UCLA

In the seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire in South Asia witnessed a remarkable political experiment of imperial centralization taken to its apogee, similar to global early modern trends elsewhere such as French Absolutism or Habsburg rule. The dissertation examines the Great Timurid emperor, Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s (r. 1658–1707) peripatetic statecraft and reconstructs how Hanafi legal canonization and juridical attitudes forged imperial governance and its everyday operations. While contemporary scholarship focuses on cosmopolitan mobility and exchange during the “first globalization” to the neglect of early modern state formations, this study turns our attention towards legal systems of land-based empires that remained resilient well into the eighteenth century. It illustrates how Mughal centralization was molded by layered interactions with local elites, gradations in property regimes, and flexible bureaucracies across the Indian subcontinent. It covers Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west to Kashmir in the north, large swathes of the Indo-Gangetic plains to the east and central India to the Deccan in the empire’s southern fringes.

I analyze the configuration of Mughal sovereignty around the Hanafi “law of the land,” showing how the imperial canonization, Al-fatawa al-ʿalamkiriyya (“The Institutions of the World Conqueror”) formed the pivot for reforming the empire’s legal architecture. From a transregional perspective, the study articulates the Central Asian heritage of the Mughals and compares their shared legal affiliation with the Ottomans. Weaving an intellectual history around the effects of canonization, this study evaluates different registers in which Hanafi law proliferated. Starting from the compilation of the fatawa by a team of imperial jurists under Shaikh Nizam’s supervision in 1660s, the dissertation moves to its everyday application across the empire. It demonstrates that a critical appraisal of the place of law in Mughal India must proceed from canon to practice, that is, the translation of the Muslim learned scholars’ legal opinions into daily habits in society. It draws on an extensive corpus of hitherto unexamined materials ranging from jurisprudential treatises to volumes of correspondence and sundry documentary genres in Arabic, Persian, and several regional languages. This study shows that Mughal legal culture remained highly resilient during the empire’s collapse and continued to provide templates for transitory post-Mughal polities and the British East India Company rule in the fragmented world of the eighteenth century.

This study intervenes in two longstanding controversies in South Asian historiography—first, the nature of precolonial land tenures and second, the mechanisms through which precolonial states shaped the political economy. I establish the absence of allodial property in agrarian tracts; instead, the Mughal State nominally owned all land like the Ottoman miri in West Asia and Northern Africa. Explaining the practice of leasing state lands to agrarian communities for a contractual rent, I unearth the Hanafi juridico-economic principles behind Mughal revenue settlements. This reinterpretation opens new perspectives to provide reasons for India’s agrarian crises generated by tectonic shifts towards freeholding under colonial rule.

Next, in a predominantly agrarian economy, the study reveals how unprecedented suburban expansion took place through imperial privileges given to elite military officers, who incentivized artisan migration from rural to peri-urban settlements. During this expansion, judicial courts became key sites for offering legal intermediation and adjudication for ensuring the claims of lower-rung subjects. I show how the Mughal system of legal brokerage molded the legal subjectivity of the empire’s inhabitants belonging to diverse ethnic and caste communities. The diffusion of Hanafi law in the subcontinent’s ecological landscape, at the intersection of regional dynamics and the imperial order, secured autonomy and entitlements to local communities overseen by middling officials. The dissertation thus uncovers multiple notions of liability as well as forms of financial intermediation and representation that proliferated among trading groups, rural chieftains, and soldiers. Centralized state management was set within a normative Hanafi understanding of political economy, which enabled macroeconomic interventions through monetary policy and public credit by the late seventeenth century.

This dissertation thus challenges the prevalent historiographical orthodoxy that reduces Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s rule to an umbrella term called “Muslim orthodoxy.” Based on contemporary reified notions of the shariʿa and an instrumental view of the emperor’s decisions, it is often argued that he radically altered Mughal public culture. Instead, I excavate two tendencies that demarcate the logic of Mughal relations to their subjects during his long reign. First, non-Muslim castes and communities—the “protected communities” of the Muslim State—were treated as autonomous in personal affairs while being legally equal in public life. This dichotomy, the study argues produced a legal normativism of a distinct treatment where “Hindus” were ironically less controlled by the State than “Muslims” in their social life. Second, contractual procedures mirrored degrees of standardization across the empire with regular bureaucratic reforms responsive to ground-level realities. Through instructions from above and intelligence reports from below, the imperial court produced, accessed, and transmitted information to state agents; thereby it was never distant from local concerns. Questioning colonial and postcolonial narratives of custom, this dissertation demonstrates that written Hanafi juridical doctrine—whose living historical memory is an embodied vernacular knowledge to this day in “Indian” mentalit�—shaped South Asia’s public legal system well until the mid-nineteenth century when English Common law eclipsed it under British colonial rule.

Tracing the genealogy of Hanafi ideas in Mughal public culture, “Mirrors and Masks of Sovereignty” charts the contours of a new-style imperial governance perfected during the empire’s middle phase (1630s–1720s)—a break from conventions of its earlier iterations under Akbar and Jahangir—that created one of the strongest dirigiste states in the early modern world. This dissertation rejects both king-centered paradigms that overemphasize the emperor, Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s personality and notions of fluid precolonial legal pluralisms that fail to situate law in a functional mode of social regulation and economic control within Mughal society layered with hierarchical stratifications of entrenched inequities. Rather, by examining gradations of proprietary rights and how they functioned through the state legal infrastructure, it reinterprets Mughal sovereignty as a juridical and financial relation of the governing elite to the governed. Examining Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s theological-legal authority as much as his strategic acumen geared towards a holistic appreciation of state affairs, the dissertation conceptualizes the institutional mechanisms that went into wielding the greatest concentration of public power the Indian subcontinent witnessed in its precolonial past. In conclusion, I argue that it is high time to move beyond reductive caricatures of the emperor’s image—modern inventions that have little to do with Mughal subjects’ quotidian experiences. Instead, I propose an analytical framework for rethinking afresh the dynamic interplay between power, law, and political economy at the height of Mughal rule.