Extract

Abhishek Kaicker’s The King and the People addresses a large historiographic project through a close reading of select episodes in the history of Shahjahanabad (modern Old Delhi). This city was built by the fifth Mughal emperor and centered around a palatial fort and great congregational mosque in the ancient capital region of Delhi. Kaicker suggests that by building the city, Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658) created a potential public. The new geography then enabled the emergence of a tradition of popular political participation that endured until and even after the great uprising of 1857. That year, the arrival of rebellious soldiers from Merath (Meerut), he argues, caused the immediate mobilization of the city’s plebeians (and not its patricians) against the oppressive Christians. This marked “another stage in the movement of sovereignty from the king towards the people.” The uprising in Delhi was ended by the British sack of the city, mass executions, and the deposition of the last emperor Bahadur Shah. But popular desire for sovereignty had a “complicated path” that led to the new constitution adopted in India in 1950 (305–308).

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