The Rights of Subjects over the Kingdom: Situating the History of Rights in Early Modern South Asia

Abstract

Eighteenth-century critics of the concept of Oriental Despotism understood rights to hold an important place in the governance of Muslim-ruled empires. In asking what we might make of this idea, this article examines a tradition of speaking about the “rights of subjects over the kingdom” in sultanic India from the late fourteenth century onwards. This tradition, drawing to a significant extent from the writings of ‘Ali Hamadānī (d. 1384), articulated normative rights of recipience for sultanic subjects, often embedded in an early Islamic imaginaire. Sketching several iterations of this tradition over five centuries, the article argues that while the critique of the concept of Oriental Despotism, in so far as it dealt with rights, would come to focus centrally on the question of property rights, there was another, less familiar rights tradition that was left thereby in the shadows.