Paper short abstract:

Persian memoirs from early modern South Asia depict encounters of humans with each other and with nonhumans. Ecobiographical readings of such texts can generate social networks of conflict. Breaking the text's structure is challenging but can reveal deeply gendered and environmental implications.

Paper long abstract:

Early modern South Asia witnessed an ever-intensifying connection with Central Asia through mobile humans, animals, and commodities. Gendered codes of conduct were crucial in shaping how mobile and elite male travelers in the early modern period experienced new physical geographies. Illustrations emerge from the Persian texts like the autobiographies penned by mobile Central Asians who traversed South Asia: Emperor Babur (d.1520), the travel writer Mahmud Wali Balkhi (d. C.1660), and the Sufi prosopographer Shah Mahmud (d. C.1750). Dominating historiography stresses that such writings operated within a common sphere of shared political and literary ethics across Asia, molded by a common Persian language. However, an ecobiographic approach moves beyond the glossy trans-imperial cultural ethos associated with such lives. Instead, it spotlights human and animal bodies’ sensorial experiences like seasonal ailments, hunger, exhaustion, and sexual longing in the immediate surroundings. Such readings can generate social networks of humans and non-humans amidst real and imagined topographies, waterscapes, filth, and pestilence. Breaking the intended structure of a text is a strange but illuminating exercise. It shows that physical hardship in the provincial South Asian terrain was crucial in making political, emotional, and spiritual selfhood. But to overcome corporal adversity, world-traveling, natural-history-observing literati gendered their immediate environments. With changing seasons and landscapes, male bodies romanced, violated, gazed at, and shunned novel human and non-human figures that they encountered. This volatility in local geographies texturized what is otherwise deemed a seamless cultural code, shared across Persianate empires.