Department of History, Ashoka University

Presents Two-Day National Conference

Debating the ‘Early Modern’ in South Asian History

9 & 10 February 2018
AC 01 LT 110, First Floor, New Academic Block, Ashoka University, Plot No. 2, Rajiv
Gandhi Education City, Rai, Sonipat, Haryana-131029

PAPER ABSTRACTS
(arranged in alphabetical order)

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Taxonomies of Time: The Medieval, Early Modern and Modern in Pir Hasan
Kuihami’s Tarikh i Hasan

Anubhuti Maurya | Bharati College | University of Delhi

Friday | 9 February | Panel I | 11:30 am-1:15 pm

Debates over periodization are fraught; for the post-colonial subject, more so. In this
paper, I would like to talk about the ‘medieval’ or the ‘early modern’ not as periods in
history, but as academies, institutions and disciplines. I would argue that debates about
periodization are also debates over archives and genealogies.

I will take up these themes by looking closely at a late nineteenth century history
of Kashmir. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Pir Hasan Kuihami

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completed a four-volume history of Kashmir, titled Tarikh i Hasan. Pir Hasan completed
his work alongside Walter Lawrence’s Valley of Kashmir. In these four volumes Hasan
discussed geography, both global as well as local; history of Kashmir, told as a political
chronology as well as through events, calamities, epidemics, urban constructions;
biographies of the learned and of the Sufis of Kashmir. Hasan followed both the
narrative organisation as well as the teleology of older Persianate Kashmiri histories. At
the same time, he engaged with the writings and historiographical methods of British
officers of the Dogra State and with other new histories written in Kashmir in the
nineteenth century.

I would read Hasan as a text written in transition, in dialogue with two traditions
of history writing — the Persianate Kashmiri and the Colonial. I will discuss how Hasan
negotiated the organisation of Kashmir’s history into ancient, medieval and modern
and how he characterised historical change.

Anubhuti Maurya is Assistant Professor in History at Bharati College, Delhi University.

She completed her PhD from Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, on Kashmir in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the period of
Mughal rule. She is now working towards completing her book, ‘The Making of Mughal
Kashmir: Space, History and Authority in Early Modern South Asia’. In 2016 – 17, she
was the Visiting Scholar at the History Department, Columbia University, New York.

Engaging with the Early Modern: Intellectual Patterns and Devotional Practices
in South Asian Sufism

Kashshaf Ghani | Nalanda University

Friday | 9 February | Panel III | 4:15-6:00 pm

Sufi activity in South Asia during the pre-modern period remains largely confined to the
dominance of the Chishti order and its sub-orders scattered all over north India and the
Deccan. A deep sense of spiritual devotion that Mughals demonstrated towards masters
of this order, particularly from the time of Akbar, reinforces this trend.

However if we are to probe into the idea of the early modern in South Asian Sufism,
particularly around the Mughal period, one cannot possibly limit its history only to the

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Chishtis. But rather broaden the idea of spiritual traditions to include important
Central and West Asian Sufi orders in India like the Naqshbandis and Qadiris. Their
activities beginning from the reign of Jahangir till the late eighteenth century
contributed significantly towards the development of intellectual patterns of
spirituality, moving beyond the ritualistic approach of the Chishtis. These later Sufi
orders also reengaged much with a rich preexisting tradition of shrine practices
popularized by Chishti masters over the 13th and 14th century.

The paper will engage with the idea of the early modern in South Asian Sufism through
the rise of these later Sufi orders during the reign of the Mughals, together with their
contribution to the intellectual tradition and ritualistic practices at the turn of the
Islamic millennium.

Kashshaf Ghani is Assistant Professor at the School of Historical Studies, Nalanda

University. His primary areas of research interest include Islam in South Asia with a
focus on pre-modern India (1000-1800). In this period Kashshaf looks into Sufism and
Islamic mystical traditions, Indo-Persian histories and Muslim societies. His current
research interests include interfaith relations where he explores Persian scholarly
traditions in non-Muslim/Hindu societies. Alongside he also works on transregional
connections between Muslim societies in South and West Asia.

