Scribal service people in motion

Culture, power and the politics of mobility in India’s long eighteenth century, c. 1680–1820

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7213844
AutoresRosalind O’hanlon (0009-0001-5852-1808, University of Oxford, autor de correspondencia), Anand Venkatkrishnan (0000-0002-0234-3782, University of Chicago, IL, United States of America), Richard Williams (0000-0001-9974-8307), Richard David Williams (0000-0003-3312-2904, SOAS University of London)
Año2020
Volumen57
Número4
Páginas443-460
Fecha de publicación2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0019464620948724
OpenAlexW3105678155
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas51

A decade after IESHR’s Special Issue of 2010, ‘Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal communities and historical change in India’, we return again to the challenges and dilemmas that scribes, bureaucrats, intellectuals and literati of different kinds faced during the early modern centuries. Building on recent advances in our understanding of these key communities, this Special Issue turns the focus to the eighteenth century. We explore the strategies of individuals as they navigated new conditions of service, unexpected opportunities for personal advancement and the complexities of affiliation amid personal networks that extended across boundaries of region, language and religion. We investigate the important role of scribal people in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century, and the new meanings that their participation gave to literary syncretism and hybridity. We return again to questions of intellectual history and the reflections of scribal service people as they sought to find meaning in the collapse of old political formations and the rise of new ones. This Introduction surveys the recent scholarly literature in these connected fields, situates the essays here in the context of this new work, and identifies some of the key questions which remain to be answered in this critical era of transition between the India of ‘early modernity’ and the coming of the colonial world

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Hybridity · Indigenous · Literature · Meaning (existential · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Law · Philosophy