often did not disrupt vernacular practices at the village level, it was widely adopted in elite households and across territories administered directly by the Mughals and those granted as tankhwah jagir (transferable revenue assignments). Persian was also the language used in imperial orders and reports sent to nobles and rulers in the region, and Rajput rulers who were part of the Mughal nobility participated in Persian chancellery practices, from using Persian seals to employing Persian scribes. In towns and cities, especially those that were most closely tied to Mughal rule, like Ajmer and Nagaur, Persian was used in low-level bureaucratic, transactional and legal documents, such as sale deeds. Just as incorporation with the Mughal court promoted the adoption of Persian for bureaucracy, as Mughal power reduced across Rajasthan in the eighteenth century, the use of Persian declined outside of ongoing diplomatic exchanges with the Mughals and, later, the East India Company. By the middle of the eighteenth century, most official state documents across the Rajasthan region were written in the various dialects of Rajasthani, though here too the adoption and adaptation of Persian administrative categories and document types is readily apparent in forms and loanwords.²³ Furthermore, although state officials generally no longer issued Persian documents, previous Persian records continued to have legal salience, and certain communities, such as the Sufi pirzadas in Nagaur and Ajmer, chose to use Persian for transactional documents well into the nineteenth century.²⁴

Methodologically, bringing a Persianate world perspective to the study of Rajasthan recognises the long history of the use of Persian in the region and the way this usage connected the region to a wider world of cultural exchange. Furthermore, by drawing on Hodgson’s definition of the Persianate that includes languages other than Persian that engage with the Persian tradition, such framing requires bringing archives of Persian and Rajasthani documents into conversation with each other.²⁵ Copious bodies of early modern records in both languages survive from the region, yet they are often studied in isolation. Part of this separation is structural: archives and libraries in Rajasthan categorise records and manuscripts along linguistic lines, sometimes going so far as to house Persian and Rajasthani materials in separate institutions entirely, in cities hundreds of kilometres apart.²⁶ Yet, as the nature of the family collections I investigated demonstrates,²⁷ both Persian and Rajasthani were often used within a single familial or institutional setting, depending on the nature of the task at hand and the position of the correspondent. Therefore, to understand the world and work of a particular family, community or institution, one must often undertake research in both Rajasthani and Persian language materials and understand how the forms and content of the records related to language politics. The frequency with which Persian records are referred to and Persian technical vocabulary remains in use in even the late eighteenth century – by which point, as mentioned previously, Persian was no longer a widely used administrative language in Rajasthan – suggests the importance of maintaining sight of Persian records in particular and the Persianate more generally in understanding the history of the region throughout the medieval and early modern periods.

By placing Rajasthan within the frame of the Persianate, I understand the cities and communities I discuss as enmeshed in larger political and cultural formations, including the Mughal Empire, which was itself interlinked with Iranian and Central Asian ideas of rule, as well as lineages and practices of Sufism that discursively connected South Asian Islam to sites in Central Asia and the Middle East.²⁸ These larger structures contributed to narratives of community and belonging, to sensibilities regarding justice and forms of rule, and to the material forms and technologies of record-keeping that shaped daily urban life. However, I also heed Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s cautioning words about connected histories that ‘not everything was connected and not all of the time’,²⁹ and recognise the uneven connection to the Persianate world within Rajasthan, varying by geography and social and political status. Furthermore, while the Persianate world encompassed shared forms of writing, of political thought and governance as well as high culture across a wide geography, these developed into regional variations as they came in contact with different vernacular forms. Thus, this work also examines contours of the specific aspects and valences of the Persianate in Rajasthan.

Urban society, political economy and religion

Centring cities and towns in the study of early modern South Asia offers an alternative vision to that of the twin spatial poles that have dominated Mughal historiography: the court and the agrarian society.³⁰ Cities and towns were inevitably connected to both the court and agriculture as homes to administrators, centres of justice and sites of regional markets. But they were much more than this too, as part of transregional trade networks, sites of artisanal production, and centres of pilgrimage. Studies of urban South Asia often deploy typologies based on these activities, examining cities primarily as political capitals, trade entrepots or pilgrimage centres.³¹ However, as Sandria Freitag has argued, focusing on any one of these characteristics exclusively tends to overlook other key aspects and orientations of cities. For instance, Banaras was not just oriented around the needs of pilgrims and the Hindu priests who tended to them, but was also home to the largest regional population, was an economic centre in the eastern Gangetic plains, and the site of cultural forms and expressions outside of pilgrimage.³² Likewise, the urban centres of Ajmer and Nagaur that are the