Between qanungos and clerks: the cultural and service worlds of Hindustan's pensmen,<i>c.</i>1750–1850

Bellenoit, Hayden J.

doi:10.1017/s0026749x13000218

Cited by 25 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Historians studying the development of scribes and scribal activity related to state power in South Asia focus on the social and material aspects of records and their keepers (Alam and Subrahmanyam 2004; Bellenoit 2014; Green 2010; O’Hanlon 2010; Raman 2012). More recent social-scientific accounts of documents and bureaucracy also study document-makers and the worlds they mediate.…”

Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Mutating Records’—Bureaucratic Knowledge in the Realm of Splintering Digitality

Hasan

2023

Contributions to Indian Sociology

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The digitalisation of the state in India and elsewhere has produced a range of effects and critical responses. Arguably, digital processes intervene in the functioning of paper processes, the lynchpin of bureaucratic states with a colonial legacy. Digitalisation must be understood as the emergence of data and technologies splintered across many different locations and functions of the state rather than as a singular form. This article argues that this splintering digitality generates a perspectival stance on the (re)significance of paper by agents of the state that embody its ‘textual habitus’, namely Village Accountants (VAs). Memorialised as writers, VAs have historically been responsible for recording the ever-changing social. Faced with the computerisation of records and their removal from participation in key inscriptional events, they generate a critique of writing and point to non-textual forms of information that congeal outside written records. In doing so, they provide a view into the encounter between digitalisation and bureaucratic knowledge.

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Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Mutating Records’—Bureaucratic Knowledge in the Realm of Splintering Digitality

Hasan

2023

Contributions to Indian Sociology

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“…219 Until this time, the employment of Hindu and Muslim munshis remained a necessity not only for administering the Company's expanding empire, but also for training British officials competent in Persian paperwork. 220 Residing in India for decades, some of these British Company servants wrote poetry in Persian and adopted Persian noms-de-plume (takhallus), among them the Reverend Bartholomew "Sabr" Gardner, as did some of the Armenian merchants who had settled in Calcutta and other Indian cities. 221 In this respect, such members of the Company's administrative and commercial cadres were following the acculturating path taken by Hindu munshis over the previous centuries, whereby the acquisition of a practical skill set led to exposure to new aesthetic tastes.…”

Section: The Rise Of New Imperial and Nationalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900)

2019

The Persianate World

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Nile Green DEFINING THE "PERSIANATE" By the fifteenth century, having gained written form as a fashionable patois of the court poets of tenth-century Bukhara, Persian had become a language of governance or learning in a region that stretched from China to the Balkans, and from Siberia to southern India. 1 As a lingua franca promoted by multi-ethnic and multireligious states, and aided further by education and diplomacy, Persian reached the zenith of its geographical and social reach between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Then, from the early nineteenth century on, it was undermined by the rise of new imperial and vernacular languages. By around 1900, the language, which had once served to connect much of Eurasia, had retreated to Iran and neighboring pockets of Afghanistan and Central Asia, where it was refashioned into the national languages of Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki. The period between 1400 and 1900, then, marks an era defined by the maximal expansion then rapid contraction of one of history's most important languages of global exchange. By focusing its case-study chapters on these five centuries, The Persianate World aims to understand the reasons behind both this expansion and contraction of Persian by identifying what functions the language was able and unable to serve in the transformative early modern and modern eras of intensifying interactions across Eurasia. By looking at the various "frontiers" of Persian-in the linguistic, geographical, and social senses of the term-the following pages chart the limits of exchange and understanding between the diverse communities brought into contact by this language. In geographical terms, this book moves beyond a static model of Persian's linguistic geography to trace the mobility of texts and text producers as far away as the British Isles and China, as well as the localization of Persian in Central Asia and India. By focusing on "horizontal" geographical frontiers and "vertical" social frontiers, on routes and roots, this book seeks to identify the limits-indeed, the breaking points-of Persian's usefulness as a medium of information, understanding, and affinity. If scholars now take for granted the notion that Persian was a shared lingua franca, it is important to identify more precisely who shared it, and for what (and indeed whose) purposes they did so. In focusing on the five centuries that most densely marked both the making and unmaking of one cultural Geist. Rather, it is conceived as a set of specific skills and practices belonging to small, often professionalized, groups of people who were not connected by an immaterial common language or "culture, " but whose contact and communication was based on tangible written documents and often limited to specific topics. An emphasis on the practice and material of writing and on the social and spatial locations of writers (whether literati, bureaucrats, or plain scribes) are therefore key constituents of such an approach. Another recent vision of the Persianate world (or rather, an "Iranian world") is art...

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“…For similar biographies from the region, see Bhatnagar (2007, 91-127). On the impact of scribal practises from Mughal times in the era of British expansion in India, see Bellenoit (2014). On karaṇam contributions to a shift in historical consciousness in early modern South India, see Naryana Rao et al (2001, 93-139); on the impact of bureaucratised government in the same region, see Raman (2012).…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland

Moran¹

2019

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KingsHiP and Polit y on tHe Himalayan Borderland grant number 334489) enabled this project's completion -my warm thanks to them all.The responsive assistance of staff members at depositaries and libraries across the globe was indispensable for research. My deep thanks to the staff at the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the National Archives of India in New Delhi, and the Himachal Pradesh Department of Arts, Languages & Cultures Library at Shimla -a great many of the sources that are mentioned in this book would have been inaccessible without them. A shorter version of the third chapter was published in Modern Asian Studies, my thanks to Cambridge University Press for allowing its reproduction in an expanded format here, and to Lucy Rhymer of the same for insightful remarks on this project as a whole. Further credits are due to Alexander Cherniak for help with Kahluri diacritics, to Offek Orr for maps that are both readable and reflective of the mythic qualities attributed to Pahari Rajputs in modern historiography, and to Isabelle Ratié for photographs of the region.Parts of this book had developed through scholarly exchanges in various academic platforms. In Germanophone circles, my thanks to William Sax for Heidelbergian hospitality and engrossing discussions around the globe, and to Martin Gaenszle and Michael Mann for facilitating an exposition of key topics from the book in Vienna and Berlin, respectively. I am grateful to Elena de Rossi Filibeck and John Bray for fruitful collaborations during early phases of research in Rome. In Paris, I am thankful to the faculty and staff of the Centre d'Études Himalayannes (CNRS, UPR 299) for many warm welcomes and engaging scholarly enquiries; to Marie Lecomte-Tilouine and Anne de Sales for immaculately planned workshops that persistently managed to break new grounds in Himalayan Studies; and to Daniela Berti and Véronique Bouillier for delightful exchanges over the years. Further thanks to Emmanuel Francis for discussions at the Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud and elsewhere.Across the Channel, I am grateful to Roy Fischel, Michael Hutt, and James Mallinson of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London for comments on an earlier version of Chapter 2. Farther still beyond the Atlantic, my thanks to Mark Turin for prompting a rethinking of Himalayan history, to Sara Shneiderman for pointed comments on the same, and to Catherine Warner for collegial collaboration on the topic. For academic exchanges in conferences and research institutes in India, I am grateful to

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Between qanungos and clerks: the cultural and service worlds of Hindustan's pensmen,c.1750–1850

Cited by 25 publications

References 17 publications

‘Mutating Records’—Bureaucratic Knowledge in the Realm of Splintering Digitality

‘Mutating Records’—Bureaucratic Knowledge in the Realm of Splintering Digitality

Introduction The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900)

Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland

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