Contribution short abstract:

As a historian of the Mughal Empire, I often encounter bugs in Indian archives, both live and in the form of historical records. What are the ethics of encountering insects in manuscript archives? What possibilities open up if we allow ourselves to tolerate worms in our precious archives?

Contribution long abstract:

I am a Ph.D. student interested in tracing agrarian environments over the course of the Mughal Empire (1520-1760). With a keen interest in botanical and faunal encounters in early-modern agrarian fields of South Asia, I now spotlight another regular encounter. Researchers in South Asia regularly meet insects in the archive. Often these nits feature in catalog entries as historical actors responsible for rendering manuscripts "badly worm-eaten", or as booklice demonstratively gnawing at the spines of entire rare collections, or a little more conventionally, as entomological entries in encyclopedias of natural history. Clearly, our archives are ecological gatherings marked by competition for space. Can historians rethink their relationship with the manuscripts archives they visit, especially in the more generally humid and under-resourced South Asia? Should my positionality as a meat-eating South Asian affect my questions? These are some of the ponderings I'd like to bring up in this workshop.