Faction, family & status culture: the high nobility of Mughal India

Thesis

This thesis aims to provide a social history and an ethnographic survey of the Mughal high nobility from the late 16th to the early 18th centuries. Its wider historiographical objective is to re-examine the conceptual framework hitherto used in studying the Mughal ruling stratum – generally designated a nobility – especially key concepts like “ethnicity” and “faction.” It does so through a tripartite approach. The study of family is the study of relationships and connections of kinship, affinity and patronage, as well as of lineage and descent as elements of identity. The study of faction seeks to unpack the meaning of this term in modern scholarship, to see what basis it possessed in the emic language of the sources, and which groups and networks did and did not fit the concept. The survey of status culture aims to discern the relationship between status and identity, and how status was articulated, performed, and defended in the courtly context. A core argument of the thesis is that aristocratic identity was extensively refashioned by late Mughal literati belonging to the mansabdārī stratum in the 18th century in a context of political challenges and increasing marginalisation, and it is this late consensus that was communicated to the first generation of colonial scholarship, forming the basis of modern understandings of the Mughal ruling class. The thesis demonstrates that the Īrānī faction comprised a small circle of élite Shīʿī emigrants from Safavid Iran, often obscured in modern scholarship by overemphasis on Jahāngīr’s consort, Nūr Jahān. It further finds an absence of evidence for what modern scholarship has called the Tūrānī faction until the late 17th century when a coteries of Central Asia noblemen begin to derive a new Tūrānī identity from a specific set of cultural and ethnographic discourses. It further describes the networks of circulation whence this aristocracy was derived. These findings contribute to our understanding of the late 17th and early 18th century Mughal crisis of authority, the nature of the Mughal ruling stratum, and the evolution of identity in this period. Most importantly, the thesis demonstrates that the identity eventually called “Mughal” emerged from the shared experience of the Indo-Muslim élite in the 18th century, having little connection to either Central or West Asia.

Authors: Mallick, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-dmobmb9q8
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: Social history; History