3 - Society

Summary

To understand the structure of society in Shahjahanabad it is necessary to reexamine the metaphors of sovereign city as mansion and patrimonial-bureaucratic empire as household. The emperor tried to organize urban society on the model of the patriarchal household, attempting to establish in the city the personal control and intimacy which he could not manage in the empire at large. The inhabitants of Shahjahanabad interacted with one another like persons in the household of an extended family. Collateral and cadet branches of the main family might live in outbuildings at some remove from the great house, but all inhabitants of the city were thought to be related, however tenuously, to the great patriarch and to be part of the same household. For the city at large the paradigm was the palace-fortress. The structure of society in the imperial residence, replicated on a smaller scale in the mansions of princes and great amirs, set the pattern for the city as a whole.

Elite quarter

The palaces and mansions of the great men were the central institutions of Shahjahanabad. The glue that held the city together, these organizations typified and distinguished the sovereign city. In the ancient Near East the central urban institution was the temple, in classical Greece the market and temple, in medieval Europe the burg or faubourg and, in the countries of Islamic West Asia, the ethnic quarter. In Mughal India the extended households of emperors, princes, and great amirs comprised a special kind of quarter, the elite quarter.