Oxford Early Modern South Asia Project
Professions in Motion: Culture, Power, and the Politics of Mobility in Eighteenth-century India
Trinity College, Oxford
1-2 June 2017
The mobility of skilled service communities has been an important theme in the social history of India’s ‘long eighteenth century’. This symposium explores the experience of service people-scholars and artists, record-keepers and revenue managers, ritualists and military men-who moved within and between the regional polities of the period. How did the experience of migration shape their mental worlds and condition their writing? Did new horizons of opportunity remake older strategies for the pursuit of service and patronage? What were the social arrangements that sustained family and professional mobility? Many scholars have suggested a remarkable ‘newness’ in the intellectual and literary life of Mughal India, when skilled service people were a key presence in its courts and polities. But what happened to their energies in the generations that followed, as they traversed the networks connecting the new regional states of the eighteenth century, and the expanding power of the European trading companies? Might their experience offer us new ways to understand the balance of subcontinental forces during the long eighteenth century transition to colonialism?
Participants
Hannah Archambault, UC Berkeley
Nandini Chatterjee, University of Exeter
Purnima Dhavan, University of Washington
Arthur Dudney, University of Cambridge
Roy Fischel, SOAS
Christopher Minkowski, University of Oxford
Naveena Naqvi, UCLA
Polly O’Hanlon, University of Oxford
Francesca Orsini, SOAS
Bihani Sarkar, University of Oxford
Katherine Butler Schofield, King’s College London
Davesh Soneji, University of Pennsylvania
Dominic Vendell, Columbia University
Anand Venkatkrishnan, University of Oxford
Richard Williams, University of Oxford
With the support of:
Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford Max Muller Fund
Radhakrishnan Memorial Bequest Fund Trinity College Oxford
Image: Murshidabad, c.1760-70. Collection of Eberhard Rist.
Enquiries: richard.williams@orinst.ox.ac.uk
Professions in Motion 