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Oxford Early Modern South Asia Workshop

Professions in Motion: Culture, Power and the Politics of Mobility in Eighteenth Century India

Danson Room, Trinity College, Oxford

1-2 June 2017

Thursday 1 June 9.15 am Coffee 9.45 Opening Remarks 10.00 Artists and astronomers on the move Chair: Francesca Orsini 10.00 Katherine Butler Schofield (King’s College, London)

‘Genealogy, Geography and Gharānā: Indian musicians’ networks in the late eighteenth century’.

10.30 Christopher Minkowski (Oxford)

‘An Open, International Search: Bringing Euclid, Al-Ṭūṣī and Copernicus to Jaisingh’s Observatory’.

11.00 Discussion 11.30 Break 11.45 Military and administrative competencies in central India Chair: Arthur Dudney 11.45 Hannah Archambault (University of California, Berkeley)

‘The business of war: raising and maintaining armies in the early eighteenth Deccan’.

12.15 Nandini Chatterjee (University of Exeter)

‘Kayasthas in Rajput land: family lore in a dynasty of qanungo- zamindars in early modern Malwa’.

12.45 Discussion

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1.15 Lunch in the Danson Room, Trinity College. All welcome. 2.30 Flight of the poets Chair: Anand Venkatkrishnan 2.30 Arthur Dudney (Cambridge)

‘‘Chasing in the desert of greed’: when Delhi’s intellectuals left for Lucknow’.

3.00 Francesca Orsini (SOAS)

‘Persianising Banaras: Literati, new courts and changing dynamics of multilingualism in 18c Awadh’.

3.30 Richard David Williams (Oxford)

‘Dreams, songs and letters: How sectarian poets documented the tensions between their gurus, gods and kings’.

4.00 Discussion 7.00 Dinner for paper givers Friday 2 June 8.45 am Coffee 9.00 The Deccan and Its Political Imaginaries Chair: Richard Williams 9.00 Purnima Dhavan (University of Washington, Seattle)

‘Networks and Fault Lines in Eighteenth century Deccani Literary Communities’.

9.30 Roy S. Fischel (SOAS)

‘Post-imperial Present, pre-imperial Pasts: Elites, Locality and the state in the Deccan, c. 1660-1720’.

10.00 Naveena Naqvi (University of California, Los Angeles) ‘Documenting Loss and Vitality in inter-imperial North India,

c.1780- 1830’.

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10.30 Discussion 11.15 Break 11.30 Émigré Horizons in South India Chair: Purnima Dhavan 11.30 Anand Venkatkrishnan (Oxford)

‘Khana Khazana: Brahmins, Scholars and Cooks in the Long Eighteenth Century’

12.00 Devesh Soneji (University of Pennsylvania)

‘Mēḷakkārar Mobility, Literature-as-Performance and Tañjāvūrī Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth Century South India’

12.30 Discussion 13.00 Lunch in the Danson Room, Trinity College. All welcome. 2.00 Maratha Brahmans and their networks Chair: David Washbrook 2.00 Dominic Vendell (Columbia)

‘Politics at a Distance: Diplomacy and Merchant Networks at Eighteenth Century Maratha Courts’

2.30 Polly O’Hanlon (Oxford)

‘Political brokers as ‘mobile professionals’ in the eighteenth-century Maratha state’

3.00 Bihani Sarkar (Oxford)

‘Travelling Tantrics and Belligerent Brahmins: the Śivarājyābhiṣekakalpataru and Śivaji’s Tantric Consecration’

