Sublime

Mercantile zeal, severe military reprisals, and the subversion of local elites all played a role in the maintenance of the Raj.

(trading station) in Surat, an agreement ‘for our reception and continuation in his domynyons’ and a couple of imperial firmans, limited in scope and content, but useful to flash at obstructive Mughal officials. Jahangir, however, made a deliberate point of not conceding any major trading

“They were well-known and well-off people, men who were the pride of Delhi,” wrote Zahir Dehlavi. “They had had no parallels in their own day, nor will we ever see their like again.”

According to the Mughal historian Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘The Emperor spent years – and fortunes – attempting to destroy the foundations of Maratha power, but this accursed tree could not be pulled up by the roots.’ From Babur to Aurangzeb, the Mughal monarchy of Hindustan had grown ever more powerful, but now there was war among his descendants

On the morning of the 21st, “a royal salute at sunrise proclaimed that Delhi was once more a dependency of the British crown.”96 But the captured city—the ancient capital of Hindustan, the great Mughal metropolis—was now a desolate city of the dead, except for parties of drunken British looters. Major William Ireland, a consistent critic of the bru

India with its own small civil administration, the status of a municipality and a population of 40,000. By the 1670s the town was even minting its own gold ‘pagoda’ coins,

“Alas my dear boy,” wrote Ghalib to a friend in January 1862. “This is not the Delhi in which you were born, not the Delhi in which you got your schooling, not the Delhi in which you used to come to your lessons with me, not the Delhi in which I have passed fifty-one years of my life.” It is a camp. The only Muslims here are artisans or servants of

“I don’t consider niggers in the same light as I would a white man,”

The recent film Viceroy’s House attempts