The Shoemakers’ Riot and the Limits of Popular Politics

Abstract In 1729, a minor clash between a group of Muslim shoemakers and a Hindu jeweler in the streets of the city spiraled into an extraordinary urban tumult that led to fierce fighting and much bloodshed in the courtyard of the city’s congregational mosque. Offering a detailed study of the shoemakers’ riot, as the event came to be known, this chapter explores the possibilities—and the limits—of everyday popular politics in the Delhi of the early eighteenth century. Despite their artifactual nature, accounts of the riot offer invaluable insight into the actions and intentions of the city’s lowest inhabitants at a moment of urban crisis, and the goal of the historical reconstruction in this chapter will be to illuminate the tangled happenings of March 1729, while still preserving the multiplicity of meanings assigned to them. The shoemakers’ agitation cannot be neatly subsumed into the standard categories of economic conflict or sectarian hatred that have given us the conventional understanding of the period. Instead of closing the meanings of the event in narratives of “larger significance,” this chapter attempts to behold the city of the eighteenth century from the eyes of the shoemaker.