3.30 Discussion 4.15 Break, Round Table and Close

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Abstracts

Hannah Archambault, University of California, Berkeley The Business of War: Raising and maintaining armies in the early 18th century Deccan Yusuf Muhammad Khan was both a writer and a military man, but in India, he complained, only the latter profession received any respect. Perhaps that is why he put his pen to use commenting on the military policies of his lifelong patron, Nizam al-Mulk Asaf Jah, who founded the 18th-century state of Hyderabad. The Deccan, where the Nizam built his career, was a meeting point for the subcontinent’s many military cultures. It was where the massive, heavily equipped and highly structured Mughal armies had famously met their match against the fast-moving guerilla tactics of the Marathas. Other templates were also available, especially in the Karnatak, where footsoldier-based armies predominated, and where (as the 18th century progressed) European-style infantry played a growing role. Yusuf Muhammad Khan travelled alongside the Nizam across large tracts of northern and southern India over four decades, serving both on the battlefield and in administrative, secretarial and accountancy-related capacities as his patron contended with changing terrains and enemy tactics. Khan recalled these experiences in the Tārīkh-i Fathiya (c. ~1755), and reflected on the Nizam’s choices in the context of broader challenges faced by small-scale military recruiters and aspiring sovereigns alike: how does one recruit, and most importantly, finance a reliable army? I draw on the Tārīkh-i Fathiya to explore the early 18th century Deccan as a moment of entrepreneurial experimentation, where even soldiers of modest background could aspire to rank and fame, and leaders scrambled to respond effectively in an evolving military society. Nandini Chatterjee, University of Exeter

Kayasths in Rajput land: family lore in a dynasty of qanungo-zamindars in early modern Malwa This paper derives from an ongoing book project about a family of landlords in Dhar, a district in Malwa, central India, and their documented interaction with three regimes, Mughal, Maratha and British, and remembered/imagined relations with more. It is a micro-history based on a reconstructed archive of principally Persian-language legal documents, from the late sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, which I collected from Delhi, Kuwait, and from present-day descendants in Dhar. As a family of Kayasths, holding the post of qanungo of Dhar under the Mughals, these should have been members of one of the most

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intensively studied early modern service communities, who, as we know, flourished under various eighteenth-century regimes, and under the British. However, this was anything but a family of pen-pushing scribes. Still known as the “Bada Raola” of the erstwhile Dhar princely state, they saw themselves as little kings, serving various empires, but with longer and deeper claims than any immediate overlord. Seemingly isolated as one of only two non-Rajput thikanedars of the region, they created an identity that was as much about martial valour as about intelligence and administrative competence. Fortunately for us, members of this family across generations were keen to tell their story, explaining their origins and those of their entitlements. They did so, repeatedly, in a variety of genres and languages. This paper will consider three such genres in which the story of the family was told: a Persian-language legal form known as mahzar-nama; a Hindi-language family history and a statement of facts accompanying a petition to British authorities, in English.

Of these, it will focus on the second, the Hindi-language family history, comparing its content and narrative style with the two other narrative genres, which were occasioned by legal disputes and hence transparently functional. At the core of the Hindi story is a journey – from Udaipur to Dhar – a migration necessitated by loyalty and betrayal, which reflected on the relations between kings and servants. The story of that journey will be examined, together with the dominant tropes – the clever wazir, the fearless soldier, the hospitable squire, the chaste woman – to consider how this family of landlords may have been trying to represent themselves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and indeed, why they may have been concerned to do so at all. Purnima Dhavan, University of Washington, Seattle Networks and Fault Lines in the in Eighteenth-Century Deccani Literary Communities Many of the emerging urban centers of eighteenth-century India were shaped by successive waves of migration. Scholars, poets, and bureaucrats in these new urban spaces were tasked with the crafting and maintenance of new bureaucratic and cultural institutions. The attempts to create shared cultural 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 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 built a shared history for émigré scholars in the eighteenth-century Deccan, but also created moments of acute conflict and dissent among these communities. The competing needs for individual self-presentation and success in the competitive climate of the period undercut the desire to forge

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collaborative networks. The conflicting record of these collaborations and faultiness 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. Arthur Dudney, Cambridge University “Chasing in the Desert of Greed”: When Delhi's Intellectuals Left for Lucknow When the Mughal Empire was in its prime, the court drew Persian-using intellectuals and poets from across the empire. Apprenticeship to respected thinkers and writers at the centre was the equivalent of a higher degree in our society. For about a century after Shah Jahan built Shahjahanabad (today's Old Delhi) in the mid-17th century, Delhi was the ultimate destination. This changed after the 1739 conquest of the city by Nadir Shah. Awadh welcomed many of those fleeing Delhi, but numerous scholars left in the early 1750s, well after the violence precipitated by Nadir's occupation. This essay considers the career trajectories of a few Delhi-based scholars with significant teaching commitments who left for Lucknow (the nephew of one sniped that he was "chasing in the desert of greed" by leaving), and wonders whether the "pull" of the Awadh court was more significant that the "push" of deteriorating conditions in Delhi. Roy S. Fischel, SOAS University of London Post-Imperial present, Pre-Imperial Pasts: Elites, Locality, and the State in the Deccan, 1660-1720 The story of the long eighteenth century in India is told with the decline of Mughal power at its centre. The rapid loss of Mughal authority gave rise to new polities, explained as either direct successors of the Mughal Empire or as new political formations inheriting Mughal administrative practices more subtly. In the Deccan, the Nizam of Hyderabad or the Maratha Confederacy are often analysed within the same Mughal-centric framework. This view presumes long rooted Mughal rule and establishes it as ground zero upon which the history of the eighteenth century is built. Such assumption, however, is more than a little problematic. After all, the Deccan, ruled by the fairly stable Deccan Sultanates for two centuries, was fully conquered by the Mughals only in the late 1680s, and regained its independent status within a few decades, marking Mughal rule as a brief interval in the long history of the region.

This paper aims at changing the focus from Delhi to the Deccan while exploring the response of local elites to the fast changing political environment. Focusing on the period from the closing phase of sultanate rule to the rise of

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regional polities in the early eighteenth century, this paper stresses that at least a certain degree of continuity was maintained. Examining different elements in local elites, whether mobile or locally identified, and their changing attitude towards political power vis-à-vis their own place, I argue that understanding this period has to take into consideration local, pre-imperial sensitivities of the elites, long established in the Deccan at the time of the Mughal conquest. By that, I suggest that understanding the eighteenth century reflects not only new elite configuration and mobility in the post-Mughal world, but also a process of negotiation with the long, localised, pre-Mughal pasts. Christopher Minkowski, University of Oxford An Open, International Search: Bringing Euclid, Al-Ṭūṣī, and Copernicus to Jaisingh’s Observatory The effects of Sawāī Jaisingh’s astronomy project in the first decades of the eighteenth century are still felt in the built environment of five Indian municipalities, especially at the observatory on the grounds of the palace that Jaisingh placed in the heart of his planned city, Jaipur. The masonry observatories are the physical remains of an early modern version of ‘big science.’ Jaisingh is reputed by contemporary sources to have spent more than two million rupees on his astronomy. What is less well known is how much of this went into hiring in the human talent who designed and staffed the observatories and who carried out the scientific work, in a uniquely international congregation of experts. Convening a conversation across three major scientific and linguistic boundaries was intended as the culmination of one of the cultural ambitions of the Mughals.

Jaisingh’s interest in astronomy proceeded in three distinct phases – Siddhāntic, Arabo-Persian, and European. The earlier forms were not abandoned but drawn along into the next phase, with improvements attempted. The staff Jaisingh convened to accomplish this had to build bridges. Jyotiṣas were tasked with translating classics of Arabo-Persian astronomical science into Sanskrit, some of these classics being Arabic reworkings of Greek authors. Chief among the pundits at the observatory were Jagannātha Saṃrāṭ, who translated versions of Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest, and Nayana Sukhopādhyāya, who translated a version of Theodosius’ Spherics, as well as works of the thirteenth century Persian astronomer, Al-Ṭūṣī. There were at various times a dozen or so specialists in Arabo-Persian astronomy, including Muhammad Abid and Dayānat Khān, who helped with these translations, and were charged with acquiring and rendering intelligible copies of the almanacs or zīj-tables produced at the courts of previous rulers such as, in reverse order, Shah Jahān, Akbar, Ulugh Beg in Samarkand, and Hulagu in Marāga, Iran. Finally there were

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Europeans brought to Jaisingh’s court, most notably Pedro de Silva, a Portuguese astronomer entrusted with making comprehensible the astronomical tables of Philippe de la Hire, just published in Paris, and brought back to Jaipur by a delegation of Jesuits and Indians whose scientific trip to Europe Jaisingh had financed. Jesuits from Goa, Bengal, and as far away as central Europe came to Jaipur to participate, perhaps hoping finally to succeed with astronomy at an Indian court, as the mission in China had done at the Beijing observatory more than a century earlier.

Many aspects of Jaisingh’s observatories have been discussed before. This talk will focus particularly on the lives of the scientists, the outward-looking ‘interdisciplinary’ setting in which they were required to function, and the difficulties of one of their main scientific activities – translation. The unfortunate experience of a third pundit, Kevalarāma, working on de la Hire’s tables, which were based on the relatively recently invented logarithms, will serve as an example of the limitations the scientists could run up against. Naveena Naqvi, University of California, Los Angeles Documenting Loss and Vitality in Inter-imperial North India (ca.1780-1830) As historical studies of India under Mughal and British colonial rule make clear, secretarial service cadres—bureaucrats, scribes, and scholars—were crucial to the elaboration of imperial power. During the height of Mughal rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these positions were filled by writers skilled in the arts of historiography, inshā’ (epistolography) and poetry, among other literary genres. Historians of the Mughal Empire have shown, notably in the case of Iranians, that state-secretaries and ministers were highly mobile figures, often serving several courts in their careers. When the Mughal Empire decentralized in the eighteenth century, yielding to multiple annexations and new regimes, this body of secretarial service figures underwent several changes. Its composition dramatically altered as writers from increasingly diverse backgrounds took up the pen. By means of their physical and social mobility, many of them linked up with the apparatuses of provincial successor states that had assumed a degree of autonomy from the Empire in the early eighteenth century. However, even when those very successor states began to lose their administrative authority in the early-nineteenth century, secretarial service figures continued to write, at a remove from the direct and consistent patronage of courts. Many of them recorded their observations in diaries and memoirs as they moved between spaces of political loss and vitality, in the inter-imperial period.

This paper focuses on the unpublished writings of two such figures in the aftermath of the First Rohilla War (1774-75), when the joint forces of the East India Company and Awadh disbanded the Rohilla Afghan-led successor state in north

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India. The first of these writings is the Kawā’if al-Sair (The Conditions of Travel), the manuscript transcriptions of an inexperienced amanuensis called Ahmed ‘Alī (fl.1780-81), who traveled through the former Rohilla territories while noting down chronograms and examining abandoned forts and mansions. The second is the Tārīkh-i’Abbāsī (Abbas’s Account), the writings of ‘Abbās ‘Alī Khān (fl. 1756-1794), the son of an Afghan nobleman from Rampur, who forged common cause with a runaway Mughal prince and attempted to orchestrate an ill-fated Durrānī Afghan and Mughal imperial alliance in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Although both works are the products of men from different ends of the spectrum of literary refinement and access to political clout; they are comparable for the ways in which they reflect on the recent past by using the rhetorical shame and physical losses of the Rohilla War as a springboard from which to harness and press into service residual signs of political vitality. Through their writings, Ahmed ‘Alī and ‘Abbās ‘Alī Khān elaborated visions of a changing political future that would build upon the lineaments of setbacks that were fresh in memory. Did these visions tend towards a single political order? If not, what were their points of reference? By producing records of their movements, what were they commemorating and what sorts of political imaginaries did they produce? Polly O’Hanlon, Oxford University

Political brokers as ‘mobile professionals’ in the eighteenth-century Maratha state Throughout the subcontinent, practises of diplomacy and intelligence gathering underwent fundamental changes from the early years of the eighteenth century. In place of networks focussed largely on Delhi, regional states developed their own more multilateral needs for the maintenance of political agents at the courts of allies and rivals across the subcontinent, creating new fields of opportunity for the knowledgeable and the enterprising. Political brokerage was closely connected with intelligence-gathering. Both roles saw processes of privatisation and commercialisation, in a world where many functions of the state were subcontracted to new classes of moneyed men who combined state service with roles as bankers, revenue farmers, monopoly contractors, and military entrepreneurs. These processes developed particularly strongly in the eighteenth century Maratha polity, given its subcontinental political ambitions, its emerging multi-centred character and its driving need for war finance. This paper focusses on political brokerage in particular, and the emergence of the Maratha vakil’s profession as a distinctive blending of cultural and political knowledges, in which subcontinental networks inherited from the seventeenth century often played a considerble part. These networks offered significant resources to eighteenth century Maratha diplomacy. Yet the privatisation of much of a vakil’s work, and the multilateral responsibilities that vakils

