Networks and fault lines in eighteenth-century Deccani literary communities

Lachmī Narāyan ‘Shafīq’ and his circle

Bibliographic Data

ID8961703
AuthorsPurnima Dhavan (0000-0001-9345-667X, University of Washington, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume57
Issue4
Pages461-480
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)
DOI10.1177/0019464620948702
OpenAlexW3097826386
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

By the end of the eighteenth century, emerging states in South Asia drew on successive waves of migration to staff their institutions. Scholars, poets and bureaucrats in these new states were entrusted with the crafting and maintenance of new bureaucratic systems and cultural spaces. The attempts to create shared bonds in these new spaces, however, also created tensions between those who were recent arrivals in these communities and those whose families had settled there earlier. In the fiercely competitive world of late Mughal literary culture, the task of uniting these groups by creating new networks was complicated by divergent goals. I examine how the writing and dissemination of new histories, memoirs and literary works with a literary network connected with one author, Lachmī Narāyan ‘Shafīq,’ built a shared history in the eighteenth-century Deccan, but also created moments of acute conflict and dissent through its literary production. The competing needs for individual self-presentation and success in the competitive climate of the period undercut the desire to forge collaborative networks. The conflicting record of these collaborations and fault lines in the archival records of this period invite us to revisit the ways in which both collective and individual identities were forged in this period

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Bureaucracy · Dissent · Literature · Memoir · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Law · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

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