The Early Colonial in Nationalist Historiography

Mahesh Gopalan | St. Stephens College | University of Delhi

Friday | 9 February | Panel I | 11:30 am-1:15 pm

In this paper I intend to examine two books written by C. S. Srinivasachari, ‘History of the
City of Madras’ (1939) and ‘Ginji and its Rulers’ (1943). History books like these were written
in a period associated with colonial and nationalist historiographies. They use the
schema of periodization of ancient, early medieval, medieval, early modern (or early
colonial) and modern (or colonial) to frame a linear historical narrative of change.
Through this paper I will argue that the history of conquest and diplomacy in these two
books has embedded within it a larger narrative of political and economic
transformation. I will show how the history of the altering political landscape in the

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region around Ginji and Arcot is consciously set against the backdrop of the rise of
English Madras. Thus the centering of Madras in the narrative of the early colonial
period did not merely reflect English ascendency but embedded within was the idea of
Madras as symbolically representing the ‘modern’. The symbolic use of 'Madras' as a site
where the transition from the old to a new or from the ‘medieval’ to ‘modern' shaped
other histories of this period. I argue that this also had implications on the
representations of ‘region’ and ‘city’. It ensured that the Madras came to represent
something more than a mere urban space.
‘Madras' came to embody a new political reality, which also appropriated the idea of a
'region' that transcended the urban limits of the English port.
The paper would show how the schema of periodization (in this case early
colonial) came to be deployed alongside themes of the region, religion, economy and
colonialism in the grand nationalist project of history writing.
Mahesh Gopalan, Assistant Professor, Department of History, St. Stephen’s College,
University of Delhi is an alumnus of the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University. He has published articles in edited volumes on the Indian Ocean and
Portuguese Asia. He has co-edited a book, The English East India Company 1600-1857,
published by Routledge in 2017. He is currently working towards publishing his first
monograph and is also associated with heritage projects in Chennai and Delhi.
Mahesh Gopalan, Assistant Professor, Department of History, St. Stephen’s College,
University of Delhi is an alumnus of the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University. He has published articles in edited volumes on the Indian Ocean and
Portuguese Asia. He has co-edited a book, The English East India Company 1600-1857,
published by Routledge in 2017. He is currently working towards publishing his first
monograph and is also associated with heritage projects in Chennai and Delhi.

Beginning of Early Modern Era? Socio-Religious Readings in the Nature of 17th -

18th Century Polities of Rajasthan
Mayank Kumar | Satyawati College (Evening) | University of Delhi
Saturday | 10 February | Panel VI | 2:45-4:30 pm
JF Richards has suggested that greater centralisation of power and stable states are
hallmark of onset of early modern era in a society. This tendency was visible in

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Rajasthan during 17th – 18th century where, institutionalized process of mapping of the
natural resources culminated in the Bhai-bant relations being gradually replaced with
Bhai-bandh-Chakar relations with feudatories. This resulted in greater centralization of
power and emergence of more stable polities. In addition, as suggested elsewhere
apparently proximity to Mughals and often loyalty and military service to Mughal was
the ‘real cause’ which facilitated greater centralization. Centralisation was not organic
in nature and could hold as long as ‘bigger’ power ensured it. Simultaneously, we
witness growing influence of Vaishnavism during this time and greater efforts by the
rulers to legitimize their efforts of centralization as divine providence. The iconography
of Vaishnavism had greater acceptance for kingship where authority of kings was
supreme and usually divine. At the same time early 18th century on one hand witnessed
great interest in astronomy and greater emphasis on ‘observation’ and ‘experiment’ but
on the other we witness greater appropriation of divine providence through astrological
predictions to legitimize one’s rule.

Historical processes are rarely unidirectional and socio-political transitions are equally
prone to follow diverse ways often contradictory before they culminate. Therefore
present paper makes an attempt to argue that, can it be suggested that centralization
was frail in nature and diverse mechanisms were deployed by the state to develop
deeper social roots. It was very fragile and prone to dissension. Can it then still be called
early modern?

Mayank Kumar teaches history at Satyawati College (Evening), University of Delhi. His
area of research is medieval Indian Environmental history. Along with several articles
published in reputed journals, Mayank has a monograph, Monsoon Ecologies: Irrigation,
Agriculture and Settlement Patterns in Rajasthan during the Pre-Colonial Period, Manohar,
New Delhi, 2013 to his credit. He was associated with Decision Centre for Desert City,
Arizona State University as Fulbright fellow. He was a fellow at Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, New Delhi before availing UGC National Research Award.

