Beyond Babel: East India Company Genre and Colonial Romanticism in an Indo-Persian Diary

Abstract

Scholarship largely holds that the "Persianate world"-a transregional sphere of cultural exchange mediated by an Indian Ocean lingua franca-was put paid to by a colonizing English East India Company. Against that historiography, this article reveals how colonial and Indo-Persian modern textual trends were coproduced. Reading a first-person account of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, written in 1815-17 by a prince from a Mughal successor state under Company rule, the article argues that the travelogue's unprecedented form of a diary, and its uncharacteristically affective contents for Indo-Persian prose, drew on emerging genres and Romantic ideologies in British India. But while this resulted in a new kind of Indo-Persian ego-document, this text of Indian Ocean travel remained, however, anchored in Mughal concepts of moods and manners. As such it betrayed transitional tensions that compel a reconsideration of how colonialism led ultimately to the passing of a precolonial Persianate Babel.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Publication Date

6-1-2024

Publication Title

Modern Intellectual History

Department

History

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244323000240

Notes

Please note a correction has been issued for this article.

Language

English

Format

text

Link to Full Text

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