Historical Studies Program and Dean of the College Present

Royal Power and a Piece of Bread: Sufi Discipleship and Islamic Patronage in the Maratha Empire

In 1707, after the last great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb died, the power and authority of the Mughal dynasty, which ruled over a substantial part of South Asia for about two hundred years, started to disintegrate. The imperial center's weakening emboldened the nascent regional powers to assert themselves in the emerging political vacuum. The Maratha empire established by Shivaji Bhosale in 1674 was one such important post-Mughal state. It posed a formidable challenge to the political ambitions of the British East India Company in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Conventionally, historians of early colonial and modern India have viewed the rise of Shivaji and the Maratha state as an assertion of Hindu religious orthodoxy. It has been argued that symbolic acts such as the coronation ceremony of Shivaji popularized the notion of caste and Brahmanical caste hierarchy in an unprecedented way which led to the hardening of caste and religious boundaries. This paper will critique the historical interpretations that associate Maratha polity with religious orthodoxy and the Brahmanization of Indian society by highlighting a parallel tradition of Indo-Islamic Sufi discipleship and Dargah worship practiced and patronized by the Maratha aristocracy.

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Time: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Online Event

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