The “Monopoly of Violence” and the Early Modern State: Remaking of Hindu Warrior Kingship in the Mughal Empire

This paper argues that the relationship between Hindu warriors and military violence changed significantly during the early modern period, contributing to the rise of Hindu kingship within the Mughal Empire. The Mughal Empire (1560s-1720s) was the wealthiest Islamicate Gunpowder Empire (Blake, 2013). The Mughal emperors claimed universal sovereignty and maintained a “monopoly of violence” (Weber, 1978) over much of South Asia by relegating the existing Hindu warrior kings to a vassal status or integrating them into the imperial army. These former kings were able to retain local authority by serving as military administrators in the empire’s hinterlands and frontiers. This political realignment, albeit paradoxically, profoundly impacted Hindu kingship. As Mughal authority became the foundation for exercising political power, the number of Hindu chiefs in the ranks of the Mughal army increased during the seventeenth century. No longer independent rulers, these Hindu leaders commissioned literature that celebrated their engagement with and resilience against significant violence. Within this narrative of kingship, martyrdom gradually emerged as the ideological basis of a redefined Hindu kingship. Hindu kings who died in battle fighting for the Mughals were honored and remembered as martyrs—exemplars of the ideal warrior. In this way, the Hindu kings negotiated their Mughal subjugation by grounding their claims in sacrifice and martyrdom. This process of redefining the relationship between Hindu kingship and violence under the Mughal “monopoly of violence” is not documented in Mughal imperial records. Instead, it becomes evident in this paper as we incorporate a multilingual archive that includes sources across various genres in Persian, Dingal, Pingal, Malvi, Braj, Hindi, and Sanskrit texts, along with ethnographic methods.