Books by Abhishek Kaicker
An original exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the sp... more An original exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire's capital, The King and the People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah's devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only as the ruled.
Drawing on a wealth of sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book is the first comprehensive account of the dynamic relationship between ruling authority and its urban subjects in an era that until recently was seen as one of only decline. By placing ordinary people at the centre of its narrative, this wide-ranging work offers fresh perspectives on imperial sovereignty, on the rise of an urban culture of political satire, and on the place of the practices of faith in the work of everyday politics. It unveils a formerly invisible urban panorama of soldiers and poets, merchants and shoemakers, who lived and died in the shadow of the Red Fort during an era of both dizzying turmoil and heady possibilities.
As much an account of politics and ideas as a history of the city and its people, this lively and lucid book will be equally of value for specialists, students, and lay readers interested in the lives and ambitions of the mass of ordinary inhabitants of India's historic capital three hundred years ago.
('Classical Presences' series), 2010
This volume brings together scholars of modern and ancient culture to explore historical, textual... more This volume brings together scholars of modern and ancient culture to explore historical, textual, material and theoretical interactions between classics and imperialism during the heyday of the British Empire from the late eighteenth through to its collapse in the early decades of the twentieth century. It examines the multiple dialogues that developed between Classics and colonialism in this period and argues that the two exerted a formative influence on each other at various levels. Most at issue in the contexts where Classics and empire converge is the critical question of ownership: to whom does the classical past belong? Did the modern communities of the Mediterranean have pre-eminent ownership of the visual, literary and intellectual culture of Greece and Rome? Or could the populations and intellectual centres of Northern Europe stake a claim to this inheritance? And in what ways could non-European communities and powers – Africa, India, America – commandeer the classical heritage for themselves? In exploring the relationship between classics and imperialism in this period, this volume examines trends that are of current importance both to the discipline of Classics and to modern British cultural and intellectual history. Both classics and empire, this volume contests, can be better understood by examining them in tandem: the development of classical ideas, classical scholarship and classical imagery in this period was often directly or indirectly influenced by empire and imperial authority, and the British Empire itself was informed, shaped, legitimised and evaluated using classical models.
Papers by Abhishek Kaicker
History of Religions, 2022
Among the primary targets of the so-called reformers of Indian Islam of the eighteenth century we... more Among the primary targets of the so-called reformers of Indian Islam of the eighteenth century were the so-called false mystics of their era. In their oft-expressed complaints against shopkeeper-mystics and pious frauds, this article discerns a sharpening crisis of values between the pursuit of the eternal divine and the allurements of evanescent earthly pleasures. Such a crisis of values, contends this article, should not simply be understood as part of some process of the decline and renewal of Islam in the Mughal empire. Rather, it was caused by a very real anxiety about the erosion of long-standing pious ideals by the forces of commerce that swept across the subcontinent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By comparing a range of biographical compendia, hagiographies, epistles, chronicles, poetry, and belles lettres produced by Mughal intellectuals, this article illustrates the ways in which the seductions of both elite influence and mass veneration combined to thwart the Sufi’s path at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Modern Asian Studies, 2019
This article uses a 1741 testimonial document from Kol (present-day Aligarh) to explore the worki... more This article uses a 1741 testimonial document from Kol (present-day Aligarh) to explore the workings of petitions in the local politics of the late Mughal empire. I suggest that even solitary documents such as this can be read as artefacts of the continuing processes of local politics which operated in excess of the administrative logic of the Mughal state. After surveying the place of petitions in the Mughal apparatus of justice from an administrative perspective, I examine the story of a vanished artisan named Hira to demonstrate that even scattered documents from the Mughal archive can reveal traces of the larger political processes of which a petition might be a single example. In this light, I demonstrate how the testimonial at hand can illuminate the everyday workings of the social and political order of the locality, and its relationship with larger structures of ideology and state power in an era of political decentralization.
Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient, 2018
This article examines the career and writings of the minor poet ʿAbd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725... more This article examines the career and writings of the minor poet ʿAbd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in order to explore the relation between the practice of courtly poetry and the work of politics in the Late Mughal empire. Tracing the transformations in ʿAbd al-Jalil’s writings over the first decades of the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that the poet’s practice, driven as much by literary concerns as by material needs, responded to and was implicated within the politics of the Mughal court. His life thus illuminates both the opportunities and dangers opened by the practice of poetry in an era of the rapid and unprecedented dispersal of political authority in the empire.
Reviews by Abhishek Kaicker
Review of Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi by Margrit Pernau (New ... more Review of Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi by Margrit Pernau (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2013
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Books by Abhishek Kaicker
Drawing on a wealth of sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book is the first comprehensive account of the dynamic relationship between ruling authority and its urban subjects in an era that until recently was seen as one of only decline. By placing ordinary people at the centre of its narrative, this wide-ranging work offers fresh perspectives on imperial sovereignty, on the rise of an urban culture of political satire, and on the place of the practices of faith in the work of everyday politics. It unveils a formerly invisible urban panorama of soldiers and poets, merchants and shoemakers, who lived and died in the shadow of the Red Fort during an era of both dizzying turmoil and heady possibilities.
As much an account of politics and ideas as a history of the city and its people, this lively and lucid book will be equally of value for specialists, students, and lay readers interested in the lives and ambitions of the mass of ordinary inhabitants of India's historic capital three hundred years ago.
Papers by Abhishek Kaicker
Reviews by Abhishek Kaicker
Drawing on a wealth of sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book is the first comprehensive account of the dynamic relationship between ruling authority and its urban subjects in an era that until recently was seen as one of only decline. By placing ordinary people at the centre of its narrative, this wide-ranging work offers fresh perspectives on imperial sovereignty, on the rise of an urban culture of political satire, and on the place of the practices of faith in the work of everyday politics. It unveils a formerly invisible urban panorama of soldiers and poets, merchants and shoemakers, who lived and died in the shadow of the Red Fort during an era of both dizzying turmoil and heady possibilities.
As much an account of politics and ideas as a history of the city and its people, this lively and lucid book will be equally of value for specialists, students, and lay readers interested in the lives and ambitions of the mass of ordinary inhabitants of India's historic capital three hundred years ago.