Who was Jawhar Aftabachi and what do his life and work tell us about sixteenth-century Mughal India? Scholars of early modern South Asia might once have considered these questions simple, and answered: an enslaved ewer-bearer (aftaba-chi) of the Mughal emperor Humayun (r. 1530–40, 1555–56), Jawhar wrote in later life the Persian-language Tazkirah-i Vaqi’at (1587), a ‘memoir’ of his master’s tumultuous reign that modern historians have long considered a key source for early Mughal history. Yet in his rich—and often provocative—new micro-history, Ali Anooshahr casts a fresh eye on Jawhar Aftabachi, using his deep knowledge of sixteenth-century Turkish and Persian sources to shed new light on his subject’s ‘life and thoughts’. In so doing, he not only reveals far more about Jawhar as a historical figure, but he also makes a powerful case for rethinking the history of slavery and imperial service in early Mughal India by advancing two central arguments. First, challenging the commonly held view that military slavery was not an important aspect of Mughal state building, he asserts that Jawhar was part of a brief but significant resurgence of elite military slavery in North India during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Secondly, Anooshahr maintains that Jawhar’s memoir sat in the vanguard of new, ‘subaltern’ modes of first-person writing in Persian, which, in turn, reflected emerging forms of individualised subjectivity precipitated by the formation of a centralising, bureaucratic state and by a new cult of imperial service as much fashioned from below as emanating from the imperial court above.
Nicholas J Abbott (Tue,) studied this question.