Mughal Legacies and Later Adaptations

As Mughal authority weakened in the eighteenth century, regional courts redirected cultural patronage, landholders negotiated with new powers, and Company rule recast some landed offices. In Delhi, the late imperial court continued to sponsor ceremonies, while colonial forces converted palace buildings to military use. Later museums and designers gave manuscripts and ornamental patterns new settings.

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New patrons in Awadh

Avadh, also called Awadh, became an autonomous power during the eighteenth-century weakening of Mughal rule. Its Nawabs, the regional rulers of Avadh, drew writers and artists from Delhi and supported Persian literary culture while Urdu was becoming more widely used for poetry and everyday speech. Under Shuja al-Dawla, who ruled from 1754 to 1775, the court at Faizabad supported poets, jurists and historians. Persian poet Siraj al-Din Ali Khan Arzu received a monthly allowance from the Nawab’s treasury, while two historians, Haricharan Das and Kashi Raj, wrote accounts of his reign in Persian.

The court’s role changed again under Asaf al-Dawla (1775–1797). A subsidiary alliance with the English East India Company put Avadh’s foreign policy, border security and army under British control, while its rulers continued to direct internal administration and cultural patronage. Asaf moved the capital to Lucknow, which became a major destination for writers and artists leaving unsettled regions. Persian remained the court and scholarly language, but Urdu grew in public literary life. During Muharram, the commemoration of Imam Husayn’s death at Karbala, Nawabi sponsorship supported public ceremonies and the Urdu marsiya, an elegy about Husayn and his family. In the nineteenth century, lithographic presses widened the circulation of this literary culture: by the late 1840s, Lucknow and Kanpur had at least twelve private presses producing more than 700 works.

Painting and textile designs under later users

After Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739, painters including Nidha Mal moved to Faizabad and Lucknow. The Metropolitan Museum’s mid-eighteenth-century Prince and Ladies in a Garden, painted by Nidha Mal in Lucknow, sets a royal couple and attendants on a white terrace within a garden. Awadh’s artists worked for courtly patrons and for European traders who collected or commissioned albums, so Persianate, Mughal, Indic and European visual vocabularies met in the same regional workshops.

Textile makers also adapted courtly designs for new settings. The Victoria and Albert Museum identifies Gujarati ari hook embroidery as a seventeenth-century craft prized by both Mughal patrons and European consumers. A much later example is designer Brigitte Singh’s Mughal-inspired poppy coat, made in Jaipur in 2014. It uses block-printed cotton: carvers make wooden printing blocks, and several blocks can be used to build a repeating floral pattern in multiple colours. The Jaipur coat carries a Mughal-inspired flower motif into a contemporary garment.

Land claims and records under Maratha and Company rule

In Malwa, a region of central India, local zamindars, a broad class of landholders and rural powerholders, negotiated with Maratha commanders, leaders of the expanding Maratha polity, as their forces expanded into the area from the late seventeenth century. A grant of 1724 gave Udaji Puwar the right and obligation to collect chauth, a share of revenue, from Malwa and Gujarat and to keep three quarters for troop expenses. The grant reached beyond lands already conquered, so Puwar commanders still had to establish control before they could collect the assigned revenue. Local landholders meanwhile used Persian mahzar-namas, signed records of proceedings, to negotiate with incoming Maratha chiefs in the 1730s. These documents helped them argue for existing entitlements during a change of rulers.

The languages of authority changed alongside those negotiations. Persian continued in house sales, personal letters and legal transactions. Historian Nandini Chatterjee notes Marathi revenue accounts in Modi, a script used for Marathi administrative records, but says they are undated and tentatively places them in the mid-eighteenth century. Puwar orders in Hindi or Rangri used Nagri script, a writing system used for these vernacular orders, while retaining Perso-Arabic administrative phrases. A Hindi and Nagri order directed monthly payments to nine mounted retainers and required them to guard a police post day and night. In the nineteenth century, Dhar became a princely state under British indirect rule, and the archive of the Jayanti Das family, a local landholding family studied by Chatterjee, includes bilingual Hindi-Urdu documents and English petitions. Its papers show how one family carried land, service and property claims across changing authorities and writing systems.

In Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, Company Regulation I of 1793 fixed the public revenue assessment for settled estates. It named zamindars, independent talukdars and other land proprietors; a talukdar held an estate or landholding known as a taluk. The regulation made the settled assessment permanent for the proprietor and heirs, and said individuals receiving land that belonged to the government would keep it at the assessment attached to that transfer. Article VIII separately authorized proprietors to transfer their rights by sale, gift or other means without prior government approval, subject to existing regulations. The text contrasted the new fixed demand with earlier increases and direct government collection from cultivators.

It also separated that revenue settlement from police allowances: Article VII, clause four, allowed government to resume allowances or land revenues assigned to maintain police stations and establishments, because landholders were being relieved of peacekeeping duties as government officers took charge of policing. Historian Nandini Chatterjee describes the 1793 Company decision to define zamindars as absolute proprietors as a major transformation that commodified land, displaced layered countryside rights and demilitarised zamindars. She traces the shift from zamindar-maintained police to Company-directed policing to the 1792 Cornwallis Police Regulations and the order to dismiss zamindar police in Bengal.

The reduced Delhi court and Zafar’s Mehrauli palace

The East India Company took control of Delhi in 1803, while Shah Alam II continued to hold the Mughal title. Bahadur Shah Zafar ruled from 1837 to 1857 with little political power beyond the court, but he remained a poet and patron of Urdu literary life. His Mehrauli summer palace, Zafar Mahal, shows how the late court used an existing family residence for new ceremonial purposes. Zafar’s monumental entrance gate, completed in 1847–48, provided access to the palace complex and its baradari, a pavilion with multiple openings. During the annual Phoolwalon ki Sair, the flower-sellers’ procession to the nearby shrine of a Sufi saint associated with the Chishti order, Zafar moved his court to the building. He also chose a burial place beside earlier Mughal rulers there. Exiled to Rangoon after the uprising of 1857, he could not be buried at the site.

Buildings remade as military sites and public memory

After 1857, British forces occupied the Red Fort, Shah Jahan’s seventeenth-century palace-fort in Delhi. They demolished many palace buildings and replaced them with barracks and other military structures. After independence, the complex gained new public functions. A freedom-struggle museum occupies one of the colonial barrack buildings, and the fort’s ramparts became the setting for India’s annual Independence Day flag ceremony.

At Humayun’s Tomb, conservation altered the visitor’s experience by restoring a working garden water system. In a joint project begun in 1997, the Archaeological Survey of India and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture restored flowing water to the garden between 1997 and 2003. Archaeological research identified underground terracotta pipes, aqueducts, fountains and channels as parts of the Mughal char-bagh, the four-part garden. The restoration reconnected the tomb’s visible garden layout with the hydraulic infrastructure that had once supplied it.

A performed story becomes a museum manuscript

The Mughal emperor Akbar’s court transformed the Hamzanama, or Book of Hamza, from performed adventures into an illustrated written work. The stories of Hamza and his followers had traditionally been performed aloud. Akbar ordered a prose version, which calligraphers copied for the imperial book workshop, or Ketabkhana. Iranian masters and calligraphers worked with Hindustani painters, while court binders assembled the text and large paintings into a set of volumes. The work probably took shape between about 1562 and 1577; contemporary sources describe twelve or fourteen volumes, each with about one hundred paintings.

The book later became a dispersed group of detached images. In 1880–81, V&A curator Caspar Purdon Clarke bought Hamzanama paintings from a shop in Srinagar, where some had been used to block winter frost from the windows. The V&A now holds twenty-eight complete folios and two fragments, separated from the vanished bindings. Each large folio combined paper and cotton layers, with text on backed paper and painting on backed cotton. The museum collection therefore preserves paintings that once worked together with written text and oral storytelling, but now appear as separate works of art.