Freedom of speech and expression is a critical indicator of the health of any society and guarantee of such freedom is integral to democracy. Yet, does a legal or constitutional guarantee necessarily translate into lived experience? One of the ways to measure freedoms is to examine the treatment meted by the State to literary and cultural dissent and resistance. In this session, we examine the status of free speech and expression in Mughal India by focussing on the treatment of dissenting and irreverent poets. Though modern India positions herself as the world's largest democracy guaranteeing to her citizens freedom of speech and expression, in practice her writers are fettered in multiple ways. In contrast, even at the pinnacle of the allegedly authoritarian Mughal rule, the plenitude of dissenting and irreverent literature produced suggests that, while applicable laws may have been illiberal, practice was rather free. Is a professedly secular democracy giving her writers a shorter licence to disagree than ostensibly intolerant monarchies of the past?

Saif Mahmood is an Indian legal scholar, Supreme Court Advocate, author, translator, public speaker and traveller. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Constitutional Law and his works on Islamic Law have been cited by the Indian Supreme Court. His other area of expertise is Indian literature and its cultural history. His book on Urdu poetry in Mughal Delhi, Beloved Delhi: A Mughal City and Her Greatest Poets (Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 2018) is widely-recognized as an authoritative work and has been cited in research theses and peer-reviewed articles. Through 2022, he served as Research Visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford where he worked on the status of free speech in the later Mughal courts and Mughal-Indian Constitutionalism. As a practising lawyer, Saif specialises in commercial and business laws and strategy in the UK-India corridor and divides time between the two countries.