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developed as servants to many masters both created considerable strains within the role, and opened key vulnerabilities in the longer term relationship with the East India Company. Francesca Orsini, SOAS University of London Persianising Banaras: Literati, new courts and changing dynamics of multilingualism in 18c Awadh The second half of eighteenth century in Awadh saw the emergence of two new polities and courtly cultures in Fyzabad/Lucknow and Banaras, as well as the creeping presence of the East India Company. These political shifts were accompanied by momentous and quick-paced language shifts—the boom of Rekhta poetry in Lucknow and, this paper argue, the partial Persianisation of Banaras. The migration of poets and scholars into Lucknow, particularly from Delhi, and the flourishing of Persian and Urdu poetry there, have been well documented, not least by the individual themselves and by several tazkiras of Persian and Rekhta/Urdu poets. This paper instead focuses on Banaras as a bourgeoning city under the increasingly shallow rule of the Maharaja and growing control of the East India Company. This paper argues that it was thanks to the westward movement of the East India Company that Banaras became a node, if not a centre, in the wider Persian world. Drawing upon Zulfiqar ‘Ali Khan’s Riyāz al-wifāq (The meadow of friendship, 1812) a tazkira of practitioners of Persian poetry he met, mostly in Benares and Bengal, it considers the migration and traffic of literati and service people from the qasbas and cities of Awadh to Banaras via Bengal, and the social range of people who Zulfiqar ‘Ali Khan writes were practicing Persian in Banaras at the very end of the 19c. Bihani Sarkar, University of Oxford Traveling Tantrics and Belligerent Brahmins: The Śivarājyābhiṣekakalpataru and Śivāji's Tantric Consecration The Śivarājyābhiṣekakalpataru, a Sanskrit work, describes the ritual substantiation of the political authority of the Maratha emperor Śivāji Bhonsle, evoking at the same time a wider social setting of brahmin migrations and conversational encounters within migrations. What makes it remarkable is that the ritual at the heart of this work is a Tantric consecration said to have occurred after the purported failure of the earlier Vedic consecration performed by the Vārāṇasī brāhmaṇa Gāgābhaṭṭa. Implicitly describing the tensions between the Vārāṇasī ritualists called into perform the Vedic consecration and the local

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Tantric ritualists in the Maratha court at Raigaḍ, the work is prefaced by a detailed evocation of pilgrimage sites dotting the Konkan coastline, which the performer of the ceremony Niścalapurī had visited before arriving at Śivāji’s court. The deities and mountains at the centre of this sacred geography are then evoked and propitiated in the Tantric ceremony, thereby symbolically connecting this network of sites with Śivāji's seat of power at Raigaḍ. Deccan Tantric cults centred on the goddess Tripurasundarī, the locally influential lineage goddess Rājarājeśvarī as well as the goddesses called the Daśamahāvidyās that had percolated from Bengal south westwards, which were omitted from the Vaidika ceremony, were also incorporated in a prominent manner into the second consecration. In this way, esoteric and popular goddess traditions entrenched in those regions and their array of power-bestowing rituals (such as the imparting of subjugatory mantras) believed by many to surpass political ceremonies of Vaidika orthopraxy energized the ritual methods sanctifying the ruler. Conceptions concerning local tīrthas—sacred sites attracting pilgrims—and their charisma, come into play in the shaping of this unique historical document. At the same time, journeys shape the transmission of all this historical information: Niścalapurī, according to the Śivarājyābhiṣekakalpataru, met another religious specialist Govinda, the author of the work, during his travels and as their paths intersected, the story of the consecration was recounted by the former to the latter. Niścalapurī’s great powers—especially over his rival Gāgābhaṭṭa—are implied to have derived from his journeys to the mystical Konkan tīrthas, whereby the sanctity of the local deities had cleansed and empowered him, and which he could thereby impart to the king. In this talk, I would like to suggest that this document narrating Śivāji’s second consecration reveals how ‘the mobility of skilled service communities’—in this case the local religious specialists of the Konkan—became an asset used by them while in competition with other mobile ritualists in securing powerful positions in the Maratha court. At the same time the document provides key insights into how ‘migration itself shaped their mental worlds’ by showcasing the backdrop for how sacred power could be accrued through pilgrimages, how political alliances could be thus forged by vaunting the attractiveness of such power, and how relevant information could be passed on to other travelers, who could enable its documentation. Katherine Butler Schofield, King’s College London Genealogy, geography, and gharānā: Indian musicians’ networks in the late 18C The reign of the Mughal emperor Shah ‘Alam II (r.1759–1806) was one of the most decisive periods of Indian history. The half-century to his death witnessed the transfer of geopolitical power from the Mughal empire to the East India

