Starting from 1526, the Mughals ruled over much of India for three centuries. This period saw the production of a fascinating variety of “ego-documents” – texts in which residents of the empire reflected on their own lives, on Islam in a Hindu context, and on the relationship of individual subjects to their new rulers.

Memoirs by the Mughal royalty – specially Babur and Jahangir – are well known. Less known and analysed are the writings of diverse others, from the poet-laureate Faizi to the lowly envoy Asad Beg, to characters like Mirza Nathan and Abdul Latif who lived dangerously on the Bengal frontier.

Equally worthy of consideration are prolific writers among the Hindu subjects of Muslim rulers, such as Bhimsen Saksena, and the witty Anand Ram Mukhlis who lived in Delhi through the turbulent 1730s and 1740s.

The Mughal ethos of Islamic rule is examined from a new angle in this book: the writers and personalities who people it were not part of elite society but a few notches below it. They thus offer an original and differently critical perspective on the empire – its religious, social, and political tensions, and its strategies for overcoming them.

Muzaffar Alam is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His many books include The Mughals and the Sufis and The Languages of Political Islam in India.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam holds the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. His many books include Empires Between Islam and Christianity 1500–1800 and Is “Indian Civilisation” a Myth?

“Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam are two of the world’s leading scholars of the Mughal Empire. Since 1994 they have achieved the unusual feat of joint authorship . . . Alam brings to the partnership expertise in the Islamic textual tradition in Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. Subrahmanyam brings to the partnership skills in the social sciences, in South Indian languages as well as Dutch, French, and Portuguese, interests in early modern history ranging from Iberia to Southeast Asia, and an instinct to question old ways of seeing things and to discover new ones”
– francis robinson, Royal Holloway, London