This chapter introduces the study, setting, argument, and plan of progression of Bankrolling Empire. In particular, I introduce the Jhaveri family of Ahmedabad and identify how the Mughal state provided new opportunities and challenges for the family by the early seventeenth century. The reader is left with the idea that traditional explanations of Mughal collapse such as bigotry of emperors, superior fighting power of rival warlords, and communal distrust between Muslim rulers and Hindu subjects are not adequate. Instead, I suggest financial crises were the chief cause that tipped Mughal administration beyond recovery. Such transformations in state and locality in Mughal Gujarat are highlighted by focusing on four generations of a remarkable business family, the Jhaveris of Ahmedabad, and their relations with political elites. The Jhaveris were deeply involved in political intrigue, courtly life, and the finances of Mughal officials and their rivals across two centuries.

Khushhal Khan ‘Gunasamudra’ was the most feted court singer of the mid-seventeenth century. Great-grandson of the most famous Mughal musician of all time, Tansen, and chief musician to the emperors Shah Jahan (r.1627−1658) and Aurangzeb (r.1658−1707), he was written about extensively in his lifetime as a virtuoso of exceptional merit. Yet this was not how he was memorialised in the 1750s, when legends of the great Mughal musicians of past and present were first compiled into biographical collections. Rather, he was remembered as the instigator of a shocking political scandal that supernaturally sealed Shah Jahan’s downfall. In this chapter I retell Khushhal’s story from the vantage point of the 1750s, in the light of the canonical Mughal music treatises of Shah Jahan’s and Aurangzeb’s reigns. I consider what they together tell us about the role and power of music in the Mughal empire, just before everything began to unravel.

James Skinner’s 1825 Tashrīh al-Aqwām includes a real-life portrait of the chief hereditary bīn-player to the last Mughal emperors, Miyan Himmat Khan. But the painting was simultaneously intended as an ethnographic archetype. A man of mixed race, Skinner wrote in Persian and drew on multiple precolonial traditions of describing ethnographic “types”. But Skinner’s entry is radically irreconcilable with Himmat Khan’s own biography and intellectual output: a revolutionary co-written music treatise, the Asl al-Usūl. To unravel this baffling discrepancy, I read ethnographic paintings and writings in Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and English against a new wave of Persian music treatises c. 1780−1850. These reveal an incipient Indian modernity in the most authoritative centres of Hindustani music production running alongside colonial knowledge projects.

The reign of Emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1720−48) ushered in a significant revival of Mughal courtly arts. Right at the centre of this vibrant milieu was the Emperor’s singing teacher and master of his atelier, Khushhal’s grandson Anjha Baras Khan. But posterity has forgotten him—it is his rivals Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” and Firoz Khan “Adarang” whom we remember as the greatest musicians of the eighteenth century. Why? As Delhi was repeatedly invaded and sacked 1739−61, Mughal court musicians scattered all over India, and had to seek new strategies to survive. What happened to Delhi’s musicians and their music is documented in a genre new to writing on music at this time: the tazkira (roughly, biographical collection). In this chapter I show that the proliferation of musicians’ biographies and genealogies were both a product of upheaval, dispersal, and enforced diversification; and a record of these things, particularly in anecdotes of rivalry.

This chapter provides an overview of the shahr āshob genre and analyses one collection of 1857 poems: The Lament for Delhi (Fuġhān-e Dehlī, 1863). Reassessing this body of texts through an analysis of its emotional language, it highlights its originality from previous Urdu shahr āshobs. The resort to elegiac literary devices and the association with the secular elegy (marṡiyah) paved the way for a particular expression of collective grief (ġham), in which it was associated with physical suffering and trauma. The contrast between pre-1857 paradise and post-1857 doomsday materialised in the image of the garden, which was deployed to describe the city as symbol of an ideal vision of Mughal political order.

This chapter analyses the nostalgia deployed in 1910s–1930s memoirs of Mughal Delhi by local ashrāf prose writers. It argues that the idealisation of the pre-colonial local past enabled authors to face the displacement lived during the construction of the colonial capital and the growing challenges of communal tension in the city. As heterogeneous texts both recording knowledge and inducing multi-sensory pleasure in the manner of qissahs (tales), city memoirs aimed at moving the Mughal past permanently into collective fantasy and at maintaining collective identity continuity. Examining the elements of nostalgic recollection, the chapter shows that those memoirs responded to the urgencies of the present, by articulating a critique of British rule and of the growth of communalism, but that they also reflected a Muslim collective identity that yearned for power.

