Can petitions serve as epistolary spaces in which the sacro-political authority of emperors is negotiated by scions of long-venerated Sufi lineages? In this seminar I will read thirteen letters penned by Abdullah Khan Firuz Jang (d. 1644), a Turanian émigré to Mughal Hindustan. As a nobleman and commander, Firuz Jang composed these letters as battlefield reports covering the Second Orchha Campaign (1635-1636), which he led. Yet these are complex texts that combine the waqi’a (report) with the arzadasht (petition). In each letter, Firuz Jang petitions Emperor Shah Jahan on behalf of a different member of his ta’ifa (faction), invoking a precedent established two centuries earlier by his illustrious ancestor, Khwaja Ubayd Allah Ahrar, who served as a patron saint of the early Mughals and their Timurid forebears. A close reading of these letters reveals a third dimension to their composition. As ego-documents, they allow Firuz Jang to position himself simultaneously as heir to the reverence traditionally afforded to Ahrar by Mughal emperors such as Shah Jahan and as Shah Jahan’s own disciple in an imperial Sufi order. The letters thus create a space where competing forms of sacro-political authority could be both articulated and negotiated, prompting a rethinking of the categories of the religious and the political in contexts where such boundaries remained fluid.
