Scribal service people in motion

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

Bibliographic Data

ID7213844
AuthorsRosalind O’hanlon (0009-0001-5852-1808, University of Oxford, corresponding author), 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)
Year2020
Volume57
Issue4
Pages443-460
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0019464620948724
OpenAlexW3105678155
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited51

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