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Debating ‘Early Modern’ in South Asia: Few Dimensions

Meena Bhargava | Indraprastha College for Women | University of Delhi

Saturday | 10 February | Panel IV | 10:00-11:45 am

The ‘medieval’ in oriental construction of the history of South Asia appeared as a
residual category, portrayed as the ‘adolescent’ stage of modernity, seen as the ‘other’
over time as it became memorialized and rigidly periodized, as something that was ‘un-
modern’ and as if in order to understand the ‘medieval’, it was first necessary to
understand the ‘modern’. The links and the continuities between the medieval and
modern periods were ignored. Several South Asian scholars have rejected and
challenged these rigidities, setting aside the notion of changelessness of Indian society
inextricably connected with the theories of orientalism and instead demonstrated
interconnections and continuities between the pre-colonial/medieval and
colonial/modern periods. The term ‘medieval’ is now considered to be too conventional
that can barely generate any systematic dialogue between medievalists of different parts
of the globe, for it neither defines a social formation nor a stage of development. It is
pertinent to categorize the period, late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries or
roughly the three or four centuries preceding the British colonial rule as ‘early modern’
rather than ‘Mughal India’ or ‘late medieval India’ or ‘late pre-colonial India’. This would
facilitate a different premise to understand the colonial intervention, situate South Asia
more widely in the global historical perspective, shift from the narrow political and
cultural dimensions of history and contextualize South Asian culture, civilization and
society in a way so as to understand better the specifics of Indian history. In the period
defined as ‘early modern’, the pace and magnitude of change had increased in human
societies in every part of the world, it was marked by shared historical processes and
long-term currents that not only accelerated in this period but also had a deep impact on
the changes during the nineteenth and the twentieth century. In other words, profound
continuities were noticed that link the histories of the early modern and the modern.
Such patterns were seen in the ‘agrarian environments’ perceptible in the sixteenth
century, which justify the use of the term ‘early modern’ for the period 1550-1850 CE. The
land looked very different in c. 1800 CE than what it did in c.1200 CE. There was a
qualitative change in the way people thought about the land; there was nothing pristine
or static in the environment and the culture of the period; to the contrary, it witnessed
changing ecological contexts whether in forests, agriculture and property. These
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pluralities can be demonstrated through several examples including from Mughal
Sarkar Gorakhpur in Suba Awadh.

Meena Bhargava is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Indraprastha

College for Women, University of Delhi. Her area of specialization is history of medieval
India and the transition period during eighteenth and early nineteenth century. She has
researched social and economic aspects of Mughal history including issues related to
land rights, environment, and use of narcotics and drugs. She is the author of State,
Society and Ecology: Gorakhpur in Transition, 1750-1830, New Delhi: Primus Books, Revised
Edition, 2014 (1999); has co-authored, Women, Education and Politics: The Women’s
Movement and Delhi’s Indraprastha College, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, Reprinted,
2015 (2005); has edited anthologies on Mughal history and medieval and early modern
environmental history; and has published several research articles in peer-reviewed
national and international journals and collected works. She has been awarded many
grants including the Charles Wallace India Trust Post-Doctoral Research Grant, British
Council Stay-in- and-Maintenance Grant, National Science Foundation, Ford
Foundation, USA, and Social Science Research Council, New York Grant. She received
the Distinguished Teacher Award, University of Delhi in 2009.

North Indian Early Modernity as a Porous Time-Frame: Language, Literature

and History in the Irregular Fifteenth Century

Pankaj Jha | LSR College for Women | University of Delhi

Saturday | 10 February | Panel V | 12 noon-1:45 pm

My paper explores the issue of ‘early modern/ity’ from the temporal vantage point of an
‘irregular’ fifteenth century by focusing on the history of languages and literary cultures
in north India. The issue of when/what/where/how was ‘early modern’ clearly depends
on the corresponding questions about the ‘modern’ itself. The endless theoretical
squabbles on modernity also mean that the early modern too remains a contested
category. That by itself is hardly a big problem in disciplines – history but also
anthropology and literature – that take pride in debates and disagreements. The
question that demands an immediate, if not a final, answer is this: In what ways, if at
all, do the debates on the need and character of the category of ‘early modern’ as a period

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help us understand the myriad aspects of life in that period. This helps us formulate a
more pertinent question: what is the heuristic viability of the early modern/ity in
disciplines like history, literature, anthropology or politics.

