Inaugral panel address at the annual Young Scholars' Conference,

Centre for Historical Studies (CHS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi

5 March 2025

Introduction to my work

The title for my address is 'The Practice of Microhistory: Challenges in capturing the veins, emotions and rhythms' and this of course comes from my PhD thesis and the monograph that I am now writing with Routledge. I attempted the work as a microhistory in the period of Mughal decline, at least the initial part of the decline; 1700-1730s which roughly corresponds to the reign of Farrukhsiyar (r. 1713–19) to some years of Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748). But I chose to look at the decline from the point of view of a petty Mughal official named Abdul Jalil Bilgrami, concentrating on his lived experience of serving the empire. My primary sources included the letters he wrote to his son, his poems that have survived in the works of later Bilgrami scholars, especially his grandson's biographical works, and his various other writings.

That being said, I also wanted to study his socio-cultural life and the inspiration for this came from, and I call this inspiration but in more formal terms it would be called 'finding of research gap', so it came from a survey of the already existing works—as we usually do in historiography—on the Mughal empire and, more specifically, on the Mughal bureaucracy (mansabdari). I do not need to elaborate on particular works I think but now with the coming up of people’s history, we have established that historians of the Mughal empire have always had a fixation with the elite and studies of the bureaucracy include works majorly on the nobility, that is, primarily, the higher ranks. Moreover, bureaucracy, as I argued, is understood only in administrative-military terms segregating it from its 'human element', so the aspect of the socio-cultural lives of the bureaucrats, especially the non-elite, remains overlooked.

Considering this, the idea was that perhaps, the first step in challenging such a focus would be to undertake the study of non-official, literary sources. Quantitative documentation—in this case, particularly the statistical tables representing the composition of the bureaucracy: the proportion of Turanis, Iranis, Afghans, Indian Muslims, and Rajputs—is no doubt the 'hard' data for factual information. Yet, evidence which has a literary character 'like soft tissues gives life and significance to the hard structure', the words of Cornell H. Fleischer and we will talk about his work in a bit. The second step, I believed, would perhaps be indulging in the investigation of a non-elite subject, so as to break down the hegemonic understanding of bureaucracy as a homogeneous entity often mistermed as 'nobility'.

With these ideas I moved forward and found inspiration in Fleischer's Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire, and as Fleischer does in the case of the Ottoman empire, the aim became to 'provide sorely needed flesh' to the empire's bureaucratic skeleton. In Fleischer's words, the task at hand was to 'delineate not only bones, but organs, veins, emotions and rhythms' and this is what has also inspired the title of today's address. You will also notice that I use a lot of terms like 'inspiration, passion, obsession, imagination, fascination' in my address and well, I believe if I am attempting to capture the emotional proclivities of my protagonist, it is my duty as a historian to put all my emotions into it as well. 

So Fleischer in his work basically studied the empire from the perspective of an educated Ottoman, Mustafa Ali, by way of his experience and how he chooses to describe that experience. His primary sources were his poetry, translations, personal correspondence, histories, etc. On similar lines for me the protagonist became Abdul Jalil, who was a petty official, in particular he held the office of a news-recorder, but was also an Indo-Persian scholar and his literary works similarly became my sources for historical reconstruction. At the same time, what distinguishes my work from Fleischer's is a more focused utilization of a single literary collection, that is, Abdul Jalil's personal letters, for recreating his realities. Though Abdul Jalil's literary pursuits were diverse, the work he produced in the public domain, not completely out of purview, are analyzed within an overarching narrative created by the letters. The thought behind this was that when a work is written keeping in view a wider audience, there occurs a conscious construction of self; emphasizing the way one wants oneself and one’s writings to be perceived by the society. Public oriented works are also influenced by other factors, such as patronage. On the other hand, the nature of personal letters is such that whatever construction of self takes place, it would be, by estimation, unconscious. This is especially true for Abdul Jalil's letters because he, unlike many other scholars of the Mughal times, did not himself compile his letters into a collection as exemplars of literary talent or for didactic purposes. They were collected posthumously by his son and nephew. It is possible hence that they were never meant for public consumption. What he wrote to his son also then be, to a large extent, uncensored, and thus, I believed would help fulfill the task of capturing Abdul Jalil's lived experience of serving the empire more authentically.

Therefore, Abdul Jalil's letters provided an excellent opportunity to reconstruct a narrative of the multifaceted socio-cultural life of a petty Mughal official, touching on subjects such as:

• his associations with the Mughal aristocracy; 

• relations with family and friends; 

• his passion for preserving books as an avid book collector; 

• his knowledge of medicine; 

• his financial affairs; 

• and most importantly, 'the excitement and occasional disappointment of his own literary pursuits'. 

And this is what I hoped my study would convey.

