Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia

The majority of Japanese even today believe that the politico-cultural universe of the Edo period was fundamentally determined by the closure of the country. They also think that the opening of Japan can be reduced to the development of exchanges with the West, following the birth of the Meiji regime. It is hard for them to imagine that Japan developed in relation with other Asian countries, since they are hardly used to appreciating Asian cultures.

Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation

The idea of trader communities spread across the shores of the Indian Ocean, or along the caravan routes of the Asian heartland, is a familiar one. Once designated as the ubiquitous “pedlars” of the “traditional trade of Asia,” these traders have more recently been described using the term “diaspora”—a term not restricted in its application, needless to add, to the Asian context. In the hands of Philip D. Curtin, the idea of traders in a diaspora has become a simple but powerful tool to analyze the phenomenon of what he terms “cross-cultural trade.” What, then, is a diaspora? To Curtin, a diaspora is “a nation of socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed communities,” that are, moreover, separated from their “host societies” in each locus in which they are situated (Curtin 1984:5). He continues: “The traders were specialists in a single kind of economic enterprise, whereas the host society was a whole society, with many occupations, class stratification and political divisions between the rulers and the ruled” (Curtin 1984:5).

The Making of a Munshi

The difficult transition between the information and knowledge regimes of the precolonial and colonial political systems of South Asia was largely, though not exclusively, mediated by scribes, writers, statesmen, and accountants possessing a grasp of the chief language of power in that time, namely Persian. More than any vernacular language or Sanskrit, it was in Persian that the officials of the English East India Company conducted its early rule, administration, and even diplomacy in the years around the seizure of the revenues of Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century. Hence they naturally had to come to terms with the social group that was regarded as most proficient in this regard.1 To be sure, the Mughal aristocracy and its regional offshoots provided them with certain models of etiquette and statecraft, and various “Mirror of Princes” texts attracted the attention of Company officials. But the pragmatic realities of political economy that had to be dealt with could not be comprehended within the adab of the aristocrat, and the representatives of Company Bahadur were, in any event, scarcely qualified themselves to claim such an unambiguous status. The real interlocutor for the Company official thus was the munshi, who was mediator and spokesman (vakil), but also a key personage who could both read and draft materials in Persian, and who had a grasp over the realities of politics that men such as Warren Hastings, Antoine Polier, and Claude Martin found altogether indispensable.2 Though the term munshi is recognizable even today, it has shifted semantically over the years. Aficionados of Hindi films since the 1960s will recognize the character of the munshi as the accountant and henchman of the cruel and grasping zamindar, greasily rubbing his hands and usually unable to protest the immoral demands of his master.3 Specialists on colonial surveying operations in the Himalayas and Central Asia will recall that some of those sent out on such ventures were already called “pundits” and “moonshees” in the mid-nineteenth century.4 But the latter set of meanings is not our concern in this brief essay. Rather, we shall look at how, in the high Mughal period, one became a munshi, what attributes were principally called for, and what the chief educational demands were. The sources with which we approach this problem fall broadly into two categories. Relatively rare are the first-person accounts or autobiographical narratives that will be our principal concern here. More common are normative texts, corresponding to the “Mirror of Princes” type, but which we may term the “Mirror for Scribes.” Thus, in the reign of Aurangzeb, just as Mirza Khan could pen the Tuhfat al-Hind (Gift of India), in which he set out the key elements in the education of a well-brought-up Mughal prince,5 others wrote works such as the Nigarnamah-’i Munshi (Munshi’s Letterbook), which were primarily concerned with how a munshi was to be properly trained, and which technical branches of knowledge he ought rightfully to claim a mastery of.6 Earlier still, from the reign of Ja -

The Mughal state—Structure or process? Reflections on recent western historiography

career extends in one fashion or the other as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. The first volume of The Cambridge Economic History of India (1982) is largely devoted to the Mughals; the New Cambridge History of India, a set of volumes still in progress, has an entire section (Section I) devoted to ’The Mughals and their Contemporaries’, includingironically enough-a volume on the Vijayanagara state, which was founded some two hundred years before Babur set foot in Hindustan.’

Frank disputations Catholics and Muslims in the court of Jahangir (1608–11)

The essay sets out to re-examine the relations between Catholics and Muslims in the Mughal court in the early seventeenth century, during the reign of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27). It does so by confronting two sets of source–materials, namely the letters of the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier and Persian–language texts from the Mughal court. In particular it focuses on the important and neglected figure of Maulana ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri, an intellectual who worked with and also studied the Europeans. The recent publication of a hitherto unknown text by him, under the title of Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, is in part the occasion for us to return to this classic theme in the historiography of cross-cultural encounters.

