Networks and fault lines in eighteenth-century Deccani literary communities: Lachmī Narāyan ‘Shafīq’ and his circle

Abstract

By the end of the eighteenth century, emerging states in South Asia drew on successive waves of migration to staff their institutions. Scholars, poets and bureaucrats in these new states were entrusted with the crafting and maintenance of new bureaucratic systems and cultural spaces. The attempts to create shared 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 late 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 with a literary network connected with one author, Lachmī Narāyan ‘Shafīq,’ built a shared history in the eighteenth-century Deccan, but also created moments of acute conflict and dissent through its literary production. The competing needs for individual self-presentation and success in the competitive climate of the period undercut the desire to forge collaborative networks. The conflicting record of these collaborations and fault lines 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.