The practice of microhistory | Capturing veins, emotions, and rhythms

What is my forthcoming book The Sky Poured Down Candy: Microhistorical reflections on the life and times of a petty Mughal official, c. 1700-1730 about? The answer is both simple and not so simple: it is about the Mughal empire at the moment of its decline in the early eighteenth century. But it is also about one man, Abdul Jalil Bilgrami, a petty Mughal official, a writer of letters, a poet, a father, a book collector, a man who lived through the turbulence of imperial decay.

My work is an attempt at microhistory. Rather than narrating Mughal decline primarily through court chronicles, I look at the empire through Abdul Jalil’s lived experience. The period I study—roughly from the reign of Farrukhsiyar (1713–19) to the early years of Muhammad Shah (1719–48)—was a time of intense change, but my entry point is not the high courtly politics. Instead, I turn to Abdul Jalil’s letters to his son, fragments of his poetry, references in his grandson’s writings, and traces left in colonial collections.

Why Abdul Jalil? Why letters?

Historians of the Mughal empire have traditionally focused on high bureaucracy, conventionally understood as ‘nobility’ and in narrow military-administrative terms. The socio-cultural life of non-elite bureaucrats—their everyday struggles, passions, friendships, literary ambitions—rarely finds a place in these narratives. Abdul Jalil’s letters offered me a way to redress this imbalance.

Letters are not “hard data” like statistical tables of bureaucratic ranks (mansabs) or lists of land revenue assignments (jagirs). But as Cornell Fleischer memorably wrote, literary evidence provides the “soft tissues” that give life to the bureaucratic skeleton of empire. Where official chronicles offer bones, letters reveal veins, emotions, and rhythms.

At the same time, Abdul Jalil never compiled his letters for posterity. They were posthumously gathered by his son and nephew, not by him. This means what we encounter is less self-conscious performance and more uncensored voice. What he wrote to his son was often raw, immediate, and deeply human.

Microhistory as practice

Could this simply have been a biography of a minor Mughal official? Perhaps. But I wanted to attempt more. I wanted to show how private letters could be used to write a microhistory: where the intimate intersects with the structural, where everyday life illuminates broader historical processes.

Microhistory has always fascinated me because of the way it marries social and cultural history. Italian microhistory—think Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms—gave me one kind of inspiration. Closer home, Partha Chatterjee’s A Princely Imposter showed how a single case could reveal the texture of Indian nationalism. For me, Abdul Jalil’s case becomes a way to think about Mughal decline not from above, but from below—from the vantage of an “ant’s-eye view”.

A point of entry

Every microhistory needs a point of entry. For Ginzburg, it was Menocchio’s strange cosmology of cheese and worms. For me, it was an incident where Abdul Jalil seems to have lost his job for scribbling a couple of verses in the margin of a news report. Poetry, it appeared, had cost him his office.

The story was irresistible. It forced me to ask: why would a petty official risk his livelihood for a quatrain? What did poetry mean in the everyday life of Mughal officials? And how did Abdul Jalil negotiate his way back into service after this dismissal? This one episode became the thread that tied together the many strands of his life.

The challenges

Working with Abdul Jalil’s letters meant confronting layers of distortion. They survive partly through a colonial compilation, Oriental Miscellany, where they were used to train English East India Company employees in Persian. His words thus reach us refracted through colonial eyes. But for me, they became a rare window into the emotional and cultural world of an eighteenth-century middling employee.

Another challenge was the pull of the macro. The early eighteenth century was a fascinating time: emperors toppled, the Sayyid Brothers dominated and fell, provincial powers rose. At times the grandeur of the context threatened to overwhelm my protagonist. But I kept returning to Abdul Jalil—to his letters, to his frustrations with jagir grants, to his literary passions—as the anchor of the narrative.

Representativity

What can one man’s story tell us? For me, Abdul Jalil represents overlapping worlds. He embodies the literary proclivities of Mughal bureaucrats, the career anxieties of middling officials, and the cultural negotiations of “townees” (qasbatis) who migrated from various parts of the Persianate world and used writing to situate themselves firmly in the Indian subcontinent. At the same time, his persistence and eventual success make him an exception, reminding us that many others exhausted themselves in pursuit of employment they never secured.

Living with Abdul Jalil

Writing this book has also been a deeply personal experience. As I struggled with paperwork in my university’s administrative offices, I often thought of Abdul Jalil’s frustrations with his petitions. When I puzzled for months over his witty verse comparing his frailty to a phoenix needing spectacles to spot his bones, I felt the tug of his humor across centuries.

In the end, when he regained office, I could only conclude that he had indeed risen from the ashes—much like the phoenix he invoked.

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This is the story my book hopes to tell: not just the decline of the Mughal empire, but the veins, emotions, and rhythms of one man’s life within it.

A life ordinary and extraordinary at once.

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Release date: September 18, 2025.