000			02073nam a22001577a 4500
999			_c517667 _d517667
008			210723b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aHalon, R.O., Venkathrishnan, A. and Williams, R.D. _927597
245			_aScribal service people in motion: Culture, power and the politics of mobility in India’s long eighteenth century, c. 1680–1820
260			_aThe Indian Economic and Social History Review
300			_a57(4), Oct-Dec, 2020: p.443-460
520			_aA decade after IESHR’s Special Issue of 2010, ‘Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal communities and historical change in India’, we return again to the challenges and dilemmas that scribes, bureaucrats, intellectuals and literati of different kinds faced during the early modern centuries. Building on recent advances in our understanding of these key communities, this Special Issue turns the focus to the eighteenth century. We explore the strategies of individuals as they navigated new conditions of service, unexpected opportunities for personal advancement and the complexities of affiliation amid personal networks that extended across boundaries of region, language and religion. We investigate the important role of scribal people in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century, and the new meanings that their participation gave to literary syncretism and hybridity. We return again to questions of intellectual history and the reflections of scribal service people as they sought to find meaning in the collapse of old political formations and the rise of new ones. This Introduction surveys the recent scholarly literature in these connected fields, situates the essays here in the context of this new work, and identifies some of the key questions which remain to be answered in this critical era of transition between the India of ‘early modernity’ and the coming of the colonial world.
650			_aScribe, Writer, Munshi Persianate, Record-keeper _925592
773			_aThe Indian Economic and Social History Review
906			_aHISTORY - INDIA
942			_cAR