7 - Bringing the Sarkār Back In

Summary

This chapter posits the Persian term “sarkār” as an emic counterpart for a Weberian neologism often applied to the Mughal empire (1526-1858), namely that of the “patrimonial-bureaucratic” state. Tracing the word from its origins in fifteenth-century Timurid Central Asia to the Mughal empire’s formation and expansion in South Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it argues that sarkār came to denote an elite household and its military and administrative appendages. More importantly, the chapter shows that the word also began to be used as a metonym for the Mughal “state.” Within this formulation, however, the sarkār as “state” remained only loosely differentiated from the imperial household itself, an ambiguity that persisted as breakaway satrapies appropriated the term for their own regimes in the mid-eighteenth century. Only when the British East India Company adopted the term for its own burgeoning polity and imposed reified notions of statehood on its Indian allies was the sarkār fully identified with a unitary state. Through this survey, the chapter suggests a method for both historicizing notions of statehood in early modern and early colonial South Asia and for retaining the comparative utility of Weberian analytic categories.