In this response to Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, I provide an outline of some significant trends in the historiography of early modern South Asia as it has evolved in the last decade or so. Both the period and the themes reviewed here reflect my own research interests. While Lieberman cites much of the research that I describe here in his chapter on South Asia in Strange Parallels, my reading of the significance of that work is somewhat at odds with his interpretation. This outline is primarily intended for non-South Asianist readers of the JAS, who might find this thematic treatment to be a useful point of entry to the field. It was this thematically oriented conversation that provoked the liveliest discussion during the colloquium at the Hawaii Conference on which this response is based.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam articulated one of the earliest critiques of Strange Parallels in a special issue of Modern Asian Studies in 1997, in response to Lieberman's prospectus for what would eventually become the two-volume work. The thrust of Subrahmanyam's critique was broad. His critique was that Lieberman's worldview was still implicitly Eurocentric, in that the Western European trajectory still provided the default path toward modernity. A second critique was that Lieberman in that original prospectus had not included South Asia in his attempt to rewrite the history of the world in the second millennium C.E. from the vantage point of Southeast Asia. That critique has been addressed in the second volume of Strange Parallels (2009), in which one chapter (out of a total of seven) is devoted to South Asia. The breadth of Lieberman's reading in the South Asianist historiography, as revealed in his footnotes, is impressive for a non-specialist in the field. Subrahmanyam's third critique was directed at what he characterized as Lieberman's preference in that prospectus for “certain chosen national entities” (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam1997, 740), that he then implicitly reified by taking their character as given and unchanging. At least as far as South Asia is concerned, Lieberman also attempts to address that critique implicitly in his chapter in Volume 2 of Strange Parallels, by pointing out that he is construing the region's territorial extent not from the retrospective vantage point of a subcontinent unified by the British empire, but from the perspective of its longer term cultural and political trajectories (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2009, 632–33).

Finally, by way of critique and response to Lieberman's “highly materialist conception (wherein agricultural expansion, commercial exchange, firearms, fiscal methods and functional ideologies are all that count)” (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam1997, 759), Subrahmanyam suggested the broad outlines of an alternate conception of the history of the early modern world, in which the circulation of people and ideas across national boundaries would help to reveal the “global and connected character of the early modern period” (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam1997, 740). In my response here, I develop some of the lines of Subrahmanyam's argument by tracing how the treatment of state formation, caste, and culture in the early modern period has evolved in the last decade in a direction undercutting Lieberman's categories of analysis. A vibrant new historiography of early modern South Asia is engaged in comprehending politics, social relations, and cultural practices from within, in work that is much more deeply rooted in local archives than was the case earlier. In the process, our understanding of ‘state,’ ‘caste,’ and ‘cultural integration’ has been transformed.

A few disclaimers are in order: I am not engaging the broader argument of Strange Parallels here; the two volumes have been lauded and critiqued by historians far better versed in world history than I. To that extent, this response is written at a tangent to the argument of Strange Parallels, using Lieberman's key analytics as themes for a review of the historiography of early modern South Asia. Nor am I attempting an exhaustive survey of that dynamic field here; two other reviews have already been published.Footnote ¹ Instead, I point to recent work that has opened up relatively unexplored questions or has sought to revise hitherto settled questions, either in the light of new evidence or in the context of better historicized objects of enquiry.

Lieberman detects a long-term trend (however uneven and interrupted) across Eurasia between the ninth and early nineteenth centuries, towards agrarian and demographic expansion, monetization, intensifying interstate competition, the pacification and sedentarization of rural society, and expanding cultural integration (both vertical and horizontal). By the turn of the nineteenth century, then, distinctively modern webs of economic, political, and cultural interdependence are seen to have emerged across most parts of Eurasia. What is distinctive about Strange Parallels is its author's insistence that the central motor both driving and manifesting these long-term developments was state formation. Furthermore, Lieberman is concerned to trace a long-term transition towards increased centralization, by which the “attractive and coercive power of privileged cores” was enhanced and the “autonomy of local centers” was reduced. Having decided on centralization as a benchmark, he finds the long-term historical trajectory of South Asia to be an anomaly: “Able to generate neither an enduring pan-South Asian empire nor a stable multistate system of regional kingdoms, its precolonial fate was, in a sense, Sisyphean” (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2009, 632).Footnote ² The insight that South Asia has alternated between empire building and regional reassertion is not new; what is striking is Lieberman's characterization of that “oscillation” as Sisyphean. That is to say, he evaluates polities in terms of their success or failure in moving towards what he sees as the positive goal of stable, large imperial formations with expansive administration, integrating large swathes of territory both vertically and horizontally.

