GCLL Annual Conference - May 2026

11 & 12th May 2026 | LUMS

The Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature at LUMS hosted its Annual Conference 2026, titled “The Mughals: Their Past, Our Present,” on May 11 and 12, 2026. Marking nearly five centuries of Mughal history, the conference brought together scholars, researchers, artists, and practitioners to examine the enduring presence of the Mughal past in South Asia and beyond.

The conference approached the Mughal world not simply as a closed historical period, but as a continuing archive of political imagination, aesthetic practice, religious negotiation, spatial memory, and cultural inheritance. It asked how the Mughal past continues to shape contemporary debates around sovereignty, pluralism, identity, language, art, heritage, and regional memory. Across eight panels and a keynote address, the conference explored the Mughal world through textual traditions, visual culture, architecture, law, political theology, material objects, regional histories, and contemporary artistic practices.

Day One

The first panel, “Sulh-i Kull: Beyond the Mughals: Islam and Secularism in Comparative Perspective,” opened the conference by situating Mughal political and religious thought within a wider comparative framework of sovereignty, ritual, accommodation, and secular/religious negotiation. Moderated by Ali Usman Qasmi, the panel brought together papers by Alex Kreger, Aneeq Ejaz, Rao Mohsin Noor, and Syed Baqar Mehdi, each of whom approached the Mughal past through questions of authority, pluralism, religious distinction, and political legitimacy. Rather than treating Mughal pluralism as an isolated imperial ideal, the panel examined how concepts such as sulh-i kull, sacred kingship, oath-making, conversion, and courtly praise participated in broader debates about coexistence, belonging, and rule. Alex Kreger’s paper, “Accommodating Unbelief: Oaths of Peace and Secularism between Mughal Sulh-i Kull and Alevi Ikrar,” explored how ritual forms such as oaths could produce ethical and political arrangements of peace across religious difference. The paper raised the question of how communities imagine coexistence beyond strict doctrinal boundaries and how ritual commitments can become forms of social and political accommodation. Aneeq Ejaz’s paper, “Conversion Ritual for a Postcolonial State: Jinnah, the Mughals, and the Problem of Religious Distinction in Pakistan,” moved the discussion from the Mughal world to the postcolonial state, asking how older questions of religious identity, conversion, and communal distinction continue to shape Pakistan’s political imagination. His paper connected Mughal histories of religious negotiation with modern problems of state formation, citizenship, and the legal marking of religious difference. Rao Mohsin Noor’s paper, “Viewing Istanbul from Delhi: The Sacred Kingship of Ottoman Sultan Murad III in Comparative Perspective,” placed Mughal sovereignty in conversation with Ottoman models of kingship, examining how imperial legitimacy was constructed through ritual, theology, sacred symbolism, and courtly authority across two major Islamic empires. Syed Baqar Mehdi’s paper, “Praising the King, Praising the Sun: Two Neoplatonic Panegyrics for Akbar at the Turn of the Islamic Millennium,” turned to the philosophical and poetic dimensions of kingship by analyzing how Akbar’s authority was articulated through Neoplatonic imagery of light, order, and cosmic harmony. Taken together, the panel opened a rich set of questions: how did Mughal political theology negotiate difference; how was kingship sacralized without being reducible to narrow religious authority; how did ritual, poetry, and political language produce legitimacy; and how do these early modern debates continue to resonate in contemporary South Asian discussions on secularism, pluralism, religious identity, and the state.

