Abstract
This article aims to explore the changing historiographical trend which began with the upsurge of the postmodernist school where history was no longer confined to a specialised genre, rather history could be constructed from a diverse range of sources, which were ignored earlier such as oral traditions, living rituals, memory collections and as I would try to show in the course of this article, even from autobiographical accounts. I would focus on Banarasidas'—a sixteenth-century gem merchant from Jaunpur and his autobiography—‘Ardhakathanak' to try and analyse how this work articulated the various processes by which in the sixteenth-century Mughal India, the identity of a person (who did not belong to the court and was rather a part of what has been termed as subject population) was shaped up. In this instance, identity was shaped and dictated by the narrator's membership to the mercantile community, which constantly manifested itself through his strategies of resistance to forms of exploitation and resulted in the establishment of informal networks cutting across territorial and filial considerations. However, identity is never uniform, rather there are multiple elements operating at different levels which constitute one's identity. In the case of my protagonist, a determining element of his identity was influenced by the framework of ethical and unethical behaviour advocated by the imperial court and this played a crucial role in his own evaluation of his ‘self' revealing in the process complex manners in which the imperial court influenced social norms. My article also tries and investigates the liminal spaces which merchants occupied in the pre-modern world, where they occupied a dual position of being both predator and predated upon and how these notions were often closely linked to issues of territoriality.
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