Oxford Early Modern South Asia Workshop
Faculty of Oriental Studies and St Anthony’s College

13/14 June 2008
St Antony’s College, Oxford

The intellectual, literary and instrumental knowledges of skilled literati constituted a powerful shaping force in the early modern histories of the world’s great agrarian empires, and in their different transitions to nineteenth century ‘modernity’. Their legal and accounting skills, their expertise in drafting letters, orders and reports, their proficiency in languages, their instrumental and technical knowledges, and their ability to manage records were highly valued attributes, required as much in the households of local elites as at the level of imperial and regional states. Their literary and intellectual expertises made them active contributors across a wide range of fields, from poetry and the philological sciences to ideals of statecraft and good government. These proficiences were indispensable to the development of new forms of state bureaucracy and revenue administration that were such marked features of the political orders of great agrarian states, in European as much as in Asian settings. They were also an important, if complex, aspect of social mobility and the formation of new social classes in these societies.

The cultural pluralism of early modern south Asia, and the fluidity and competitiveness of its regional state systems, gave these classes of literati and service people a particularly critical role. Their skills constituted a vital resource for states in their engagement with new technologies, as much as in their drive to increase revenues. The worlds of cosmopolitan literary reference developed by these literati set new standards for what it meant to be cultured, and their familiarity with contemporary normative literatures on the nature of virtuous government gave them access to a powerful language of moral authority. Their roles as record keepers drew some into forms of history writing, while their social vicissitudes in pursuit of service roles impelled others into self-reflective and sometimes autobiographical modes of literary expression. Above all, these communities of service people acted as interlocutors and intermediaries between the different languages and cultural arenas of early modern India, as acute observers and sometimes as interrogators of the institutions and practices they observed and as servants of their intellectual, ritual and practical needs.

This workshop will examine early modern India’s service communities from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, from a range of different perspectives:

• the extent to which it is possible to see a distinct class of ‘literati’ emerging in this period;
• the practical skills and instrumental knowledges that they offered to early modern states, courts and households, and the degree to which these are consistent with our present understanding of the characteristics of ‘Indian’ knowledge systems;
• the relationships that early modern states developed with communities of ritual, cosmological and genealogical specialists, and the interplay between the preoccupations of states and the internal cultural logics of these specialist communities;
• the all-India networks of patronage and employment that these classes of literati helped to develop as they pursued service opportunities, and the significance of these wider networks for Indian states;
• the consequences of their geographical and social mobility for contemporary debates about the nature of social hierarchies and social order;
• the interface between intellectual and social history that these communities enable us to explore, particularly in their own developing understanding of the subcontinent’s normative political cultures and its modes of thought about the past;
• the degree to which these classes of literati helped to define pre-colonial India’s ‘cultural pluralism’, with their access to different cosmopolitan and vernacular languages, their geographical mobility and their distinctive role as interlocutors;
• the literary genres through which these communities expressed their sense of themselves as a group and developed their critiques of contemporary society;
• their religious and sectarian affiliations, particularly the sufi and the developing Vaishnavite cultures of some of these communities.

Through these and other perspectives, the workshop will explore the transformative potential that these communities brought to India’s own distinctive experience of the ‘early modern’.

To register for the workshop, or for further information, please contact: rosalind.ohanlon@orinst.ox.ac.uk

Oxford Early Modern South Asia Project

Christopher Minkowski, Oriental Studies, Oxford
Polly O’Hanlon, Oriental Studies, Oxford
David Washbrook, Trinity College, Cambridge