The second panel, “Memory and Its Empire: Mughal Afterlives in South Asia and Beyond,” focused on the many ways in which Mughal memory has survived, travelled, and been reinterpreted across architecture, visual culture, literature, artistic training, and colonial knowledge production. Moderated by Saman Tariq Malik, the panel brought together papers by Hasan Nisar, Mehreen Chida-Razvi, Nomanul Haq, and Tayyab Khan, each of whom explored a different afterlife of the Mughal past and asked how imperial memory is preserved, transformed, contested, or repurposed across changing historical contexts. Hasan Nisar’s paper, “Engraving Mughal India in 17th Century,” examined European visual representations of Mughal India, particularly the role of early modern engravings in shaping distant perceptions of the Mughal world. His paper raised important questions about how images travelled across regions, how European audiences came to imagine India through visual forms, and how such representations contributed to the formation of imperial and colonial knowledge about South Asia. Mehreen Chida-Razvi’s paper, “Standing Stones, Written Words: Mughal Architecture as South Asian Memory,” approached Mughal architecture as a living archive in which buildings, inscriptions, and spatial arrangements preserve historical memory while also becoming sites of later political, cultural, and emotional interpretation. Her paper asked how monuments continue to speak across time, and how architectural remains function not merely as aesthetic objects but as repositories of memory, authority, and identity. Nomanul Haq’s paper, “‘Go to London, that Illuminated Garden’: Ghalib’s Counterpoint of the Mughal Past and the Future of the Dominion,” explored literary nostalgia and the imaginative movement between Mughal India and imperial Britain, considering how the Mughal past entered literary expression as both memory and critique. His paper opened up questions about colonial modernity, longing, displacement, and the ways in which literary texts use the Mughal past to reflect on the future of empire and dominion. Tayyab Khan’s paper, “Zauq-i Nigāh: Habitus, Period Eye, and the Adaptive Tradition of Ustad Haji Mohammad Sharif,” turned to artistic pedagogy, inherited visual habits, and the training of perception. By focusing on the adaptive tradition of Ustad Haji Mohammad Sharif, the paper examined how Mughal visual sensibilities continued not only through preserved artworks but also through practices of looking, learning, making, and transmitting aesthetic knowledge. Taken together, the panel demonstrated that Mughal memory survives in multiple and layered forms: in monuments and inscriptions, in European engravings and colonial visual archives, in literary nostalgia and critique, and in artistic habits passed from one generation to another. It showed that the Mughal past remains active not simply as heritage, but as a field of interpretation through which questions of memory, empire, visuality, pedagogy, and cultural belonging continue to be negotiated.

The third panel, “Spatial Pasts and Geographies: Landscapes that Remember Empire,” explored Mughal space, geography, landscape, and memory by treating landscapes not as passive settings for imperial history, but as active archives that preserve traces of movement, sovereignty, migration, architecture, ecological imagination, and regional belonging. Moderated by Fizza Sajjad, the panel brought together papers by Hafiz Amir Ali, James Wescoat, M. Abdullah, and Shahnawaz Afzal, each of whom examined how Mughal power and memory were shaped through spatial experience and geographical imagination. Hafiz Amir Ali’s paper, “Connected Geographies of Early Mughal Sovereignty: Reading North India through Sidi Ali Reis’s Mir’at al-Mamalik,” examined early Mughal sovereignty through the lens of travel writing and connected geographies. By reading North India through Sidi Ali Reis’s account, the paper raised questions about mobility, transregional networks, maritime and overland routes, and the ways in which Mughal India may be understood within wider Afro-Eurasian circuits rather than as a self-contained imperial formation. James Wescoat’s paper, “Waterscapes of Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama: The Tactics of Mughal History, Painting and Geography in Lahore,” focused on water, landscape, painting, and imperial imagination, showing how waterscapes in Mughal historical writing and visual culture were not merely descriptive details but important instruments for organizing political, spatial, and symbolic meaning. His paper asked how geography and visual representation worked together in the production of imperial authority, particularly in relation to Lahore and its surrounding landscapes. M. Abdullah’s paper, “Bagh, Burj and Baradari: Mughal Architectural Imaginations in the Spatial Imagination of Punjabi Folk Songs,” shifted attention from courtly and administrative archives to Punjabi oral and folk traditions. By tracing the presence of Mughal architectural forms such as the garden, tower, and pavilion in Punjabi folk songs, the paper explored how imperial spaces entered regional poetic memory and became part of everyday cultural imagination. Shahnawaz Afzal’s paper, “Gardens of Memory: Babar, Migration and Ethnobotany,” examined Babar’s memories of landscape, plants, gardens, and migration, connecting the beginnings of Mughal imperial history with ecological memory, displacement, longing, and the emotional geography of cultivated spaces. Taken together, the panel opened a rich set of questions about how empires inhabit landscapes, how mobility produces sovereignty, how water, gardens, and architecture become carriers of memory, and how regional traditions remember imperial forms in their own idioms. It showed that Mughal landscapes were not merely conquered, governed, or monumentalized spaces; they were also travelled through, painted, sung, cultivated, emotionally remembered, and continuously reimagined across textual, visual, ecological, and oral traditions.

The fourth panel, “Beyond the Court Chronicle: Adab, Gender and Mughal Historiography,” moved beyond conventional court chronicles and official imperial records to examine gendered memory, literary self-fashioning, poetry, affective narration, and alternative modes of writing Mughal history. Moderated by Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo, the panel brought together papers by Faraz Anjum and Manahil Raza, both of whom foregrounded the importance of women’s voices, literary expression, and non-official archives in complicating dominant narratives of Mughal political history. Faraz Anjum’s paper, “Memorializing the Mughal Past: Filial Loyalty and Imperial Identity in Gulbadan’s Humayun-Nama,” explored Gulbadan Begum’s Humayun-Nama not simply as a historical account, but as a work shaped by memory, kinship, loyalty, and dynastic consciousness. The paper raised important questions about how familial affection, personal recollection, and imperial identity intersect in Mughal women’s writing, and how Gulbadan’s narrative expands the archive of Mughal historiography by offering perspectives that are intimate, affective, and politically meaningful. Manahil Raza’s paper, “Princess Zebunisa’s Poetry: A Balance of Expression and Expectation,” turned to the poetic world of Zebunisa and examined how a Mughal princess negotiated the tensions between literary creativity, spiritual reflection, gendered expectation, and courtly constraint. Her paper asked how poetry could become a space of self-expression within structures of power, and how Zebunisa’s literary voice reveals the complex relationship between gender, authorship, piety, and imperial belonging. Taken together, the panel expanded the methodological scope of Mughal studies by showing that Mughal history cannot be understood only through imperial chronicles, administrative documents, military campaigns, or the actions of male rulers and courtiers. It must also be read through women’s writings, poetry, familial memory, literary subjectivity, and the emotional registers through which imperial life was remembered and represented. In this sense, the panel demonstrated that adab and gender are not peripheral to Mughal historiography; they are central to understanding how the Mughal past was narrated, preserved, and reimagined from within the household, the literary sphere, and the intimate spaces of empire.

The day one ended with the keynote address by Professor Jamal J. Elias, titled “A Voice Like Persian: Maulana Rumi and Nostalgia for a Literary Past,” offered a major intellectual anchor for the conference. This session was moderated by Professor Nomanul Haq. It examined the contemporary reception of Jalaluddin Rumi in Pakistan and South Asia, especially the ways in which Rumi has been remembered, translated, appropriated, and reimagined within modern literary and cultural discourse.

The central thematic concern of the keynote was nostalgia for a Persianate literary past. Professor Elias considered how Rumi, as a figure of Persian mystical and poetic authority, continues to occupy a powerful place in South Asian imagination. However, this remembrance is not neutral. It raises important questions about what kind of past is being recovered, who claims that past, and how literary memory is reshaped by modern cultural, linguistic, and national contexts. The keynote asked several significant questions:

How does Rumi function as a symbol of a lost or desired literary world? What does the contemporary fascination with Rumi reveal about changing relationships with Persian, Urdu, and regional languages? How is the Persianate past remembered in a postcolonial South Asia where language, identity, and nationhood have been reorganized along modern political lines? And how does nostalgia shape our understanding of literary inheritance?

The keynote was deeply relevant to the broader conference theme, “The Mughals: Their Past, Our Present.” The Mughal world was inseparable from the Persianate cultural sphere. Persian was not only a courtly language but also a medium of philosophy, poetry, administration, aesthetics, and transregional exchange. By focusing on Rumi’s afterlife, the keynote illuminated how the Mughal-Persianate world continues to haunt the present as memory, aspiration, loss, and cultural resource.

In present-day South Asia, debates around language, heritage, religion, and identity remain deeply charged. Persian has largely receded from formal institutional life, yet Persianate memory continues to shape Urdu literary culture, Sufi traditions, popular spirituality, and ideas of refinement and cosmopolitanism. The keynote therefore invited the audience to think about how societies remember the past not only through archives and monuments, but also through longing, quotation, translation, and literary desire.

In this sense, Professor Elias’s keynote did not merely revisit Rumi as a historical figure. It used Rumi to ask how the past survives in the present, how cultural inheritance is selectively remembered, and how nostalgia can both preserve and transform historical memory. The address powerfully connected the Mughal past with contemporary questions of literary belonging, linguistic loss, and the politics of cultural memory.

Day Two

The fifth panel, “Off-Centre Regional Worlds and the Rewriting of Mughal Power,” shifted the focus away from imperial centres and courtly narratives toward regional worlds, local archives, peripheral formations, and the varied ways in which Mughal authority was experienced, adapted, contested, and reworked across different political and social landscapes. The panel brought together papers by Ammar Zaidi, Humera Naz, Kamini Masood, and M. Shafiq, each of whom examined Mughal power from the vantage point of local institutions, regional memory, documentary practices, ecological geographies, and frontier politics. Ammar Zaidi’s paper, “Paperality, Forgeries, and Property Magnates: Bureaucratization in a Mughal Qasbah, 1639–1756,” explored the documentary world of a Mughal qasbah, focusing on paperwork, property claims, forgery, and bureaucratic practices as instruments through which local authority and social power were organized. His paper raised important questions about how documents produced legitimacy, how bureaucratic systems operated at the local level, and how property, record-keeping, and manipulation of paperwork shaped relations between state structures and local elites. Humera Naz’s paper, “Governance and Grievance: Using Primary Texts to Understand the Evolution of Political Narratives and Identity Construction in Sindh,” examined Sindh through primary textual sources, asking how political narratives, grievances, and regional identities evolved under and beyond Mughal authority. Her paper foregrounded the relationship between governance and local memory, showing how communities articulated political claims and shaped regional belonging through textual traditions. Kamini Masood’s paper, “Six Rivers Met in Punjab, Six Rivers Meet in a Place,” reflected on Punjab as a layered historical and spatial formation, connecting rivers, place, memory, and regional identity. Her paper treated landscape not merely as geography, but as a repository of cultural memory and historical experience, where ecological formations and human belonging intersect. M. Shafiq’s paper, “Between Wilayat and Mumlikat: Tribal and Religious Trends and Mughal Authority in Kabul-Peshawar Province,” examined the Kabul-Peshawar region as a frontier zone where Mughal sovereignty interacted with tribal structures, religious affiliations, and local political formations. His paper raised questions about how imperial authority was negotiated in regions where tribal autonomy, religious networks, and frontier politics complicated centralized rule. Taken together, the panel emphasized that Mughal power was never uniform, absolute, or simply imposed from the centre. Rather, it was continuously mediated through local documents, regional identities, ecological landscapes, tribal formations, religious structures, and provincial political cultures. The panel therefore expanded the conference’s broader inquiry into the Mughal past by showing that empire must also be understood through its off-center worlds, where sovereignty was translated into local practices, contested through regional histories, and remembered through diverse forms of social and political experience.

