On the road
The novice munshi’s view of inter-imperial North India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8961647 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Naveena Naqvi (University of British Columbia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 481-501 |
| Publication date | 2020-08-24 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0019464620948416 |
| OpenAlex | W3081416429 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 27 |
This article analyses the diary entries made by a Persographic secretary (munshī), Aḥmad ʿAlī, who was employed by a retiring East India Company official to write an account of the journey they made together in 1780 across North India from Lucknow to the Mughal imperial capital in Delhi and back. Much of the landscape that they traversed—including a cluster of qasbahs, river passes, forests and fields—was formerly governed by a confederacy of Rohilla Afghans from 1737 to 1774. By 1780, however, this region was marked by the absence of well-defined, enduring state structures and witnessed an abundance of overlapping political claims. Under such conditions, Aḥmad ʿAlī, a novice secretary from this region who lacked access to major scholarly networks or courtly circles, found himself uniquely placed to observe and document the micro-level political and historical changes that he had lived through. Unlike his courtly counterparts, he witnessed transformations at a remove from both imperial politics and the regional courts that had developed through the eighteenth century. Rather than to a state or a single political project, his locus of service was aligned with the world of independent military entrepreneurs and their households, which were strewn across a region that he knew well. Questioning the view that secretaries were primarily cyphers of courtly culture or bureaucratic imperatives, the following pages demonstrate that while Aḥmad ʿAlī served his individual employer, he could imagine politics and history outside the constraints that came with corporate political affiliations, as a figure who was new to the work of secretarial penmanship and a seasoned bearer of textured regional knowledge
Ancient history · Bureaucracy · Capital (architecture · Political capital · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Asian Studies and History · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
The Scandal of Empire
Persianate Selves
Mughal Arcadia
Controversies Surrounding the Reception of Valī “Dakhanī” (1665?–1707?) in Early Tażkirahs of Urdu Poets
Between Qasbas and Cities
The Making of a Munshi
Discovering the Familiar
Accounting for Difference
The Career of Colonel Polier and Late Eighteenth-Century Orientalism
The Formation of the Colonial State in India
British India and the Abuses of Power
Early Modern Persian, Urdu, and English Historiography and the Imagination of Islamic India under British Rule
Local Pasts
Ancient History and the Antiquarian
Travels in Ladakh 1820-21
Syed Ahmad and His Two Books Called 'Asar-al-Sanadid
The Office of Akhbār Nawīs
History as Self-Representation
Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History
Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British Empires
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |