Monuments such as Humayun’s tomb (built 1562–71), Fatehpur Sikri (commenced in 1571), and the Taj Mahal (built 1632–43) have today become so iconic of Mughal architecture that we often forget how peripatetic were the courts and bodies of the Mughals. Built to endure the ravages of time – that is, both climate and changing political fortunes – Mughal monuments, with their durable materials, imposing dimensions, and eye-catching ornament, assert a fixity that was little known in the lives of those who commissioned them. As Carla Sinopoli has shown, throughout most of its history the Mughal Empire was ruled from multiple capitals across which the emperor moved.1 Delhi, Lahore, and Agra were arguably among the most important of these cities, and the court’s movement from one to another responded as much to changes in season as to their strategic positioning for military, spiritual, and diplomatic encounters. Thus, for example, Akbar (r. 1556–1605) famously moved the capital in 1571 to Fatehpur Sikri, a palace-city that he built around the shrine of the Chishti saint Shaykh Salim, who had predicted the birth of the Emperor’s son and heir. However, Akbar’s residence there was short-lived, as he moved the capital in 1585 to Lahore to fight challengers who had emerged in the northwest.2 From 1639 to 1648, Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), who had complained that the narrow and crowded streets of Agra were unsuitable for ceremonial procession, transformed Delhi into a theatre suitable for the performance of imperial power.3 The seventeenth-century architecture of Delhi – especially the jharoka windows (overhanging balconies or oriel windows), audience halls, and processional plan of the Red Fort – served to foreground the body of the emperor as a site of sovereignty through choreographed, ceremonial displays to his subjects.4 Following its inauguration as a capital by Shah Jahan, Delhi remained the primary seat of the Mughal emperor.

And yet, even with the increased uniformity and formalization of architecture and courtly ritual at Delhi, the emperor and his sovereign power remained mobile. If in the early days of the empire the imperial tent and camp served the needs of a mobile court, from the reign of Akbar onwards they also asserted the sovereign status of its chief occupant. Such confluence of mobility and sovereignty at the imperial tent became especially significant in the eighteenth century, as regional powers rose in north India and the Deccan on the heels of an increasingly fragmented Mughal authority. This essay traces some of the uses of the Lal Dera (‘red tent’, plate 1) by the Maharaja of Jodhpur, Abhai Singh (r. 1724–49), in the early-to-mid-eighteenth century. The tent allowed Singh to present his sub-imperial court as an ascendant albeit Mughal-authorized power in north India. By highlighting the importance of a mobile object like the Lal Dera as a material object in which sovereign power is embodied and through which it is communicated, the essay argues that mobility was inherent to the configuration of kingship in north India rather than merely a symptom of Mughal ‘decline’.5

• 1. Carla Sinopoli, ‘Monumentality and mobility in Mughal capitals’, Asian Perspectives, 33: Fall 1994, 293–308.
• 2. Catherine Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge, 1992, 51–2.
• 3. Catherine Asher, ‘Sub-imperial palaces: Power and authority in Mughal India’, Ars Orientalis, 23, 1993, 281.
• 4. Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra, London, 2006, 83–4. For a discussion of the pre-Mughal appearance of jharokas in Rajasthan, see Giles Tillotson, The Rajput Palaces: The Development of an Architectural Style, 1450–1750, New Haven and London, 1987, 14–9.
• 5. Within the historiography of South Asia, a debate continues regarding the political, economic, and cultural climate of the eighteenth century Mughal Empire, and whether or not this period should be treated as one of decline or fragmentation. The two, opposing positions are usefully summarized in Z. U. Malik, ‘Financial problems of the Mughal government during Farrukh Siyar’s reign’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 4, July 1967, 265–75, and Satish Chandra, ‘Social and attitudinal change in medieval India: Thirteenth–seventeenth century’, Indian Historical Review, 36: 1, 2009, 23–35. For a comprehensive discussion of Mughal cultural patronage in this purported era of decline, see Yuthika Sharma and William Dalrymple, eds, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857, New York, 2012.