How one official’s uneasy stay in an inn reveals the boundaries of respectability in Mughal everyday life!

In quote:

حال در کٹرہ شیخ فرید اقامت داریم، حویلیی بکرایہ ہرگز میسر نمیی‌آید

بودن سرایی که در حکم بازار را است، خوش‌نمیی آید؛ اما چه باید کرد؟

Hāl dar katrā-i Shaikh Farid aqāmat dārīm, haveli ba-kirāyā hargiz mī sar na-mī āyad. Būdan sarāī ke dar ḥukm-i bāzār rā ast, khush namī āyad; ammā che bayīd kard?

At present, we are residing in the inn of Shaikh Farid, as no house for rent is absolutely available anywhere. Being a caravanserai, that is like a marketplace, it is not pleasant; but what can one do?

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This brief but poignant complaint opens up a window into the socio-cultural world of the Mughal middle-class life. How?

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First things first, this post is inspired by Shabnam Nasimi’s essay, Caravanserais: The Original Motorway Service Stations, where she reminds us that:

kārvān-sarāy originally signified not merely a shelter, but an official or respected space where travellers could expect both security and services … The practice of building resting places along major transport routes — offering food, shelter, and protection ... [has] its origins … in antiquity.

Respected space? Once.

As I read Nasimi’s piece, I couldn’t help but reflect on how my own work intersects with this history, particularly through Abdul Jalil Bilgrami, the protagonist of my book The Sky Poured Down Candy (read about my book here). In one of his letters to his son, from early eighteenth-century Shahjahanabad (then capital of Mughal empire; present Delhi), Abdul Jalil laments his living conditions, in the period of imperial decline, through the above-mentioned Persian quote.

The discomfort experienced by Abdul Jalil is not merely about the inconvenience of lodging, but about what the lodging represented. In my opinion, it signaled a transgression of carefully maintained boundaries between respectable living and the chaotic, common spaces of the marketplace.

Status, cleanliness, and social separation

For men like Abdul Jalil, that is, the Mughal middle classes, status was not just about wealth or title. Wait, who were these middle classes? Think of scholars and teachers, calligraphers and poets, physicians and astrologers, architects and engineers, artists and painters, musicians, and more. In short, the thinkers, makers, and doers who animated the Mughal world beyond the court.

For the men of these categories it seems that status was performative, shaped through daily practices that marked them as distinct from servants, labourers, and the bazaar crowd. As Rosalind O’Hanlon suggests (in this article), there existed ‘extremely elaborate boundaries’, the boundaries that kept far apart ‘the world of servants, menials and the bazaar [market]’. Additionally, conduct/advice manuals such as the Mirzanama (as I have also argued in a academic paper; read here) codified this etiquette: food had to be cooked in one’s own kitchen to ensure purity, market food was to be avoided, and eating in public, among the common crowd, was discouraged as degrading. Even habits like drinking were critiqued when associated with the unruly manners of the marketplace.

Living in a serai, associated with itinerants and trade, therefore, blurred these distinctions. Clearly, a respectable home was more than shelter. It was a status symbol, carefully curated through architecture, privacy, and access to clean, controlled spaces. A house, in fact, adorned with a garden and a pond, as stated in the Mirzanama, was appropriate for a middling gentleman, even if economic resources were limited.

This is where Abdul Jalil’s discomfort becomes deeply instructive. His words reveal that status was not simply about comfort, but about sustaining a lifestyle that signalled honour, discipline, and moral worth. The physical location and condition of a residence could impact how one’s social identity was perceived, and by extension, how one felt about oneself.

The microhistorical lens

Taking a microhistorical approach and focusing on the life and letters of a relatively obscure official like Abdul Jalil allows us to uncover these subtle layers of Mughal society: everyday lives, social norms, and cultural aspirations. Grand narratives about empire, military conquests, or court politics often overlook how norms were lived, negotiated, or transgressed in everyday spaces. By attending to Abdul Jalil’s grievances, we see how class, respectability, and moral codes operated outside the formal structure of power.

His predicament also helps us understand the aspirational nature of middle-class life in Mughal India. Petty officials often oscillated between modest incomes and refined aspirations, as also argued by Hanlon. Abdul Jalil’s lament hence reflects both personal hardship and the anxiety of belonging, alongside a desire to maintain dignity while navigating precarious circumstances, that of Mughal political-economic decline.

Through his letters, we glimpse how status symbols were not static markers of wealth but part of a broader moral economy. The pursuit of respectability thence was shaped by daily choices including where to live, how to eat, how to drink, whom to associate with, in turn, cueing one’s place in society.

What this means for us

First, for us historians, this is a reminder that structures of power and hierarchy are built as much in marketplaces and homes as in courts and battlefields. Studying the life of a relatively minor figure like Abdul Jalil invites us to rethink how urban culture, morality, and material life intersected in early modern South Asia.

And second, for readers, it is a reflection on how spaces we take for granted, such as inns, streets, kitchens, etc., carry meaning beyond their immediate function. They encode boundaries, aspirations, and anxieties, much like how our homes today signal class, taste, and belonging.

Abdul Jalil’s experience of living at the crossroads between affordability and respectability continues to resonate, reminding us that history lives in the everyday choices that we, often without any second thoughts, make.