Professeure invitée EHESS-Cesah-CRH : Subah Dayal, NYU Gallatin — Campus Condorcet Aubervilliers, mars 2025
Subah Dayal is a historian of early modern South Asia, with a focus on the intersections of the Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds. Her broader research interests are in connected histories, household studies, comparative early modernities, global history, and pre-modern documentary and manuscript cultures. Her first book, Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation in Peninsular India (University of California Press 2024), draws on literary and archival materials in Persian, Urdu, and Dutch, bridging approaches in global history with social and cultural studies of the Mughal Empire. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, Past and Present, and The Wire.
Programme
From Golkonda to Siam: Secret Letters, Envelopes, and Diplomatic Crisis in the Mughal port-city
Dans le cadre du séminaire de Naveen Kanalu, Le sujet de droit en Islam : responsabilité, éthique et économie (l’empire moghol et l’Inde)
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Mercredi 5 mars 2025 de 18h30 à 20h30
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Campus Condorcet-Centre des Colloques (Salle 3.07)
Place du Front populaire 93300 Aubervilliers
This presentation reconstructs a moment of diplomatic crisis in the Mughal port-city of Masulipatnam on the northern Coromandel coast (southeastern India). It first excavates “stray” objects – envelopes, seals, and registration notes – connected to secret letters that were exchanged amidst a showdown between the ambassador of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya, Mughal port-city officials, and merchants from the VOC factory ca. 1690. It concludes with a reflection on the stakes for reconstructing the unspoken relationships between objects and texts and the possibilities for writing a materially-informed social history of maritime bureaucracy and intra-Asian diplomacy.
Learning Persian the Dutch way: Notebooks of Translation and the Creation of Trans-imperial archives in the Indian Ocean
Dans le cadre du séminaire de Naveen Kanalu, Le sujet de droit en Islam : responsabilité, éthique et économie (l’empire moghol et l’Inde)
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Mercredi 12 mars 2025 de 18h30 à 20h30
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Campus Condorcet-Centre des Colloques (Salle 3.07)
Place du Front populaire 93300 Aubervilliers
This talk reconstructs the textual and material imprint of anonymous Persian-knowing scribes and clerks, who worked in the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) settlements and factories across the seventeenth-century Indian Ocean world. Historians have often presumed and lamented that the Islamic empires of the Middle East and South Asia “lacked” maritime archives, unlike their extensive documentary records on agrarian matters. Connecting existing caches of bi-lingual administrative documents and notebooks of learning dispersed across Persographic port-cities southern Iran and Mughal Hindustan, this presentation interrogates how anonymous scribes translated and made sense of symbols of archiving, ciphers of recording, and documentary typologies at the intersections and limits of two mutually-illegible chancery worlds. It will reflect on the possibilities of these materials for writing a multi-directional and entangled social history of trans-imperial archives.
À retrouver sur le site de l’EHESS
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Chargé de diffusion scientifique (26 février 2025). Professeure invitée EHESS-Cesah-CRH : Subah Dayal, NYU Gallatin — Campus Condorcet Aubervilliers, mars 2025. IISMM. Consulté le 12 novembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13dtx