The sixth panel, “Across Time and Tongue: Texts, Interpretation, and the Indo-Persian Literary Imagination,” focused on translation, textuality, Persian literary culture, storytelling, and the long afterlives of Indo-Persian memory. The panel brought together papers by Atif Khalid Butt, Daniyal Channa, Eva Orthmann, Mariam Zia, Muhammad Nauman and Faham Zeeshan, each of whom examined the Mughal world as a multilingual and interpretive space where texts travelled across languages, communities, courts, genres, and historical moments. Atif Khalid Butt’s paper, “Translation of Religious Texts and Social Inclusivity in the Mughal Empire,” explored translation as a mode of intellectual exchange and social engagement, asking how the translation of religious texts enabled dialogue across traditions and contributed to forms of inclusivity within Mughal cultural and political life. His paper raised broader questions about how translation functioned not merely as a linguistic act, but as a practice of mediation, interpretation, and cross-cultural understanding. Daniyal Channa’s paper, “Matters of State: Urfi Shirazi and the Rhetoric of Persian Newness,” examined Persian literary innovation in relation to political expression and statecraft. By focusing on Urfi Shirazi, the paper considered how the rhetoric of “newness” in Persian poetry and prose could become a way of articulating power, aesthetic distinction, and imperial imagination. Eva Orthmann’s paper, “Self-representation and Power in the Ma’āsir-i Rahīmī: A Compiled Source and its Intentions,” turned to the politics of compilation, authorship, and textual intention in a Mughal-era source. Her paper asked how texts construct authority, how self-representation operates within compiled works, and how literary production becomes part of political culture. Mariam Zia’s paper, “Akbar’s Hamzanama in Painting and Storytelling,” focused on one of the most celebrated narrative and visual projects of the Mughal court, examining the relationship between painting, storytelling, performance, and imperial imagination. The paper highlighted how narrative and image worked together to create a rich world of meaning, spectacle, and cultural memory. Muhammad Nauman Farhan Zaheer’s paper, “Afterlives of Qais and Laila: Mughal Memory and Indo-Persian Poetics from Iqbal to Contemporary Anglophone Poetry,” traced the continuing life of Indo-Persian poetic figures across modern literary traditions, connecting Mughal memory with Iqbal, contemporary Anglophone poetry, and the broader inheritance of Indo-Persian poetics. Taken together, the panel showed that Mughal textual traditions were never fixed or confined to a single language, genre, or historical period. They moved across time and tongue: through translation, compilation, poetic innovation, visual storytelling, and modern literary adaptation. The panel therefore expanded the conference’s central concern with Mughal afterlives by demonstrating how the Indo-Persian literary imagination continues to shape questions of interpretation, memory, aesthetics, language, and cultural belonging in South Asia and beyond.

The seventh panel, “Circulating Empire: Texts, Objects, and the Persianate Mughal World,” examined the Mughal world as a mobile, interconnected, and transregional cultural sphere shaped by the circulation of objects, images, manuscripts, diplomatic practices, architectural forms, artistic techniques, and miniature traditions. The panel brought together papers by Ana Nasir, Lola Cindric Fouzia Farooq Ahmed, and Mahreen Zuberi each of whom approached Mughal history through movement, exchange, displacement, and afterlife rather than through a fixed territorial understanding of empire. Ana Nasir’s paper, “Imperial Excess: Sound, Ceremony, and Architecture — Reimagining the Naqqar Khana of Lahore Fort through Mughal Miniatures,” explored the relationship between sound, ceremony, architecture, and visual evidence by reading Mughal miniatures alongside the architectural space of the Naqqar Khana at Lahore Fort. Her paper raised questions about how imperial authority was not only seen but also heard and performed, and how ceremonial soundscapes, architectural settings, and visual representations together shaped the sensory experience of Mughal sovereignty. Lola Cindric’s paper, “Setting Imperial Prestige in Stone: Mughal Parchin Kārī and its Appropriations Across the Subcontinent,” examined Mughal stone inlay work and its later adaptations, asking how artistic prestige travelled across regions, periods, and architectural contexts. His paper foregrounded the afterlife of Mughal craftsmanship and showed how techniques associated with imperial authority were appropriated, transformed, and re-situated across the subcontinent. Fouzia Farooq Ahmed’s paper, “Mobile Sovereignty and Inter-Imperial Networks: Re-reading Mughal Diplomacy Beyond Territorial Paradigms,” challenged the idea of empire as a purely territorial formation and instead proposed mobility, diplomacy, envoys, and inter-imperial networks as key frameworks for understanding Mughal sovereignty. Her paper asked how power moved through diplomatic exchange, ceremonial encounters, and political communication across imperial worlds. Mahreen Zuberi’s paper, “Undoing the Sacred/Secular Divide: Contemporary Miniature Painting as Restorative Practice,” brought Mughal miniature traditions into conversation with contemporary artistic practice, exploring how miniature painting can unsettle modern divisions between the sacred and the secular while restoring older modes of seeing, making, and meaning. Her paper raised important questions about the continuing relevance of Mughal visual traditions in contemporary art and their capacity to recover forms of perception marginalized by modern categories. Taken together, the panel highlighted circulation as a central feature of Mughal history and its afterlives. It showed that Mughal texts, objects, images, artistic techniques, diplomatic practices, and visual forms moved across courts, regions, collections, and historical periods, continually generating new political, aesthetic, and ethical questions. In doing so, the panel expanded the conference’s larger theme by showing that the Mughal past remains present not only in monuments and texts, but also in circulating objects, displaced folios, inherited artistic practices, and contemporary debates around heritage, ownership, memory, and interpretation.

