Farhat Hasan – författare

This book presents an exploratory study of the Mughal state and its negotiation with local power relations. By studying the state from the perspective of the localities and not from that of the Mughal Court, it shifts the focus from the imperial grid to the local arenas, and more significantly, from 'form' to 'process'. As a result, the book offers a new interpretation of the system of rule based on an appreciation of the local experience of imperial sovereignty, and the inter-connections between the state and the local power relations. The book knits together the systems- and action-theoretic approaches to power, and presents the Mughal state as a dynamic structure in constant change and conflict. The study, based on hitherto unexamined local evidence, highlights the extent to which the interactions between state and society helped to shape the rule structure, the normative system and 'the moral economy of the state'.

This book explores the changing socio–cultural world in early modern South Asia, and locates the agency of the Mughal state therein. The development of literacy and new forms of engagement between literacy and performance prompted the opening up of new spaces of social communication, and led to the development of a performative (and somatic) public sphere in South Asia. The work highlights the significance of legal spaces, along with the markets and coffeehouses, in shaping the emergent public sphere. While defending the case for legal pluralism, it argues that the Mughal state endured and enhanced the diversity in the legal order. Focusing on the socially embedded attributes of the state, it looks at how the state''s relations with the local powers impinged on, and reproduced community identities, identity conflicts, legal pluralism, property relations, and different forms of social communication.

This book opens up an archive of women's verses found in the extant, but overlooked, women's biographical compendia (tazkira-i zenana) written in the nineteenth century. As commemorative texts, these compendia written in Urdu draw our attention to their memories – celebrated and contested – in cultural spaces. In drawing connections between memory and literature, this study contests the commonplace assumption that the literary public sphere was markedly homosocial and gender exclusive, and argues instead that the women poets, coming from a wide variety of social groups, actively participated in shaping the norms of aesthetics and literary expression; they introduced fresh signifiers, and signifying practices to apprehend their emotions, experiences and world-views. This work suggests that the women's tazkiras performed an act of 'epistemic disobedience' contesting not only the British imperial representations of India, but also the Indo-Muslim modern reformers on issues of domesticity, conjugal companionship, and love and desire.