The mobility of skilled service communities has been an important theme in the social history of India’s ‘long eighteenth century’. Regional states, merchant patrons and the European trading companies sought mobile people with a wide range of talents: as Persian speaking administrators and accountants, as jurists with a command of Sanskrit, as linguistic and political intermediaries with a command of vernacular languages, as scholars, men of letters, religious specialists and skilled artificers of different kinds. Such service people often commanded key intersections between political, diplomatic, commercial and military power across the subcontinent.
Yet we know relatively little about the practical conditions of mobility that made their lives possible, or the ways in which migration itself shaped their mental worlds. This symposium considers the reflections of people – from scholars and artists to service and administrative elites – who moved within and across the regional polities of the eighteenth century. How did the experience of migration change or condition their writing? Did they employ distinctive vocabularies and languages of self-fashioning that offer a contrast with earlier literary models? What was the importance for them of older local affiliations – family ties, established religious and sectarian loyalties or shared identities based in language and class? How far did new horizons of service and patronage re-shape the ways in which service people imaged the social geography of the subcontinent?
Not all of the figures of interest in this period offered explicit reflections on political and social life. The symposium is as concerned with questions of social history proper as with those of cultural and intellectual history. Musicians, merchants, and mercenaries traveled alongside scholars, scribes, and savants. What were the social arrangements – kin networks, patronage systems, bureaucratic postings, sectarian and military recruitments – that made mobility possible? How did migration of different kinds shape practical as well as affective conditions within the family, and how did families themselves adapt to new regional cultures and conditions of service? What led some professional families to establish themselves as new administrative dynasties, while others did not?
Many scholars have suggested a remarkable ‘newness’ in Indian intellectual and literary life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when skilled and mobile people were a key presence in the polities of Mughal India. 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?
Polly O’Hanlon, Anand Venkatkrishnan and Richard David Williams
Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
Previous programs of the Oxford Early Modern South Asia project can be viewed here.
Professions in Motion 