The final panel, “Ambivalent Last: Ethics, Sovereignty and Unfinished Pluralisms,” returned to the ethical, legal, and political questions that had shaped the conference from its opening session: pluralism, sovereignty, law, religion, governance, intellectual openness, and the unresolved possibilities of the Mughal past. The panel brought together papers by Simra Sohail, Tahir Kamran, Zahra Sabri, and Zubair Abbasi, each of whom examined Mughal history as a field of complexity rather than as a source of settled conclusions or simple models for the present. Simra Sohail’s paper, “Governing without Codification—Legal Pluralism and Administrative Order in Mughal India,” examined Mughal legal practice beyond the assumption that effective governance necessarily depends on centralized codification. Her paper raised important questions about how administrative order was produced through legal plurality, negotiation, flexibility, and the coexistence of multiple normative systems. It showed that Mughal governance cannot be understood only through the modern expectation of uniform legal codes, but must be read through practices of mediation, adjustment, and layered authority. Tahir Kamran’s paper, “Intellectual Radicalism and Pluralist Possibilities in Mughal India,” explored figures such as Shah Hussain Sarmad and Dara Shikoh to examine the radical intellectual and mystical possibilities within the Mughal world. His paper considered how antinomian mysticism, translation, philosophical inquiry, and interreligious engagement opened spaces for shared thought and pluralist imagination, while also emphasizing the fragility of these possibilities under changing political and religious pressures. Zahra Sabri’s paper, “Kingly Religiosity and Alcohol Consumption: A Case Study of Mughal Emperors,” examined the tension between royal conduct, religious norms, imperial self-fashioning, and moral authority by focusing on alcohol consumption among Mughal emperors. Her paper complicated simplified assumptions about piety and kingship, asking how rulers negotiated personal practice, public religiosity, ethical expectation, and sovereign image. Zubair Abbasi’s paper, “Imperial Shariah, Al Fatawa Al Alamgiriyah as Legal Code in Mughal India,” investigated the relationship between textual traditions, legal thought, and imperial governance, considering how historical and administrative texts could acquire legal and political significance within the Mughal context. Taken together, the final panel was especially significant because it brought the conference back to contemporary concerns without reducing the Mughal past to a direct lesson for the present. It showed that Mughal history remains relevant because it offers a complex archive for thinking about legal pluralism, ethical sovereignty, religious distinction, intellectual dissent, and coexistence. In a time when questions of identity, belonging, religious difference, and political authority remain deeply urgent, the panel suggested that the Mughal past should be approached as an ambivalent and unfinished field of inquiry—one that allows us to think critically about the promises and limits of pluralism, the relationship between law and power, and the ethical demands of governing diverse societies.

Across two days, “The Mughals: Their Past, Our Present” created a wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversation on the Mughal past and its continuing afterlives. The conference moved across imperial courts, regional worlds, textual traditions, architectural spaces, visual cultures, legal orders, ecological landscapes, and contemporary artistic practices. It showed that the Mughal past is not a static inheritance but an active field of memory, debate, and reinterpretation. The conference’s central contribution lay in its refusal to treat Mughal history as either mere nostalgia or a finished imperial archive. Instead, it opened the Mughal world as a space for rethinking present-day questions of pluralism, sovereignty, language, memory, artistic inheritance, regional identity, and cultural belonging. From sulh-i kull to legal pluralism, from Persianate literary nostalgia to contemporary miniature painting, and from Mughal landscapes to displaced folios in global museums, the conference demonstrated that the Mughal past continues to shape how we imagine South Asia’s present and future.