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Company, from the first major British military victory over Bengal in 1757 to their eventual conquest of the Mughal capital, Delhi, in 1803. But it was also a period that saw local elite artistic production, from painting to song to poetry and dance, flourish and transform right across India under the patronage of a welter of newly wealthy potentates of eclectic variety and differing tastes. The upheaval at the Mughal centre in the late eighteenth century caused by multiple invasions, coupled with declining Mughal finances, led to a partial exodus of the scions of Delhi court musicians to the new centres of patronage. There they acted as arbiters and preservers of older elite forms, as well as innovating in the service of newer tastes. The genealogical and geographical networks of these houses of hereditary musicians (now called gharānās) can be traced through a remarkable set of sources that were new to the musical field in the late eighteenth century – multilingual song collections and tazkiras (compendia of biographical notices). By and large written by hereditary musicians and aristocratic amateurs who were their disciples, these sources were themselves a key byproduct of musicians’ increased mobility in Shah ‘Alam’s reign. In this paper I will trace and analyse the geographical, literary, and human networks and nodes revealed in these sources to consider the changing relationship between the local and the pan-regional in the Hindustani musical field during this pivotal period, and what these networks tell us about wider cultural, economic, and political transformation at the micro level across late Mughal North India. Davesh Soneji, University of Pennsylvania Mēḷakkārar Mobility, Literature-as-Performance, and Tañjāvūrī Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth-Century South India This paper examines forms of mobility deployed by South Indian courtesan artists and their kin (known by the Tamil term mēḷakkārar and the Marathi kaḷāvant) at the eighteenth-century Tañjāvūr Marāṭhā court. Drawing largely upon literary and musical texts produced in a number of languages (Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Marathi and Braj) under the patronage of Śāhajī Mahārāja (1684-1712, the second Bhosale ruler of Tañjāvūr), this paper demonstrates how the art of courtesan troupes or mēḷams participated in far-reaching networks of patronage and enabled inter-medial conversations. Cultural production under Śāhajī, as Indira Peterson has argued, revolved around the seamless dissolution of the already fluid boundaries between “literature” and “performance” at the court. Thus, kāvya-oriented, Purāṇic, and local, vernacular narratives were reworked into innovative genres meant for performance largely by by courtesans, dance-masters, and Brahmin actors, in addition to extant lyrical genres such as the padam, which had been present in Tañjāvūr since the Nāyaka period. These new modes of performance were staged both at the court and in

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temples patronized by Tañjāvūr’s Marāṭhā rulers, and constituted new networks of patronage and reception for “courtly” poetic and performative idioms. Artistic “mobility” however, was not limited to new formations around patronage and court-endorsed movement of personnel. These shifts were couched in radical experiments with courtly multilingualism and the emergence of new, distinctly “Tañjāvūrī” literary forms. For example, under Śāhajī’s patronage we saw the creation of what is perhaps the earliest-ever composition of a Brajbhāṣā text in South India, namely the transcreation of the Telugu yakṣagāna-prabandha genre in the form of a drama meant for performance by courtesans called Rādhā Vaṃśīdhar Vilās Nāṭak. I argue that the long eighteenth century at the Tañjāvūr court brings into sharp relief all the key issues that will shape cultural history for the next two hundred years in this region – namely, the complex and highly productive relationships between Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil and Marathi as public languages; radical shifts in economy; the deployment and negotiation of caste-based power; and perhaps most importantly, the oscillation between codifications and defamiliarizations of cultural practice. Dominic Vendell, Columbia University Politics at a Distance: Diplomacy and Merchant Networks at Eighteenth-Century Maratha Courts Having worked together to secure the support of the Nagpur rājā in the battle of Kharda, the Peshwa’s envoy Baburao Viswanath Vaidya and the rājā’s head munśī Shridhar Laxman and ciṭṇis Krishnarao Madhav formalized their alliance by means of a written agreement (karārnāmā) on April 6, 1795. They pledged to split any political business that came their way as well as any profits accruing from this business, including the revenues of several villages in Berar. This agreement reflected the influence and credibility within the political establishment of the Nagpur court that Vaidya had accumulated during his long career in diplomatic service. The Vaidyas were a Konkanastha Brahman merchant family who over three generations performed a range of commercial, administrative and political services for the Satara, Pune, and Nagpur governments, including moneylending, revenue collection, brokerage, and diplomacy. In this paper, I characterize the depth and breadth of their service ‘portfolio’ by examining the ways in which they enabled mobility across physical, political and social-functional boundaries. With the aid of designated intermediaries who exchanged letters, accounts, and financial instruments, they built a network of money, goods, and persons stretching from Wai to Benares. By annihilating space in this fashion, the Vaidyas and their associates, including the Baramatikar Joshis, enriched themselves, but they also allowed for more efficient coordination of political efforts to meet the increasingly serious challenges to