Empirically, the paper approaches these ostensibly theoretical issues by looking at the
unique ensemble of languages and literary practices in the period between the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries in north India. Do we see concrete traces of a move
towards congealing of certain trends that could lead the region, through the next three
centuries, into what we now refer to as the ‘modern’ age – howsoever the later ph(r)ase
is defined? If the literary productions of the time (fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries)
do indeed show such a trend, what is the cost of committing to such a narrative? In
other words, will the evident teleology in looking for the evidence of what comes later
suppress equally or more important narratives about the same or related issues?

Pankaj Jha did his Bachelor’s and a Master’s in History from Ramjas College, Delhi. His
MPhil and PhD too were obtained from the University of Delhi. Part of his doctoral work
was done at the University of Texas when he was there as a Fulbright Fellow for about a
year. He worked with Persian materials on tasawwuf for his MPhil. His doctoral work
explores Sanskrit and north Indian ‘vernacular’ texts of the much neglected fifteenth
century. His primary area of interest is languages and literary cultures of north India
and their linkages with ‘mainstream’ history. An area of special interest for him is
knowledge formations in the premodern period. His book on A Political History of
Literature is expected to be out soon by Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Some Dimensions of the Early Modern in Rajasthan, c.1700-c.1850

Priyanka Khanna | Indira Gandhi National Open University

Friday | 9 February | Panel VI | 2:45-4:30 pm

This paper probes the question of early modernity in India by examining some hitherto
neglected transitions underway in the Rajput Kingdom of Marwar in Western Rajasthan
between the eighteenth and the mid nineteenth centuries. Based on a range of local
Rajasthani sources, the paper focuses on three major issues: one, the changes in the
Rajput politics with the gradual decline of the Mughal overlord that led to a movement

8
away from localism to that of a more dynamic regional polity. Second: the striking
proliferation of documentation and emergence of a record keeping culture, with
significant – if not equal – inclusion of women. Third: the position and responses of
women in the ongoing transformations in these centuries. In detailing its last concern,
the paper primarily focuses on the section of women who had to live as the concubines
in Rajput households. The motivation behind the choice emanates from the fact that a
thorough historiographical revision of late pre-colonial /eighteenth century India,
underway since the last two decades, will remain incomplete without mapping the
changes in the lives of non-elite groups during the period. Mapping thus some
significant dimensions of the reshaped political culture of eighteenth and early
nineteenth century Rajasthan- underlined by a vibrant political environment, an
emerging concern for knowledge about the regime, one that brought greater economic
opportunities for women but at the same time persisted with reliance on religious
idioms, saw an emerging emphasis on masculinization and boundaries of caste and
community- the paper aims to centre stage elements in transition that were hesitant
and imperfect, yet distinct and indigenous.

Priyanka Khanna is currently working as an Academic Consultant at the Department of

History, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. She submitted her
doctoral thesis in July 2016 at the Centre for Historical Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru
University and is now awaiting her viva. Her Ph.D. thesis, titled “Half-Wed Wives: A
Study of Concubines in the Rajasthani Kingdom of Marwar, c. 17th -mid 19th centuries”
explores the status, roles and lived experiences of women who had to live as the
concubines of elite men in the ruling Rajput household of Jodhpur. Priyanka has
presented her research work in several national and international conferences and her
publications include ‘The Female Companion in a World of Men: Friendship and
Concubinage in Late Eighteenth Century Marwar’ (Studies in History, Vol.33, Issue 1,
February 2017) and ‘Embodying Royal Concubinage: Some Aspects of Concubinage in
Royal Rajput Household of Marwar (Western Rajasthan)’ (Proceedings of Indian History
Congress, 2012).

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When the Reins Were Held by Rascals: Towards a Typology of “Early Modern”
Politics through Portuguese Adventures in the Bengal Delta

Radhika Chadha | Miranda House | University of Delhi

Friday | 9 February | Panel II | 2:15-4:00 pm

This discussion is built around some key formulations which have found broad
acceptance. The early modern period in Asia has been seen as an age of stable empires.
It might be useful to see it as an age of empire between ages without empire.

Yet, following others, the early modern period was one when the region as a
phenomenon, which had emerged in previous centuries, continues to be very visible. It
is the region that provides the lens through which to view and understand the political
economy, which was, at the same time, one characterized by strong states with a huge
spatial spread. This became visible especially in peripheral areas, being difficult to
discern in core zones of exercise of authority.

