The UBC South Asia Research Colloquium offers a forum for specialists in South Asia to share their research in front of an interdisciplinary audience. This seminar features speaker Dr. Naveena Naqvi (University of British Columbia).
The Saulat Public Library, Rampur, India (credit: NN)
Questions about how archives are constituted, by whom, and to what end, have occupied numerous postmodern meditations on the act of writing history. At the same time, the idea of “discovering” unconventional sources of history to sidestep the limitations of more traditional archives has also revealed its inherent problems. While keeping this critical lens in mind, the present talk will analyze a written work from a marginal archive in an attempt to demonstrate the historical potential that it holds.
The example that I will spotlight from Persianate South Asia indicates that one of the features that sets marginal archives apart is that, among their myriad materials, they are frequently the custodians of unconfirmed and improbable historical accounts, rarely to be found in more established collections. The particular work at hand, Tārīkh-i-‘Abbāsī, is a first-person Persian-language narrative of an event that may never have happened—a diplomatic mission headed by a runaway Mughal prince to the Durrani Afghan court in Kabul. This mission is thought to have taken place in the late 18th century in the years leading up to the East India Company’s annexation of most of Mughal north India. The author was a minor go-between who found himself in a position to record what appears to have been the last attempt at instating a Mughal prince as the Timurid sovereign of a much-shrunken empire.
What does the documentation of this delegation and its availability to us mean? What does it definitively tell us even as we acknowledge its tenuous claims on the objective truth? Are we to deduce that the Durrani Afghan empire continued to present a challenge to the political future of the East India Company in a way that the dismembered Mughal empire could not? Was the possibility of reviving an older form of imperial rule under a Muslim dynast truly at stake, and if so, whose vision was this?
Date & Time:
Monday, April 8, 2024 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Location:
UBC Asian Centre, Room 604, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver
Hosted by the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, this event is open to the public.
Registration is required (please find the registration form above).