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Maratha rule brought by the East India Company towards the end of the eighteenth century. Anand Venkatkrishnan, University of Oxford Khana Khazana: Brahmins, Scholars, and Cooks in the Long 18th Century Towards the end of the 17th century, the Maharashtrian scholar Raghunātha Gaṇeśa Navahasta moved from his comfortable post as temple priest at Chāfaḷ, in the Sātārā district (halfway between Pune and Kolhapur), down south to receive the patronage of Queen Dīpābāī in Thanjavur. At the behest of the queen, as he says in his unpublished Narakavarṇana, Raghunātha began writing in Marathi instead of Sanskrit, in order to reach a wider audience (lokopakārā sāṭhī). But was his Sanskrit writing only intended to be accessible to a limited range of elite-educated Brahmin males? In this paper, I read Raghunātha’s one published work, a cookbook titled the Bhojanakutūhala, or Curiosities on Food, in the context of his travels from north to south and changes in his working conditions along the way. Raghunātha studied Brahmanical jurisprudence with a scion of the eminent Deva family of Maharashtrian Brahmins in Banaras. He then became a close confidant of the charismatic Marathi preacher Rāmdās, acting as his personal tutor and taking up the responsibility of administering the daily activities of a temple at Rāmdās’ seminary in Chāfaḷ. Finally, he became a courtier to the Thanjavur Marathas, in the heyday of their sponsorship of multilingual cultural products. This paper is also in part about the transmission of ideas from Banaras to the South, and how regional devotional networks allied with political elites to carry cosmopolitan knowledge throughout the subcontinent. Richard David Williams, University of Oxford Dreams, Songs, and Letters: how sectarian poets documented the tensions between their gurus, gods, and kings. Early modern poets conventionally began their compositions by praising and invoking the blessings of their higher authorities and patrons. For a poet working in a religious setting, there were several different authorities to consider, not least the guru, one’s god, and the local ruler or political authority. These were not merely conventions or theoretical considerations: temples could dominate significant networks and land rights, which afforded both religious leaders and deities similar expectations and obligations to kings.

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What happened when these different authorities came into conflict? In the eighteenth century, north Indian society was particularly unstable, and the relationships between these different power-brokers proved volatile. This paper considers how intellectuals attached to religious households and lineages navigated the challenges of the period, particularly invading armies, religious reforms, and forced migration. I will consider the case study of Vrindāvandās (c.1700-c.1787), a Brajbhasha poet and lay devotee of the Radhavallabh Sampraday, and provide contextualized readings of two of his poems, concerned with recent history and the contemporary political climate. These poems explain how his sect responded to the reformation of vaiṣṇava religion under Jai Singh II, when the gurus did not comply with the king’s demands, and left the temples of Vrindavan to seek refuge in Delhi. They also reflect on the vulnerability and instability of the Rajputs and the Mughals, especially during the Afghan invasions. Vrindāvandās himself spent much of his life moving between safe zones and different political authorities, all the while writing for his guru and his gods. This paper will ask how far these poems gesture to a distinctively eighteenth-century mode of literary expression and reflexivity, and consider the archival qualities of Vrindāvandās’ works, which cannot necessarily be read as conventional hagiographies or devotional literature.