My research is in coastal and deltaic Bengal amongst Portuguese officials and

freebooters jostling to create a presence there in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. A small regional component of an enormous imperial spread, the ways in
which they related to each other throw much light on the nature of early modern
politics.

Early modern South Asia has also been marked with porous frontiers and rapid
circulation of people, commodities, technologies and ideas. Within a complex political
and cultural landscape, shaped by a permeability of borders, it was people rather than
land that constituted the scarcer resource for states. This focus on people helped shape
the political economy and became an enduring feature of the early modern period.

Following from this, regions themselves were amorphous. Linkages were forged as
people lived across worlds, straddling boundaries. The coastal folds of the Bengal delta
that were yoked loosely to the Portuguese imperial arm were also part of Asian polities.
They lay, variously, in the domains of Afghan rulers, the Mughal emperor and the king
of Arakan. These Portuguese settlements and enclaves came to form a significant
component of these kingdoms, a militaristic-economic presence, a political
constituency, a region in themselves.

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Regional boundaries, thus, were not necessarily political – economic, geographical,
cultural definitions could cut across political regions, often redefining the limits of
empire themselves.

This paper is organized in three parts. In the first I will trace what Bengal meant to the
Estado da India and why it remained peripheral to its core zones of activity. In the
second I establish that personnel settled or moving on the margins, themselves formed
the penumbra of Portuguese society in Asia. In the third, I try to smooth out, through
the premier settlement at Hugli, the tangles that held together the imperial spread. This
throws a new spin on the Portuguese empire in Asia, an example of an early modern
polity, read through its eastern, regional, private incarnations. Into the narrative is
threaded the position such alien people and their settlements came to occupy in the host
polities in which they were entrenched and of which too they came to form a vital part.

Radhika Chadha is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Miranda House,

University of Delhi. She received her PhD in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University.
She has been Fellow, Fundacao Oriente, Lisbon. Her book Merchants, Renegades, Padres:
Portuguese presence in Bengal and Arakan, 16th & 17th centuries is forthcoming from Primus.

The Early Modern Conundrum: Peninsular India and the Idea of Periodisation in a
‘Regional’ Perspective

Ranjeeta Dutta | Jawaharlal Nehru University

Saturday | 10 February | Panel IV | 10:00-11:45 am

The idea of ‘early modern’ as a conceptual category and chronological construct requires
serious investigation in Indian history writing. Therefore, if ‘early modern’ is seen as a
period of transition from ‘medieval’ to ‘modern’, then a discussion on both these
categories would also be in order. The aim of the presentation would be to analyze the
historical processes selected by the scholars to represent the ‘medieval’, ‘early modern’
and ‘modern’, possible interconnections between the three and the implications of such
representations. It will be emphasized that such a comparative intersection between
different categories of temporality is not devoid of ideological underpinnings that have
influenced the discipline of history and history writing.

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 The paper will focus on southern India, for the frame of periodization in Indian
history has acquired a certain universalistic dimension that does not take into account
the diversities of themes and historical processes of various regions in India, in this case
the peninsular region. The general characteristics associated by historians with ‘early
modern’ can be identified in the historical processes in the peninsular region between
the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘Creation of global sea passages’, maritime
connections, circulation of commodities like pepper, gold, cotton textiles, import and
use of gunpowder and new military technologies, rise of centralized states straddling
across multiple cultural zones, for instance, the Vijayanagar Empire, a vibrant scribal
community, dynamic mercantile and artisanal groups, circulation of people through
travels and migrations and so on are some of these characteristics.

However, to what extent were these historical processes of ‘early modern’ a break
or a transition from the medieval, setting the tone for modern needs to examined. The
presentation will not engage with the historical validity of the use of ‘early modern’, for
it is emphasized that such a validity can only be worked out, in relation to ‘medieval’ and
‘modern’.

Ranjeeta Dutta teaches at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University. Previously, she also taught at the Department of History and Culture in
Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research interests are religion and religious
identities with special emphasis on the peninsular region. Her publications include a
monograph titled, From Hagiographies to Biographies: Ramanuja in Tradition and History
(2014) and an edited volume (co-edited with Rameshwar Prasad Bahuguna and Farhat
Nasreen) titled, Negotiating Religion: Perspectives from Indian History (2012).