Taking stock of the Franks

This article reflects on a diverse set of materials that constitute a part of South Asian xenology in the early modern period. Partly derived from South India, and partly from the northern Indian core of the Mughal empire, these materials deal with the problem of the ‘Franks’, namely the Europeans—whether seen in the context of Asia or of Europe. Initially the Europeans appear as strange, wondrous and also largely untrustworthy interlocutors in the Indian Ocean. Then, with the passage of time, an image of Europe itself emerges, which is finally sealed in the later eighteenth century with the first travel accounts by Indians to Europe. However, these images are part and parcel of a more general xenological and geographical understanding of the areas that neighbour South Asia, and should hence be analysed as such.

Discovering the Familiar: Notes on the Travel-Account of Anand Ram Mukhlis, 1745

Despite its considerable production of literary and historical texts in a vast variety of genres, the Indian subcontinent in the early modern period appears a relative wasteland where the setting down of travel accounts is concerned. Searching through the Indian vernacular languages, one is hard pressed to come up with travel texts that are comparable to those produced in East Asia, or in the Arabicspeaking world, until at least the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, as we are frequently reminded, the genre of ’travel-record literature’ (yuchi wen hsfeh) had flourished in China from at least Song times, even if it was not necessarily known by that name.3 By the Ming and Ch’ing eras (what we might call the early modern epoch), travelogues were a perfectly common form of literature, so much so that almost any litterateur of the epoch in Chinese worth his salt considered it de rigueur to leave behind a travel-account of some kind. In contrast, the South Asian landscape appears regrettably bleak. The best that

Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India

This essays deals with a neglected and significant strand of Indian political thought by describing and analysing the corpus known as nīti in the context of medieval and early modern South India (in particular with reference to the Telugu-speaking region). Works of nīti are presented here within a larger context, as they evolve from the medieval Andhra of the Kakatiyas into the Vijayanagara period, the Nayakas, and beyond. They are also opposed and contrasted to other texts written within the broad category of dharmashāstra , which seem to deal with a far more conservative project for the management of society and politics within a caste-based framework. Authors and compilers dealt with include Baddena and Madiki Singana, but also the celebrated emperor-poet Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509–29). An argument is made for the continued relevance of these texts for the conduct of politics in South Asia, into and beyond the colonial period.

Warfare and state finance in Wodeyar Mysore, 1724-25: A missionary perspective

Mysore in the eighteenth century conjures up in the minds of Indians and Indianists an image of the state of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. Yet the informal and formal reign of these two-father and son~ndured no more than thirty-nine years (1761-1799), and built upon a state structure that had been modified and refined over a century and a half under the Wodeyar lineage, which ruled from Srirangapatnam and Mysore. It is not a coincidence, though, that popular imagination as well as historical writings have focused on the ’Sultanate’ of Mysore. As contenders for power, and threats to the growing ascendency of the English East India Company, Hyder and Tipu received a great deal of attention in early British administrative and survey records, not all of it unflattering. Moreover, these rulers themselves--in particular Tipu-have left us a corpus of proclamations, which in the hands of revisionist historians have permitted the discovery of the ostensible ’modernity’ of this regime.’ I

Writing the Mughal world : studies on culture and politics

Between the mid-sixteenth and early nineteenth century, the Mughal Empire was an Indo-Islamic dynasty that ruled as far as Bengal in the east and Kabul in the west, as high as Kashmir in the north and the Kaveri basin in the south. The Mughals constructed a sophisticated, complex system of government that facilitated an era of profound artistic and architectural achievement. They promoted the place of Persian culture in Indian society and set the groundwork for South Asias future development. In this volume, two leading historians of early modern South Asia present nine major joint essays on the Mughal Empire, framed by an essential introductory reflection. Making creative use of materials written in Persian, Indian vernacular languages, and a variety of European languages, their chapters accomplish the most significant innovations in Mughal historiography in decades, intertwining political, cultural, and commercial themes while exploring diplomacy, state-formation, history-writing, religious debate, and political thought. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam center on confrontations between different source materials that they then reconcile, enabling readers to participate in both the debate and resolution of competing claims. Their introduction discusses the comparative and historiographical approach of their work and its place within the literature on Mughal rule. Interdisciplinary and cutting-edge, this volume richly expands research on the Mughal state, early modern South Asia, and the comparative history of the Mughal, Ottoman, Safavid, and other early modern empires.