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The Mughals: Their past, our present

To mark five centuries since Babur’s invasion of Hindustan, the Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature is organizing a conference co-convened by Saman Tariq and Ali Usman Qasmi, bringing scholars together to revisit its political, cultural, and historiographical legacies.

Concept note:
Five hundred years ago, Babur’s march into Hindustan established what came to be known as the Mughal Empire. What followed from this invasion was not a civilizational rupture; the Mughal rule consolidated within an Islamicate milieu shaped by porous boundaries, cultural exchange, and multireligious encounter. Sufi silsilas, Bhakti saints, Jain merchants, European traders, Jesuits, artisans, and peasants shared roads, markets, and imaginations. Trade routes braided distant regions, and craft, devotional, and aesthetic practices shaped sociality and community. If the Islamicate influence gave the Mughal world its peculiar openness, a transregional Persianate and Indic cosmopolis kept its everyday life anchored in a shared moral, administrative, and literary imagination. Persianate norms of governance, ethical conduct, and literary cultivation informed imperial life as the Mughal worldview drew sustenance from indigenous knowledge systems. Its courts and streets were home to multilingual poetry, translational practices, and continuous dialogue between Persian, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Hindwi, and countless other linguistic registers. Likewise, Mughal interactions shaped perceptions of caste, gender, and sexuality that intersected with arenas of diplomacy, patronage, courtly, and domestic power. To emphasize this Islamicate, Persianate, and Indic influence is to recognize that the Mughal dynasty was a node in a cultural and intellectual network spanning Central Asia, Iran, South Asia, and Europe. 

 

Over time, the memory of the Mughal empire has been refracted through sharply contested approaches. Colonial narratives cast the Mughals as despotic outsiders; nationalist movements recode them as civilizational enemies; nostalgic traditions imagine them as a lost golden age. In our moment - shaped by the force of civilizational populisms and a growing Hindutva politics of rage - the Mughals have been transformed into symbolic currency. Their memory is mobilized to draw boundaries of belonging between cultural insiders and outsiders, to authorize exclusionary nationalisms, and to naturalize emerging forms of authoritarian governance.

500 years on, the Gurmani Centre of Languages and Literature at LUMS convenes this conference to reinvigorate discussion about the Mughal past - not to romanticize empire, but to illuminate what futures can be imagined when we read this past beyond civilizational myth, myopic nationalist frames, and homogenizing impulses of the present? We seek to create an interdisciplinary space for rethinking Mughal history as an entry point into plural and democratic futures. This conference invites historians, literary scholars, political theorists, anthropologists, art historians, conservationists, and artists to interrogate competing claims over the Mughal past.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

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• Law, governance, and political thought;

• The Indo-Persianate sphere and its influences;

• Multilingual literary cultures and translation practices

• Trade, mobility, and connected histories;

• Art, aesthetics, and material worlds;

• Gender, sexuality, and intimacy;

• Religion, caste, devotion, piety, and ritualistic practices;

• Heritage, conservation, and politics of preservation;

• Counter-histories of the Mughal empire from below;

• Peasant, laboring lives and peripheral worlds beyond the Mughal court;

• Teaching Mughal history - pedagogical, experimental, and creative interventions;

• Mughal memory in the digital age;

• The futures of Mughal History: democracy, pluralism, and ethics.

 

All paper abstracts (200 words) should be submitted to (gcll.conference@lums.edu.pk or gcll@lums.edu.pk) by February 10, 2026.

 

Convenors:

Ali Usman Qasmi

Director, Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature,
Associate Professor, History,
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

ali.qasmi@lums.edu.pk

 

Saman Tariq Malik

Postdoctoral fellow,

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

saman_malik@lums.edu.pk

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Poster Description:

This poster renders Mughal sovereignty as a resonant absence: a crumbling darbar without an emperor, suspended above fragmented crowds gathered at the margins, watching a centre that no longer coheres. Yet this absence remains politically charged and contested. Across South Asia, and beyond, people continue to interact with the Mughal past through shared material heritage, cultural memory, and inherited aesthetics. This identification is unsettled and confused, shaped by loss, contradiction, and competing claims. The lion bearing the globe evokes displaced power and inherited burdens, revealing a shared yet fractured memory assembled after empire.

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About the Artist:
Abdullah Ahmad is an interdisciplinary researcher, aspiring art historian, and visual artist working with South Asian material culture, archival fragments, and contested histories. His research-led practice explores memory, loss, and inherited meaning across Mughal, Sikh, Jain, and post-Partition contexts.

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