Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar: A counter-narrative to India's 'Islamic dark age'

Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar: Commerce and Everyday Life in the Mughal World

by Jagjeet Lally

Published by Penguin Business

232 pages             ₹399

 

We are taught to see history in decades and centuries, in kingdoms and dynasties, in battles and conquests, in heroes and villains. But time seldom moves in such black-and-white currents. Perhaps no era in Indian history is as maligned and as misunderstood as the Mughal, largely due to colonial archives that directly benefited from showing the Muslim “outsiders” as despotic and detrimental to the Indian subcontinent, a sentiment exacerbated by Hindu nationalists.

 

Layer upon layer of historical writing reinforces such misconceptions. But the Mughal decades brought stabler times, with relatively widespread prosperity. Contemporary evidence removes “the certainty — sedimented over several decades and centuries in successive historical works — that the eighteenth century was a time of chaos and decline”, writes Jagjeet Lally in Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar: Commerce and Everyday Life in the Mughal World. Drawing on the perspectives of contemporaries such as Guru Nanak and Banarasidas, a Shrimal Jain merchant, he paints a picture of what common life in the Mughal times must have looked like.

 

 

Monarchy has often been a paternalistic administration, with kings deciding the hows and whys for their subjects, ruling in a top-to-bottom fashion. But as Lally clarifies: “The Mughal state was vitally made ‘from the ground up’ — and often on the back of commerce, its riches, and the support of merchants and bankers.” For a slim volume, the book is impressively broad in scope while staying accessible, dismantling the many myths of the era and explaining why and how the Mughal state gained such legitimacy and power. Consider the Sikh and Maratha rulers, so often cast as the empire’s natural adversaries. They inherited its fiscal and bureaucratic machinery and made it their own, rather than creating an entirely distinct system.

 

But the foundation of this system largely remains invisible. Merchants and bankers guarded their craft within the family, with skills caste-based and passed down through generations. These were uncertain times, and trust was everything. “Trust, reliability and reputation are everything in this world. To break trust (...) will more than likely spell the end of his career,” Lally notes. Elsewhere, he writes that “Indian merchants, financiers and their family firms remain enigmatic, for which they have either elicited great respect (at best) or been reviled and used as scapegoats for various ills down to recent times (at worst).”

 

Under the Mughals, however, that opacity slowly began to lift. Because the qazi’s court offered predictable laws and rules across regions, Hindus and Muslims alike increasingly preferred it over venues like caste councils. “Recourse to the Mughal legal order, the drive towards documentation, the importance of archiving, the intensification of competition over property and its attendant rights” were among the factors that contributed to the legitimisation and increasing efficiency of the Mughals. It was a neat loop: Documentation strengthened the state, and a stronger state demanded still more documentation.

 

Trade set the terms of almost everything, from religion to social customs. As the author observes: “So closely connected were warfare, the annual caravan traffic, and the associated rental or sale of animal power and manpower, that several Indian dynasties had their origins in long-distance overland trade, while others sought to exercise control over the flows of riches and resources it brought.” Consider the Khalsa, largely comprising lower castes and classes, who began resisting Mughal norms and rituals. This defiance, however, ran counter to the Khatris of the same region, who had strong commercial ties with the Mughals.

 

Marwar had a similar story. Upper-caste Hindus aligned themselves largely with the mercantile Vaishyas and their customs, embracing vegetarianism and non-violence despite the Kshatriyas, another upper caste, adhering to starkly different ones. With the shift, the region became more endogamous and more intolerant of “unethical” practices.

 

Religion, too, picked up the market’s accent. “By the eighteenth century, then, the spread of market relations and a new commercial spirit had advanced far enough to affect (afflict, some might say) virtually every aspect of life. Religious teachings employed the language of the bazaar, as in the case of Sikhism, and a marketplace for popular piety was emerging as entrepreneurs — well-intentioned or otherwise — sought to exploit various means of enrichment,” Lally points out.

 

Cities multiplied, and trade grew with them, as did quality of life. Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar  illustrates the nitty-gritty of this everyday life: How markets functioned, how trading routes spawned new businesses, how customer behaviour changed. “They [urban centres] were also where people went to buy new things or experience sensory delights, where foreign novelties often made their first appearance, and home to those spaces and places of leisure and pleasure where one could see and be seen at one’s best.” 

 

In this burgeoning economy, elite women also played a key role — some supported trade and pilgrimage, while others amassed wealth and resources. This also helped them counteract the loss of prestige that followed a faction’s defeat, whether between fathers and sons or brothers.

 

The book acts as a counter-archive against the colonial myth, still stubbornly alive, of an Islamic dark age liberated by the British. It documents how new administrative, legal, fiscal, and political systems changed a subcontinent and fostered a relatively inclusive and ethical society, even as its successors exploited, looted, destroyed, and drained its resources. As our history grows more political and our myths more historical, books like Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar matter all the more. Because history was never black and white; it was a bazaar — loud, crowded, vibrant, colourful.

 

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The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor. Instagram/X: aroomofwords