If centralization of administration and the expansion of the state's “bureaucratic, legal, and taxing capacities” are not merely traced over the long term but are implicitly seen as desirable ends in themselves, it follows then that for Lieberman, the trajectory of Inner Asian conquest elites in India is ultimately a failed one, since they did not succeed in consolidating a stable imperial formation. The causes of such failure are seen as both particular to the Mughals, and as typical of deeper South Asian patterns. As far as the Mughals themselves are concerned, Strange Parallels sums up the scholarly consensus that “institutional weakness, territorial overextension, … destabilizing economic growth, [and] a comparatively high degree of cultural encapsulation helps to explain not only the Mughals' eighteenth-century collapse, but also their failure—unique among polities under review—to revive thereafter” (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2009, 754). Broader South Asian patterns of politics seem more disconcerting for Lieberman, however: “Indeed, a formidable barrier to the stability of all Indian polities, regional as well as trans-regional, was the irremediably segmented conceptualization of power … In this world, sovereignty was not unified and inalienable, but multiple, residual, and nested; and the countryside bristled with petty principalities” (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2009, 740).

Historians of South Asia have challenged this assumption about imperial formations being the only desired form of political arrival for elites in South Asia. As far as horizontal integration by expanding regimes is concerned, recent scholarship has shown how political incorporation and varying degrees of administrative centralization were accomplished repeatedly by provincial warrior elites creating regional kingdoms. While Cynthia Talbot has traced how Kakatiya warrior groups created a ‘state’ best described as a “fluctuating political network composed in large part of a multitude of personal ties between lords and underlings,” more recently Samira Sheikh has shown how Muslim Sultans of local origin forged a regional polity in western India that became the political and cultural foundation for the modern, linguistically defined province of Gujarat (Talbot Reference Talbot2001, 172; Sheikh Reference Sheikh2010). As both Talbot and Sheikh suggest, and as the history of the Maratha polity in western India has demonstrated, such provincial elites consolidated their “bureaucratic, legal, and taxing capacities” over core territories that were relatively homogenous in linguistic and cultural terms; beyond such cores, they were content to launch periodic raids within an extended sphere of influence.

While Lieberman acknowledges this character of the regional kingdoms in South Asia during this period, unlike him, the scholars he cites (including Talbot) do not locate the emergence of such regional kingdoms within a context of waning or waxing empire. Instead, the new scholarship has been much more interested in tracing local and regional sources of political dynamism, while pointing out the limited and varying success of imperial powers such as the Khalji and Tughlaq state in the fourteenth century and the Mughal state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in incorporating such provincial polities.

Furthermore, in an exercise comparing the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Mughal empires in the early modern period, Subrahmanyam argues for the eventual benefits of Mughal collapse in the eighteenth century. While the Mughal Empire may have helped to engineer its own crisis through the degree of relative autonomy that it permitted (or was compelled to permit) to its vassals, Subrahmanyam reads that very autonomy as a crucial ingredient in the region's longer-term political consolidation into the present. That is to say, the strengthening and re-energizing of the regions that Mughal rule facilitated may have been a key factor in the demise of the Mughal empire. However, it was also arguably a key factor in consolidating a subcontinental polity coinciding with Mughal territorial boundaries for the most part that has endured into the present day in the shape of the Republic of India (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam2006). Subrahmanyam thus clearly offers an alternate perspective on the limited success and short-lived nature of Mughal centralization, at the other end of the interpretive spectrum from Lieberman.

