Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Nadir Shah and the State of Conquest
Chapter 2: Sovereignty, City and the People
Chapter 3: Poetry and the Public in Aurangzeb's Delhi
Chapter 4: Law and the People Under Aurangzeb
Chapter 5: Regicide and Popular Protest
Chapter 6: Islam as a Language of Popular Politics
Chapter 7: The Shoemakers' Riot and the Limits of Popular Politics
Epilogue
Bibliography

About the Author

Abhishek Kaicker is Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

"I was deeply impressed by Abhishek Kaicker's The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (OUP). In this delightful, highly readable book, Kaicker offers up a pioneering study of popular politics during Mughal rule. You'll be amazed at how much shoemakers and coffee contributed to the making of sovereignty in early modern India!" -- BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year 2020
"The King and the People is an exemplary exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the empire's newly-built capital, Shahjahanbad. Spanning a period of a hundred years, Kaicker tells an enthralling story of how trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only as the ruled. A major intervention in the
field of state sovereignty and popular politics." -- Shahid Amin, Delhi University
"The King and the People offers an invaluable story of the intersection of popular politics and Mughal sovereignty in the city of Delhi between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Complex, insightful, and drawing on little known Persian-language materials, this book will inform and excite specialists of South Asian history as well as early-modern world historians. Engagingly written and filled with colorful characters and anecdotes, this book
will also delight lay readers." -- Munis D. Faruqui, Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
"In describing how people woke from a powerful fantasy about the omnipotence and sacrality of Mughal rule to start asserting themselves as a political force in the eighteenth century, Abhishek Kaicker's extraordinary and beautifully crafted book conjures up the often cacophonous voices of Mughal Delhi, both Hindu and Muslim, as they worked out their complicated allegiances to sovereign, city, family, and faith." -- Samira Sheikh, Associate Professor of History
and Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University
"A strikingly original and extraordinarily vivid account of the making and unmaking of Mughal sovereignty through centuries of power and poetry, regicide and revolution. Crucial to Kaicker's narrative is the emerging voice of ordinary people in Mughal history, one that both dooms and yet paradoxically preserves it for posterity." -- Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford