Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Alka Patel
- Location:
- C402
- Start time:
- 26 July, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel explores various mercantile communities in South Asia, along with their networks outside of their home regions. These papers will highlight the importance of non-royal actors in the circulation of capital, commodities, and ideas.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores various mercantile communities in South Asia, including Gujaratis, Marwaris (princpally Jains and Hindus) and "Eurasians," along with their networks outside of their home regions, many originating in Gujarat and Rajasthan. These papers will highlight the importance of non-royal - not to be mistaken for non-elite - actors in the circulation of capital, commodities, and ideas (such as architectural traditions), emphasizing the significance of mercantile history in the overall discourse on early modern South Asia. The papers' approaches will be varied and conducive to an interdisciplinary dialogue, encompassing art and architectural history, history, literature, and anthropology.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Samira Sheikh (Vanderbilt University)
Paper short abstract:
As Mughal authority waned in Gujarat, the East India Company and the Gaekwads shared power. The paper traces how Gujarat's mercantile culture was shaped by former Mughal revenue officials through the story of the entrepreneurial Lalludas Dayaldas, a minister of the Nawab of Bharuch.
Paper long abstract:
Lalludas Dayaldas was the trusted chief minister of the Nawab of Bharuch in the late eighteenth century with full authority in all matters save those relating to the shari'a. As the Nawab's agent, he negotiated with the increasingly powerful Gaekwads of Baroda and representatives of the East India Company. His family had been desais or revenue officials in the Mughal administration and as the Mughal fiscal system in Gujarat began to give way to 'a vast market in the rights of revenue collection, or rather, of shares in imperial sovereignty' (Hasan, 2006, 119), Lalludas and his relatives became prosperous portfolio capitalists. They offered credit and insurance facilities, tax and inheritance advice, and sold cotton, ghee, and other goods. Lalludas was also a prominent Vaishnava patron and builder in Bharuch, remembered reverently as an elder of the Modh bania caste. Local officials and revenue entrepreneurs such as Lalludas acquired unprecedented decision-making power at this time, and shaped, to a considerable extent, the dominant culture of Gujarat. To whom would Lalludas grant his allegiance? This paper examines the mercantile ethos of the late eighteenth century through the story of Lalludas, as he decided whether to support the Nawab, the Gaekwads, the Company, or the interests of his own family.
Dipti Khera (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores urban imaginings of Rajasthan's towns and cities, particularly Udaipur, visualized by artists and poets in Jain painted invitation letters and poems for mercantile and religious communities in the context of changing territoriality in early modern and early colonial India.
Paper long abstract:
In 1830, the merchants of Udaipur sent a 72-feet long vijnaptipatra or painted scroll to a Jain pontiff, inviting him to spend the next monsoon season in their city. While the artist visualized Udaipur with painted vignettes of street-life, bazaars, temples, and palaces, referencing established conventions, he sought radically to alter the format and modes of seeing the scroll. This paper, first, charts the transformation of vijnaptipatras into a vernacular visual genre (1750-1830) that mediated between sectarian and court traditions, thereby highlighting the circulation of images and audiences. Second, it explores how such scrolls created a cartographic vision of the place that entered even into popular poems of the period. Focusing on vignettes of alluring places within eighteenth and nineteenth century Rajasthani gajals on Udaipur, I suggest that Jain monk-poets departed from exclusively constructing a religious geography related to pilgrimage.
This paper considers Jain painted invitation letters and topographical poems within the historiography of cultural practices engaging with travel, place-making, mercantile networks, and changing territoriality in early modern and early colonial India. I argue that these artifacts—operating on the margins of regional courts and metropolitan polities—offer a view into how artists and poets employed the trope of praise to re-imagine places within other geographies, subtly subvert political and economic realities, and craft urban memories for broader elite and non-elite audiences. Monks and artists inscribed their subjective experiences as urbanites, thereby enabling us to trace the dynamic interactions of nineteenth century religiosity and commerce with various power brokers.
Karen Leonard (UC Irvine)
Paper short abstract:
Entitled "Hyderabad's Palmer and Company Revisited," the paper argues that, rather than being infamous interlopers in Hyderabad's affairs, the members of this Eurasian-Gujarati banking firm were crucial indigenous participants in the state's tumultuous early ninettenth-century politics.
Paper long abstract:
Entitled "Hyderabad's Palmer and Company Revisited," the paper argues that, rather than being infamous interlopers in Hyderabad's affairs, the members of this Eurasian-Gujarati banking firm were crucial indigenous participants in the state's tumultuous early ninettenth-century politics. Using oral history as well as written sources, the insider view of this firm is upheld against the view of the Resident Charles Metcalfe of the East India Company and subsequent historians who have followed that lead.