To move to vertical integration by stable imperial states, Muzaffar Alam and Subrahmanyam again – in their introduction to an edited volume on the Mughal state – persuasively undercut the older historiographic orthodoxy about the reach and capacity of the Mughal administrative apparatus. They do so by pointing out that much of the formidable revenue data generated by the Mughal regime by the 1590s recorded projected revenues rather than actual yields; that the very availability of data on taxable land (arazi) at the end of the sixteenth century varied widely across and within provinces; and that imperial attempts through the seventeenth century to increase revenues must be seen in the context of the regime's limited success in doing so in the first place. The Emperors made increasing claims to absolute authority, drawing on Timurid political traditions from Central Asia as well as Indic idioms. By the logic of Alam and Subrahmanyam's evidence, however, the vaunted political centralization of the Mughal state across much of its territory was more aspiration than reality (Alam and Subrahmanyam Reference Alam, Subrahmanyam, Alam and Subrahmanyam1998).

To be fair to Lieberman, he does recognize that “historians of Mughal administration divide between those who stress uniform, intrusive centralization and those who emphasize patrimonial inefficiency and fluid local contexts. In the latter view, the empire resembled a ‘wall-to-wall carpet’ less than a ‘patchwork quilt’” (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2009, 648). The last substantive defense of the Mughal centralization thesis appeared in 1993, however, in an article by Athar Ali that Lieberman cites (Ali Reference Ali1993). Since the publication of The Mughal State, two new studies of imperial and provincial regimes have drawn inspiration, tacitly or overtly, from the more agnostic revisionist view of the Mughal state apparatus, as well as from the insights of political anthropology. Farhat Hasan's study of imperial administration in two port cities of Mughal Gujarat reconstructs the Mughal state not as a stable, pre-existent ‘structure,’ but as articulated through the process of its negotiation with local actors. His study seeks to demonstrate how “the powers of the Mughal state were limited in spatial and functional terms by ‘the internal resistance of its own circuits’” (Hasan Reference Hasan2004, 126). In keeping with this shift of focus to comprehending the state from below, in her monograph on artisanal groups in the Rajput kingdom of Jodhpur in the eighteenth century, Nandita Prasad Sahai also argues that this regional state was also “a mere primus interpares in a continuum of power centres whose fortunes constantly waxed and waned” (Sahai Reference Sahai2006, 100). Both these newer studies of early modern state formation are firmly rooted in a careful reading of archival records, and both depict state regimes that are both articulated and contested through their negotiations with local communities and local actors. A reified ‘state’, assessed as either ‘strong’ or ‘weak,’ is thus displaced in this recent scholarship by an analytic of the state as process. From this perspective, it would follow, administrative centralization takes on a different hue; it is really about the variable success of a ‘state’ in persuading local actors, both elite and non-elite, in accepting its writ for their own interests. And in this new historiography the persuasion is perforce ongoing and contested, and the writ of the state is therefore typically contingent and circumscribed.

The emphasis on local actors and their interests, and their contests to state authority, has also generated some revision of the historiography of early modern processes of royal legitimation. Norbert Peabody's study of how Hindu kingship was constituted in the Rajput principality of Kota in the eighteenth century is attentive to the modulations in projections of royal authority, given the particular interests of various target audiences such as merchant groups and Hindu renunciant orders. Peabody thus sees the authority of kingship as historically and politically contingent, by posing the crucial question of audience and reception for such messages: a question that was missing from influential earlier hypotheses about the formulation of Mughal imperial authority in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Peabody Reference Peabody2003; compare with Richards Reference Richards and Richards1998).

This new scholarship on state formation thus connects with another shift of focus in the historiography of early modern South Asia, towards some of the classic questions of cultural history: such as the history of values, norms, knowledge production, memory, and literary traditions. Furthermore, insights gained from the methods of cultural history are being used to rethink questions of social and political history. For one, the range of historical evidence has been expanded to include genres of narrative that had yielded limited or no insights when read more literally or in more positivist fashion (Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam Reference Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam2003; Sreenivasan Reference Sreenivasan2007; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2009).Footnote ³ In the last decade or so, driven by these new questions, along with a wider body of evidence and a greater sensitivity to the protocols structuring both the bureaucratic archive as well as narrative sources, there have been penetrating analyses of social institutions such as the family, gender relations, and ‘caste’ (jati), along with a new, revisionist historiography of South Asian slavery. Much of this new work is deeply attentive to the individual and collective experiences of historical agents, insofar as it is recoverable from the evidence.

Thus, Sumit Guha and Jos Gommans have both drawn inspiration from the scholarship on borderland groups elsewhere in Eurasia,Footnote ⁴ in tracing the long-term evolution of interactions between nomadic pastoralists and forest-dwelling groups on the one hand, and settled peasant societies on the other. Guha reconstructs how caste affiliations and boundaries emerged primarily in the context of sedentarization, an insight that Lieberman echoes. Unlike Lieberman, however, who is concerned to trace a more or less linear movement toward the increasing standardization of caste practices in the early modern period, Guha points out how as late as the early nineteenth century sedentarized groups could return to the forest, and in the process to the edges of caste society. The boundaries between the forest and the field, between mobility and sedentarization in South Asia over the course of the second millennium appear far more mutable and negotiable in this interpretation of the evidence than they do in Strange Parallels (Guha Reference Guha1999). Building on the earlier insights of Dirk Kolff (Reference Kolff1990), Jos Gommans has examined the same sorts of peasant-pastoralist interactions for their role in shaping the military labor market in South Asia, and thereby the character of both warfare and state building. Running through Gommans' work is a persistent current of the political opportunities available to individuals and groups through their participation in the military economy, whether as soldiers, warlords, or as traders in horses, that most prized of military commodities in South Asia (Gommans Reference Gommans1995; Gommans Reference Gommans1998; Gommans Reference Gommans2002). The same theme of political opportunities for entrepreneurial individuals and groups is revealed in William Pinch's work on the warrior ascetics who rose to political prominence in the eighteenth century, and whom the British needed forty years or more to ultimately disarm and sedentarize by the mid-nineteenth century (Pinch Reference Pinch2006). Scholarship on the diffusion of gunpowder technology and the state's military capacity continues to appear (Khan Reference Khan2004), but the newer research cited here is much more interested in how historical actors negotiated such structural constraints and thereby reshaped them.

The new interest in human beings experiencing and reshaping their structurally constrained circumstances is most apparent in Richard Eaton's A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives, the first and only volume in the New Cambridge History of India series that is structured as a series of biographies. Eaton defends the use of the older genre of historical biography “to investigate and illuminate social processes fundamental to the history of the Deccan between the early fourteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries … [including] colonization, factional strife, elite mobility, slavery, inter-caste relations, and social banditry” (Eaton Reference Eaton2005, 4). For their part Alam and Subrahmanyam in their collaborative work have moved decisively in the direction of a ‘historical anthropology’ — into exploring the worldview, values, and experience of individuals in Mughal imperial service; whether literati, minor Mughal princes or diplomats. The experiences of such individuals offer a new prism for comprehending how institutions like the state and the extended elite family may have functioned in actuality, through the exploration of political relationships such as vassalage or bureaucratic service.Footnote ⁵ So, for instance, Alam and Subrahmanyam mine a memoir by a minor Mughal prince at the turn of the nineteenth century to reveal how, contradictory to our earlier assumptions about the consolidation and unification of Mughal sovereignty under Akbar, at the end of the eighteenth century members of the extended imperial household still perceived sovereignty as shared among the princes of the Timurid clan (Alam and Subrahmanyam Reference Alam and Subrahmanyam2006).

Where this scholarship has turned to the level of the local collectivity and the individual to enrich our understanding of early modern politics and political institutions, other scholarship revises what we know of early modern social history by historicizing the institution of the family and thereby both ‘kin’ and ‘the individual’ more deeply. While Ruby Lal has explored the role of the elite household and its women in underpinning the power and political relationships of the first two Mughal rulers, a volume on the history of the family between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries edited by Indrani Chatterjee pushes much further in rendering visible the politics of the family, as well as the familial underpinnings of social and political relationships in early modern and colonial South Asia (Lal Reference Lal2005; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2004). In the process, family, caste and state all emerge as simultaneously powering and managing each other. A second volume on slavery in South Asia, edited by Chatterjee and Eaton, deepens these insights by pointing to the continuum of affective relations as well as obligations characterizing servitude, kinship, and, ultimately, politics. Thus slaves and ex-slaves could rise to wield great power among Muslim ruling elites, in patterns reminiscent of military slavery elsewhere in the Muslim world. But slaves could also be incorporated within the family through overt adoption and / or as affective kin, with precolonial legal regimes formalizing such relationships to differing degrees in particular historical contexts (The pioneering book-length exploration was Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1999).