On the use of microhistory

Why microhistory? On the face of it the work could very well have been a biography but I wanted it to be more than a simplistic biography of a petty official and so the work hopes to demonstrate how private letters, as a genre of literature, can be used in the practice of microhistory. So I was giving myself a methodological challenge as well. But what do I really mean by the practice of microhistory? In my view, it is a practice that facilitates a cohesive integration of social and cultural historical perspectives. How? To state simply, both social and cultural history aim to explore the past, but they do so from distinct perspectives and with specialized approaches. Cultural history, for instance, views society as a phenomenon imbued with meaning, with cultural historians focused on uncovering those meanings. However, this approach has its limitations, as it often does not provide deeper access to the past beyond what the historical actors themselves understood. This limitation calls for the integration of broader approaches, such as those employed in social history, which seek larger explanations for historical events. As I studied Microhistory, I found that it attempted to combine these two approaches by examining the lived experiences of historical actors—their perceptions of themselves and the meanings they attributed to events. At the same time, it incorporates a retrospective analysis to reveal broader historical structures that were beyond the actors’ immediate awareness.

And once again I found another inspiration for this kind of work. Yes, Italian microhistory and Carlo Ginzburg's famous work The Cheese and the Worms were inspirational. But what about the Indian context? Inspiration came from Partha Chatterjee's A Princely Imposter: The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal. The story that Chatterjee chose to unfold ran alongside the macro-contexts of crucial historical events including the onset of the Second World War, the 1943 Bengal Famine, the Great Calcutta Killings, but most impressively the rise of Indian nationalism. His microhistory, therefore, macrohistorically tells us a unique story of Indian nationalism. Similarly, my work, I decided was to be situated in the early eighteenth century which was the period of the onset of the decline of the imperial power of the Mughals and through it I hoped that me and eventually the readers will see how Abdul Jalil in his letters took us frequently to the imperial court, bringing into the spotlight the politics of the period; in which far from being a passive bystander, he actively participated. Hence, once again not being a simplistic biography, the work aimed to uncover how Abdul Jalil's story provides us with an ant's-eye view and, in the process, offers itself as a unique history of the Mughal decline.

Where to start?

Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, one of the scholars currently at the forefront of microhistorical studies, writes, '[n]early all cases which microhistorians deal with have one thing in common; they all caught the attention of the authorities, thus establishing their archival existence'. Ginzburg began his famous work The Cheese and the Worms with the words, '[a]s frequently happens, this research, too, came about by chance'. Abdul Jalil Bilgrami's letters caught attention somewhat in the like manner and once this petty official, living in eighteenth-century Mughal India, established his archival existence, the urge to give voice to his personal experience of the Mughal bureaucratic administration became irresistible.

There was one event that absolutely captured my imagination and that was when Abdul Jalil seemed to have been initially dismissed from his office of news writer because of this seemingly innocent action of jotting down a couple of verses in the margins of a news report. The verses stated that during the reign of Farrukhsiyar, in Sind, once during a shower of rain, the sky poured down candy. So, at least from the first glance, from the letters he wrote to his son, it seemed that poetry cost him his job. However, objecting to the unfairness of the circumstances, Abdul Jalil proceeded to Shahjahanabad (Delhi) and endeavoured to regain office. This I decided would be the starting point of the story. And this was again keeping with microhistorical methodology. To quote Robert Darnton, author of the famous The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, one 'should try to enter the cultures of the past at points where ... [one does not] understand something. When one cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something'.

For Ginzburg, in his protagonist Menocchio's life, the picture of ripe cheese and worms emerging from it as a model for the birth of angels was surprising enough and so it acted as a point of entry. Taking cue from this, Abdul Jalil's verses and the incident that it chronicled, for me became a point of entry into the narrative of his life. Now I do not want to reveal the actual reason why he was dismissed, I am going to let the suspense be till the book comes out but I can assure you it wasn’t the contents of the verses as they accorded divine validation to Farrukhsiyar's rule, a practice well-established among the Mughals. Nevertheless, all the remaining threads of my work were tied to this overarching question.

Challenges of the archive and of writing such a work

1. Distortion and second-hand nature of the archive: It was actually an anonymous colonial translator who, in his collection of Oriental Miscellany, gave a second life to Abdul Jalil's letters, transcribing them in the original Persian and translating them into English. Several medieval and early-modern letter-writing manuals similarly were brought into use by the colonial authorities for training the new cadre of English East India Company's employees in the Persian language and Oriental Miscellany was one of them. There is no doubt thus that Abdul Jalil's letters suffer from what can be termed as 'refractions'. His past comes down to us through a long train of distorted lenses, that is, the colonial reading, understanding, translation, and interpretation. In addition, his letters make their way onto the pages of a book compiled with an altogether unique aim. Keeping this in view, I argued that we readers—the prisoners of our present—need to define our parameters for mindfully judging the value of these letters. For the colonial readers, the letters, among other documents, helped them gain proficiency in the language of the administration of the land they wished to rule. On the other hand, for the purpose of my work, the letters helped peek into Abdul Jalil’s authentic experience of serving the empire, a value that I argued defeated the possible critique of the second-hand nature of my major primary source.

