Diary of Amar Singh with annotations, commentary, and introduction by DeWitt C. Ellinwood, Jr.

Both an official chronicle and the highly personal memoir of the emperor Babur (1483–1530), The Baburnama presents a vivid and extraordinarily detailed picture of life in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Babur’s honest and intimate chronicle is the first autobiography in Islamic literature, written at a time when there was no historical precedent for a personal narrative—now in a sparkling new translation by Islamic scholar Wheeler Thackston. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes notes, indices, maps, and illustrations. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The book examines major developments and recent trends in the historiography of the Mughal Empire and post-Mughal state systems. The aim is to integrate the research of the past twenty to thirty years in a theoretical framework in order to achieve a better understanding of the transition period of the late 17th and early 18th century in India. The book outlines organizational structures and power relationships in the Mughal Empire and accounts for the redistribution of power on the Indian subcontinent in the context of long-term stuctural change in the Indian Ocean region. Rather than signalling social stagnation and decay, the decline of the imperial order and the transformation of the political system appear to reflect a process in which the state dynamically adjusted to changes in Indian society and economy. By integrating new social groups and incorporating various new technical means of resources mangagement, the state significantly enhanced its organizational power and its capacity for social control.

The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history. Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb’s reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent. Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi’s nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.