In the late 1620s, Prince Khurram was serving his punishment posting as governor of Deccan, while his sons were held hostage at the imperial court by his own father, Emperor Jahangir. Prince Khurram, who would eventually assume the imperial Mughal throne as Shah Jahan in 1628, was being punished for armed rebellion, which had also seen him attempting to build a military and political base in the sūba (province) of Malwa, until he was chased across the country by the imperial army and eventually defeated. While embroiled in imperial high politics, Prince Khurram found the time to issue a nishān (a princely order) confirming the appointment of a man called Mohan Das to the post of qānūngō (local official maintaining tax records) of the pargana (district) Dhar.

This chapter introduces the political geography of the region called Malwa in central India: a sultanate from the thirteenth century, a Mughal province from the sixteenth, a Maratha state from the eighteenth, and a British-controlled princely state from the nineteenth. It traces the area of operations of the book's protagonists, relating that area to key commercial and military routes that traversed the region, and the petty Rajput domains that dotted and shaped the territory. The chapter serves to evoke the context of entrenched knots of military-political pwer together with the shifting of empires, within which the family of landlords staked their claims.