Between Imperial Bookends: An Inquiry into the Histories of Afghan Princely States

There has been a tendency to see the decline of the Mughal Empire and the establishment of British rule in India as twin processes that encapsulate South Asian history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While there has been an acknowledgement of simultaneously occurring political formations such as the Maratha confederacy and the Sikh state, these are for the most part understood as short-lived aberrations. Mughal ‘successor states’ are for the most part surveyed and studied collectively. This paper is part of an attempt to revise these historiographical shortcomings.

 

This paper investigates the histories and political ideologies of Afghan princely states (c. 1750 – c. 1950). There has been a long history of an Afghan political activity in South Asia particularly since the days of the Lodi Sultanate. During the early modern period, Afghan power brokers and rulers were present both within and outside the Mughal Empire: they ruled over small kingdoms in Bengal and Orissa, operated from power centers in the Deccan sultanates, and the Afghan Sur state posed a significant challenge to Mughal imperium. How then, during the twilight years of Mughal rule, did the Afghan political presence in the subcontinent change? We find that Pashtun leaders from different tribes (khels) briefly controlled Kashmir and established the states of Rohillkhand, Tonk, and two lesser-known principalities in the Deccan. On the basis of regional ethnographies, geographies, histories and biographical accounts, I focus on the ways in which the Afghan antecedents of the states of Bhopal and Tonk figure in the histories of these regions. How long is it before Afghan mobile groups are remembered as ‘settled’ rulers? In what ways did these Afghan princely states relate to Mughal sovereignty, and to other successor states? I use manuscripts and lithographs in Persian and Urdu to address some of these questions.