2. The challenge of macro: During the course of my study, despite the fact that I had decided to contextualize Abdul Jalil's story within the context of early eighteenth-century Mughal India, sometimes the context would overtake my actual aim of concentrating on his socio-cultural life. It was such an interesting period of time with power changing hands frequently at court between the emperors and the high-ranking nobles, particularly for Abdul Jalil's life the context of the power tussle between Farruksiyar and the Sayyid Brothers was so important. And as PhD scholars, we frequently anticipate and should anticipate, future points of criticism of our work and this was definitely becoming a sore point for me. At many places still my work, I would say, suffers from limitations of macro overpowering the micro. Yet, I had to find solace in Ginzburg's following words when he wrote about Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society, that it presents before us 'a constant back and forth between micro- and macrohistory, between close-ups and extreme long-shots, so as to continually thrust back into discussion the comprehensive vision of the historical process through apparent exceptions and cases of brief duration'.

3. Relevance of the work: Another question that I anticipated would be the relevance of the work? What does one case tell us? Why study this? So I brought in the idea of representativity in microhistory and asked myself, who does Abdul Jalil represent? In the context of eighteenth-century Mughal India, does Abdul Jalil typify a considerable number of petty officials? In this as well, I adapted from Ginzburg's view that singular cases can be representative in both positive and negative sense. Positively, I argued that Abdul Jalil's representativity formed 3 overlapping circles:

First, his literary pursuits provide us with a window into the socio-cultural lives of not only the petty officials but the Mughal bureaucracy as a whole, particularly their everyday literary proclivities and emotional registers associated with it, challenging the bird’s-eye view of Mughal poetic culture as 'professional poets in august courtly assemblies, reciting florid and elegant panegyrics in exchange for handsome rewards, or else plying their trade in exclusive private maḥfils and literary salons'. What is brought to life is how, away from the ceremonial court, the everyday use of poetry in letters, created a socio-cultural space meant for 'regular exchange of witty banter, mystical musing, friendly [and filial] intimacy, and a whole range of emotional registers rarely associated with the Mughal court in modern historiography', or for that matter almost never hitherto associated with Mughal bureaucracy.

The second circle is populated by several middling servants of the empire who used their literary talents for career advancement. The third, is formed by the qasbati individuals or for lack of a better term townees, who, often migrating from places such as Iran and Iraq, used literary compositions to furbish genealogical trees, thus, situating themselves firmly in the Indian subcontinent.

At the same time, Abdul Jalil could also be representative in an alternate sense. The outcome was ultimately favourable for Abdul Jalil. However, on the circumstances pervasive around him, Abdul Jalil commented that obtaining a jagir had become an agonizingly tricky undertaking; a great many people had bewildered themselves chasing the same. Yet, somewhat defiantly, he camped on the doorstep and remained adamant in his pursuit, making him an exception. Thus, through his experience of administrative decay, we do learn that a good statistical majority in eighteenth-century Mughal India may have been unable to tackle the system, may have exhausted all their resources in the process, and may have indeed remained jagir-less.

4. Living with the archive: I was aware that not only were my major primary sources limited, a few letters, a few poems, a few essays and a part of it was also translated, however, with a different aim. So I had to let the archive speak for itself. And here once again I would digress from purely academic discussion and bring out the emotional aspect of research. Every day I read the letters I started relating more and more to Abdul Jalil. While I struggled with paper work here at JNU, he struggled with his paperwork in regaining his office. You would have definitely found me thinking of his experience while standing in long lines of administrative work. And I will end this with one fun example of me being immersed in research experience, Abdul Jalil's use of the Huma bird or what can be translated as Phoenix in one of the verses he included in his letters to his son and he basically said that an illness had left him so weak that a phoenix would need to wear spectacles to locate his bones.

And I spent months figuring this verse out. I did find out that as a Persian trope, the bird often finds a place in poetry and prose and its shadow is considered so full of blessing that it was believed whoever is touched by it will become king. It is also a bird known to have, 'achieved its high rank by virtue of its modesty, for it lives only on dry bones'. And we have none other than Mirza Ghalib announcing his strength to be superior to that of the huma, 'for whom his bones, replete with the fire of love, would probably prove indigestible'. At the same time also the use of spectacles in the verse - as something that Abdul Jalil has been looking for, a lost one and another suitable one to buy, actively in his letters. So the fusing of conventional poetic tropes, dietary preferences, with everyday concerns was absolutely fascinating to me, so much so that when eventually in the story he is able to regain an office, I was forced to conclude that he rose from the ashes much like a phoenix.