Conclusion

The conclusion begins with reminiscences of a visit to a mosque in the Baṛaliyā village of Patiya district, Chittagong, which houses a cot that supposedly belonged to Saiyad Sultān. The chapter tells the tale of this miraculous cot, and the connections of its master to the kingdom of Arakan. This account highlights the interconnected nature of the histories of Chittagong and Arakan, and the bitter irony of today’s Rohingya crisis. It foregrounds this book’s contribution to translation theory and to research on the Islamization of southeast Bengal and the Islamic cosmopolis of early modern South Asia, while pointing to new directions for research.

What is military labour? War, logistics, and the Mughals in early modern South Asia

The category of ‘military labour’ has traditionally been used to designate ‘combat labour’ – the labour of soldiers. Focusing on the case of early modern South Asia, the present essay argues that this equivalence is misplaced and that it is a product of a distorted view of war defined primarily in terms of combat. The essay discusses the roles played by the logistical workforce of Mughal armies in conducting military campaigns and facilitating imperial expansion. It calls for broadening the category of ‘military labour’ to include all types of labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of military objectives.

Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and popular and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally.

The scribal household in flux: Pathways of Kayastha service in eighteenth-century Western India

Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and politics. This article examines the changing professional identity of the Kayastha scribal household in eighteenth-century western India. I focus on the ascendancy of the Chitnis household of Satara in the context of the growth and diversification of Kayastha employment under the Maratha sovereign Shahu Bhonsle (1682–1749). By consolidating portfolios of titles, appointments, and rights to property, ambitious scribes and secretaries, as epitomised by the career of Govind Khanderao Chitnis (d. 1785), were able to pursue riskier and more lucrative political assignments and form networks of kinsmen and associates across Maratha governments. Yet greater scrutiny and competition for state largesse, not least from within the Chitnis household itself, forced members of later generations to adopt creative and sometimes risky strategies to defend their claims to property. This article explores how the profound dislocations of political transformation in eighteenth-century South Asia enabled distinctive modes of individual and collective self-fashioning amongst skilled, upwardly mobile groups.

From Adam to ʿĀdil Shāh: Rethinking Inter-Religious Encounter in the Tārīkh-i Firishteh

Despite the Tārīkh-i Firishteh’s continued importance for scholarship on early-modern South Asia, little attention has been paid to analyzing the text’s introduction, where its author, Muḥammad Qāsim Astarābādī (Firishteh), articulates a conception of historical time in part by critiquing the Mahabharata. Existing scholarship on the Introduction has invoked the conceptual framework of ‘encounters’ between Persianate and Sanskritic cultural spheres, where Firishteh’s critique of the Mahabharata is made possible through Mughal engagement with Sanskrit texts. By analyzing two registers of the Introduction—tārīkh as a mode of historical narration central to dynastic legitimation, and Abū al-Fażl’s use of the Mahabharata as a way to critique certain Abrahamic conceptions of genesis—this paper suggests that the language of ‘encounter’ is ultimately ill-suited to understanding the Introduction’s most controversial passages.

Thinking Beyond Aurangzeb and the Mughal State in a Late Eighteenth-Century Punjabi Braj Source

This article argues for the value of looking past the emperor Aurangzeb, in seeking to understand how he has been portrayed. The eighteenth century Braj source from Punjab examined here portrays local debates and conflicts at the centre, and the Mughal state at the periphery, of the project of communitarian self-formation. Here, the emperor operates from the outside. Internal communitarian concerns, particularly regarding caste inclusion, dominate, linking the text in question to larger questions around caste and community that emerged in early modern South Asia in a range of contexts.