The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb from the late 17th century is remembered for his inflexible Islamic administrative attitude towards regional satraps and dependents, which prompted the Hindu and Sikh nobility across a wide swathe of north and central India to take consequential autonomous actions especially after his death. In the process, new patterns of agrarian patronage developed. These included shifting roles of elites in providing credit, grain and tools to peasants; ‘contracting out’ labour for farm and non-farm work; massive expenditures on the military and mercenaries alongside the recruitment of peasants as irregular soldiers; lien or revenue demands and collection by independent peasant-warrior groups such as Jats and Marathas; and the rise of an intermediate economy of artisan, military and commercial services. These changes gave small towns a new resilience while also restructuring the agrarian economy, giving rise to emergent social groups that were principally organised around trade, clientelism and caste-shaped patriarchy.  

 

While many of these complex developments have been brilliantly portrayed in Christopher Bayly’s Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, this paper builds on that context to write a largely speculative footnote around the formation of new masculinities and urbanisms within the modernizing timeframe of the 18th and early 19th centuries in South Asia. Using other accounts from the region, including histories of private life, I argue that these elements of colonial North India’s founding moments were also constitutive of longer legacies that leave their mark on politics and space even today.