Trust in the Early Modern: Armenian Mercantile Ethics & the Legal Regimes in
the Indian Ocean Arena

Santanu Sengupta | Polba Mahavidyalaya | Burdwan University

Friday | 9 February | Panel II | 2:15-4:00 pm

‘Early Modern’ has been an equally celebrated and critiqued category. While a timeline
of 1500-1800 has been drawn to demarcate the period, the possibilities and problems

12
remain rampant. The criterions of demarcating the period proposed by J.F. Richards
need to be re-explored on both spatial and temporal parameters.

The proposed paper intends to look closely at the criterion of the rise of mercantile
networks through the vantage point of the New Julfan Armenians in Indian Ocean
arena. It intends to question the nature of social capital of the network that reduced the
risks of transaction and see whether the ‘Early Modern’ was marked by any particular
discernible shift in the components of social capital and mercantile ethics.

The New Julfan Armenian network developed during the Ottoman-Safavid contests in
the early 17th century. It has been said that the extensive Armenian diaspora, spread
from Amsterdam to Astrakhan to Manila functioned on the exclusive circulation of
information that in turn constructed familiarity, reputation(s) and ensured the
honouring of trust. By mid-18th century, the moral core of the diasporic network had
collapsed with the fall of New Julfa. The network however continued to function from its
regional nodes like Calcutta and Madras, both littoral enclaves of the Indian Ocean. The
collapse of the network has been attributed to their association with European colonial
institutions like the courts of law. Was there then a sharp shift change in the mercantile
ethics, trust and social capital that had been seen in various Armenian sources,
including the law book compiled by the Astrakhani Armenians- Datastan Girkh
Astrakhani Hayots? Or do we see a narrative of a long term dialogue, negotiations and
adjustments that shaped the mercantile ethics and further complicated the category of
the Early Modern. In other words, the paper will engage closely with the aspect of
legality as a constituent of the mercantile culture of the Armenians in the Indian Ocean
and rethink the category of the Early Modern.

Santanu Sengupta works as an Assistant Professor in History in Polba Mahavidyalaya

under the University of Burdwan. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis titled “The
Empire’s Network: Formation of the British Empire in the Eastern Indian Ocean and
the Armenian Agency (from mid-18th to 19th century)” from the Centre for Studies in
Social Sciences, Calcutta under the supervision of Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian. His
areas of interest are Armenian diaspora, Indian Ocean in 18th Century, mercantile
cultures and legal cultures.

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Locating South Asian ‘Individual’ within ‘Medieval’: The Case of Jain
Heterodoxy, 1470s-1770s
Shalin Jain| University of Delhi
Friday | 9 February | Panel III | 4:15-6:00 pm

The categories of ‘individual’ and ‘modernity’ both are seen as products of European
modern intellectual history and in a binary approach, scholarship on early-modern
South Asian intellectualism and its functionality has focused overwhelmingly on
monotheistic contexts and the categories of community organization, largely ignoring
the role of persons and processes negotiating with a constant urge of ‘individual’
expression engaged in heterodox projects and non-monotheistic religious traditions.
The existing historiographical knowledge ignores the narratives in which ‘individual’
identity was appropriated and redefined constantly by dissenting personalities who
simultaneously challenged as well as created hierarchies and stimulated asymmetrical
power relations. Rather than locating South Asian intellectual tradition in contrast to its
European ‘other’ and their religions, I plan to locate diverse sites of interaction,
negotiation and similarity, making similar political statements.
This paper explores the traditional urge to define religions in normative contexts
and the individual attempts to embrace, surpass and resist such definitions. Largely
developed in the light of the textual expectations about what individual as well as his
conduct was supposed to be, our understanding regarding parameters of religiosity
requires to be qualified as the conflicts arising out of individual actions became
increasingly popular in heterogeneous ways, defying both religious and communitarian
authorities. From fifteenth through seventeenth centuries certain individual projects in
South Asian Jainism demonstrates attempts to integrate religion into building
unorthodox individual campaigns, while community was being continuously
marginalized.
I see the rise of heterodoxy, dissent and skepticism within early-modern South
Asian Jainism as a vehicle of individualistic expression. Heterodoxies of Lonka Shah,
Banarsidas and Todarmal may be cited as a prelude to future debates and struggles for
individualistic expressions making a case for historical continuities across the prisms of
‘medieval’ and ‘modern’. Yet such projects of individualism remained unfulfilled and
they also do not reflect upon our historical knowledge simply because clouds of
orthodoxy loomed large over the discourse. Nevertheless, through such narratives one

14
requires problematizing category of medieval as well. Everyday negotiation of
individual with the hegemony of larger social categories is a constant feature beyond
historical periodization which moves beyond the binary of medieval and modern. Our
‘medieval’ like our ‘modern’ was neither uniform nor homogenous. Both have been
permeable, overlapping, extending and intervening into each other.

