Kaicker, Abhishek creator text The Indian Economic and Social History Review monographic eng

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60(4), Oct-Dec, 2023: p.479-480 Farhat Hasan, Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, xv+155 pp. Perhaps still smarting from Hegel’s dismissal of ‘Hindoo political existence’ as obtaining ‘purely a people, but no state’, for historians of India it has until recently remained a sine qua non to demonstrate the solidity and firmness of the state before colonial rule. The anxieties of post-independence historians about the viability of the national project (to which we might add the fact of their elitism), points out Hasan in the conclusion of the work under review, have led them to focus exclusively on histories which privilege the Mughal state to the exclusion of the society it ruled. Rethinking the nature and place of the state and the arena of its relations with the social world is the object to which this book aspires.- Reproduced https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00194646231203726 The Indian Economic and Social History Review 240207