These latter findings in particular have implications for how we re-conceptualize the history of caste. Persistent archival traces of such affective incorporation into kinship at various levels of the social and political hierarchy limit the explanatory potential of a dominant historiography of caste, premised on the ‘purity’ (presumed rather than proven) of biological descent and on ‘endogamy’. Instead, historians have now begun to pay attention to the policing of caste boundaries at particular historical moments. In a sense, the old assumed relationship between caste stratification and social mobility is being flipped, as new studies reveal the repeated opening and manipulation of caste boundaries, along with the mechanisms by which particular institutions were empowered to conduct such boundary management (O'Hanlon and Minkowski Reference O'Hanlon and Minkowski2008; see also Guha Reference Guha2003, 153–5). Lieberman cites Susan Bayly's insights on the social and political capital that emergent state regimes accrued in the early modern period, by intervening in matters of caste organization. Bayly and Lieberman also point out the visible hardening and standardizing of caste practices by the eighteenth century (Bayly Reference Bayly1999). The new work by O'Hanlon, Minkowski, and Guha suggests, however, the degree to which the drive towards greater standardizations and policing of caste was a response to anxieties generated by the greater mobility and circulation of various occupational groups in the early modern period.

A similar turn away from relatively static conceptualizations is also evident in recent scholarship on religious traditions and cultural practices. A foundational edited volume published in 2000 crystallized the trend towards examining religious affiliations and identities on the ground, by locating texts and practices in finely fleshed out historical contexts. The scholars in this volume, which Lieberman cites, were also sensitive to accommodations between patrons and clients and between sectarian traditions (Gilmartin and Lawrence Reference Gilmartin and Lawrence2000). More recently, Nile Green's research on Sufism in early modern peninsular India, and on the practices of Muslim soldiers in the British colonial army, has shifted our focus away from a text-oriented understanding of Islam towards lived religion (Green Reference Green2006; Green Reference Green2009).

The last decade has also seen a sustained investigation of early modern cultural patronage and its politics, often surprising when viewed from a perspective rooted in the present.Footnote ⁶ Thus the Mughal court offered patronage to poets writing in Brajbhasha, increasingly associated in this period with devotional traditions centered on Krishna. Equally, poets writing in Brajbhasha at the self-consciously Hindu, Rajput court of Orchha in the seventeenth century also wrote verse chronicles in praise of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (Busch Reference Busch2005; Busch 2010; for a textbook account of early modern India incorporating the insights of this new cultural history, see Asher and Talbot Reference Asher and Talbot2006). A new literary history tracing the emergence and consolidation of both imperial and regional literary cultures is also beginning to offer reinterpretations of the broad narratives of political history (Pollock Reference Pollock2003; see also the colloquium on this edited volume in Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 3 (2005)). Thus new work has been focused on recovering discursive accommodations and borrowings among literary traditions hitherto thought of as politically antagonistic; equally, scholars are now more sensitive to innovation and dynamism in literary and artistic practices during centuries hitherto classified as periods of political decline, by which was typically meant political decentralization (Orsini and Sheikh, forthcoming).

To sum up, what characterizes the new historiography of early modern India is an awareness of the distinctions between normative values and social practices at a particular historical moment. Scholars have re-oriented themselves towards recovering the latter in all its multifarious aspects, rather than writing histories of institutions (such as ‘state’ or ‘caste’) whose parameters are taken to be self-evident and unchanging. What is emerging then could be described as a new social history drawing inspiration from historical anthropology and from the cultural turn in the discipline of history. This is a historiography that seeks to comprehend the lived experience of politics and social relations in early modern South Asia. The difference of perspective between Strange Parallels and this vibrant new historiography is best exemplified in a recent edited volume covering the same period between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries. Lieberman's abstractions of ‘state,’ ‘caste,’ and ‘cultural integration’ are replaced here by sections titled “Politics, Legitimacy, and Political Culture,” “Community, Gender, and Cultural Transmission,” and “Commerce, Crafts, and the Countryside” (Datta Reference Datta2008).