In mid-1953, Abu Mayanja and Munu Sipalo left to study in Britain and India respectively. Chapter 2 follows them to explain the growing importance of information circulation in this cohort’s anticolonial culture. The opportunities they found for pursuing anticolonial activism in the urban hubs of London and Delhi need to be understood within the framework of the early 1950s (anti-communist) socialist internationalism in Western Europe and newly independent Asian countries, specifically through the Socialist International and Asian Socialist Conference. Young, mobile East and Central Africans were critical to the visions of these organisations and the networks that linked them. But Sipalo’s attempts to run an Africa Bureau and organise a pan-African conference, and Mayanja’s attempts to find a platform in the British press were constrained by experiences of racism, and by the ignorance and skewed priorities of anticolonial sympathisers and patrons. Mayanja’s trip to a Moral Re-Armament ‘multiracial’ spiritual centre in the Swiss Alps epitomised some of the paradoxes of this cohort’s information campaign. Much of this is lost when reading this as a history of students abroad.

In this chapter, we examine Operation Blue Star, its aftermath, the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi and the Indian state’s efforts to find a negotiated solution up to 1987 with the Rajiv-Longowal Accord. We then evaluate the shift in strategy to combat antiterrorism (mid-1987 to mid-1991). This is followed by a review of the counter-insurgency operation from the end of 1991 to early 1993 which defeated the Sikh militancy and led to the restoration of ‘normality’. After 1993, we outline how the moderate Sikh political leadership re-engaged with the political process in the state and won a landslide victory in the state elections in 1997. In conclusion, we reflect on the competing explanations offered in the literature on the defeat of the militancy associated with the movement for Khalistan.

In 1857, a string of military mutinies soon followed by a series of popular uprisings tore apart the core heartland of colonial India and threatened to unravel the British Raj. Units of the Bengal Army rose up against their British officers and in conjunction with other discontented groups quickly seized key cities and towns. The British were ejected from major centres, and there were genuine fears that the conflagration would spread to other regions of colonial India. The scale of the revolt, and the violence with which it was accompanied, was unprecedented. Moreover, the intense racialization of the conflict and the anxieties it spawned, would shape British military, strategic, and political policy throughout the empire for generations to come. Ultimately, the British were able to restore order, but not without a huge amount of bloodshed, in large part because of a lack of common purpose and organization amongst the rebels. The British benefitted from the fact that the revolts did not spread much beyond the north, leaving much of India tense but quiet. Resources could therefore be more easily pooled and concentrated on the rebels who operated bravely but without direction. Militarily, the revolt was a watershed moment for the British Army and for the British Empire.

The final chapter returns to the Indian subcontinent to reveal the durability of the Company’s expansion within the carapace of Mughal sovereignty by the mid-eighteenth century. Although traditionally understood as a period of Mughal decline, largely facilitated by the ‘rise’ of the Company, this chapter argues that the two were not mutually exclusive, and in fact the continued expansion of the Company within a Mughal framework contributed to the empire’s continued authority on the Indian subcontinent, as the networks of Company servants helped bind the emperor in Delhi to the regional nawabs into the 1750s. For example, the imperial farman of 1716 provided the Company with its greatest set of rights yet, including customs-free trade and the territorial expansion of most of its main settlements, such as Calcutta and Madras. The Company’s negotiations to implement these rights with the empire’s various regional governments served to embed the Company even further into these regions, even as the nawabs assumed greater local powers themselves. Many of these negotiations continued to be shaped by the private transcultural networks between Company servants and Mughal elites, and despite the emergence of a powerful and more capable British nation-state in the early eighteenth century, one that made various claims on the Company in Asia, these intimate and cross-cultural ties proved remarkably resilient.

Chapter 4 focuses on the dynastic rise and fall of Razia Sultan to political leadership in thirteenth-century India. Daughter of Iltutmish, the founder of the Delhi Sultanate, Razia was favored by her father to succeed him. But at his death the contestation of the transition of power was rapid, relentless, and ruthless. It all happened in less than a year after the sultan’s death. His son Rukh al-Din wore the crown for only six months and twenty-eight days before being defeated and dethroned by his sister Razia. At the age of thirty-one and unmarried, Razia became the first and only female sultan of the Delhi Sultanate, preceded and succeeded by her half-brothers. Razia Sultan ruled a little over three years, during which time she was able to expand the state’s territory, bring a certain level of peace and prosperity to her people, patronize the arts, and support educational institutions. She was toppled through the treachery of some of her close advisers and her jealous brothers. The alleged Prophetic hadith was never invoked and there was no institutional religious opposition to her leadership.