“Noble” Friendships: Intimacy, Mobility, and Bureaucrats in the Mughal Empire, 1628–58

This paper foregrounds a certain kind of ‘vertical intimacy’ and friendship of ‘little kings’ with elite Mughal officials to demonstrate the political formation that undergirds the relation between state and locality in the seventeenth-century Mughal empire. While hierarchized loyalty provided the bedrock of this intimacy/ friendship and exalted the status of lesser chieftains, who, in turn, utilized these imperial associations and ranks to consolidate kingship in the localities, I argue that such relationships among various status groups were not limited to the imperial level. Instead, the 'little kings' reproduced such friendship and intimate social relations on the ground level, integrating them into a multilayered power structure in the seventeenth-century Mughal empire.

Mahesdas Rathor (d. 1647), a minor Rajput warrior chief, became a Mughal nobleman within ten years of service. Such meteoritic rises to imperial hierarchy became commonplace for Rajput frontier warriors. In return, figures like Mahesdas gained limited autonomy as 'little kings' in their assigned revenue units in the hinterlands. Such hierarchized relations with the Mughal noblemen contextualized the might of local Rajput rulers within the empire. These rulers of the hinterlands provided military service to the Mughal elites and became close associates in the process. For instance, Mahesdas became known as Mahesdas Mahabat Khani after his recruiter Mahabat Khan. Social status, noble birth, lineage, service, and masculinity determined these uneven friendships' contours.

Drawing on imperial Persian chronicles and a robust vernacular archive across Dingal, Pingal, Marwari, Braj, and Hindi that celebrate such associations between the little kings and the Mughal nobleman, I examine the forms of vertical intimacy that forged diplomatic relations not only between the local kings and the elite empire but also the local kinship network itself. Vertical intimacy emerges in this paper as an anchor to study inter and intra-empire infrastructures of power.