Shalin Jain is currently Associate Professor in Medieval Indian History, Department of

History, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India. He has published many research papers
in esteemed national and international journals such as Indian Historical Review,
Studies in History, Social Scientist etc. He has been awarded Professor J.S. Grewal
award in Medieval Indian History by the Indian History Congress, twice, in years 2004
and 2013. He held a short term honorary fellowship at the Center for South Asia at the
University Of Wisconsin- Madison USA in 2013. He availed UGC Raman Fellowship
award for post-doctoral Research in United States of America to work on
“Contemporary Environmental Concerns and Medieval Religious Communities” at
Claremont Lincoln University, California, USA during 2013-14. Presently he is Fellow of
CST library scholars programme of Claremont School of Theology, California, USA. He
has two research projects awarded by Research and Development Grant scheme of
University of Delhi. He participated in various national and international conferences
and workshops in India as well as in UK, Germany, USA and France. His forthcoming
work is a monograph – Identity, Community and State: The Jains under the Mughals.

Narrating Lives in Early Modern India: Articulation of Modern Subjectivities

and Selfhood in Indo- Persian Biographies, 17th- 18th centuries

Shivangini Tandon | Aligarh Muslim University

Saturday | 10 February | Panel V | 12 noon-1:45 pm

The effort in this paper is to look at traces of an emergent modern consciousness in
literary narratives with a particular focus on the Indo Persian biographies written in the
17th and the 18th centuries. The development of early modernity in South Asia led to
profound structural shifts in the literary culture and one of the efforts of this paper is to
explore these shifts in style, narratives and aesthetics related to the shaping of an early
modern culture in South Asia. The first biography or tazkira that I would be looking at is

15
Shaikh Farid Bhakkari’s Zakhirat-ul-Khawanin written in the 17th century. Bhakkari was
an influential Mughal noble, and was in personal touch with several of the nobles and
saints he discusses in his work. My second tazkira, written in the 18th century, is Shah
Nawaz Khan’s Ma’asir-ul-Umara. Like Bhakkari before him, Shah Nawaz was also an
important noble, and deeply immersed in the Mughal courtly norms and values.
Zakhirat-ul-Khawanin, the first dictionary of the Mughal nobles, formed the base for such
later works as Ma’asir-ul-Umara which was a biographical dictionary of the Mughal
nobles and bureaucrats from 1500 to about 1780 A.D.

In seeking to retain a diachronic frame of reference, I have chosen to compare

these two tazkiras with a view to study the lives of the Mughal elites in relation to the
processes of state formation and cultural change. While imperial chronicles delve on the
political activities of the Mughal elites, indeed in great details, I hope that by shifting to
the biographical works we would get a better understanding of their socio-cultural
activities, and, more importantly, their domestic and ‘intimate’ relations, and the inter-
connections of these relations with the political activities.

Focusing on Indo-Persian biographies, I look at the shifts in narratives of lives in

the 17 and 18th centuries and seek to locate these shifts within a developing paradigm of
th

early modernity. Under the influence of early modernity, I argue that there is in
biographical narratives a shift towards new forms of subjectivity, selfhood and
household. The effort in this paper therefore is to explore new, modern notions of
personhood and subjectivity in literary narratives in the 18th century South Asia.

Shivangini Tandon is currently working as Assistant Professor in the Department of

Women’s Studies, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh (India). She has taught briefly in
St. Stephen’s College, Kirori Mal and Gargi College, Delhi University. She is the recipient
of Max Planck India Mobility Grant, Berlin (2016-2021). Her PhD thesis titled
‘Remembering Lives in Mughal India: Political Culture and Social Life in Indo Persian
Biographies; 16th -18th centuries’ has been accepted for publication by Oxford University
Press. Her research papers and book reviews have been published in journals like the
Indian Historical Review (IHR), Social Scientist and as part of Occasional Paper Series by
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, The Book Review Literary Journal and
Biblio.

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