From a Cultural Category to a Territorial Claim: Imaginations of ‘Hindustan’ in Mughal Imperial Discourse

The concept of ‘Hindustan’ in the Mughal period was a cultural category, but one which was also imbued with territoriality. Often in scholarly writings, Hindustan is studied within an exclusive cultural frame of reference, but I hope to argue in my paper that it had political and territorial connotations as well. In diplomatic negotiations across the Islamic world, the Mughal rulers identified their sovereign domain with the cultural and territorial space of Hindustan. I want to see how the idea of Hindustan was invoked by the Mughal rulers in political negotiations with the other early modern Islamic empires to articulate their sovereignty and situate it within a spatial frame of reference.