Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation in Peninsular India - Paperback
by Subah Dayal (Author)
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Between Household and State departs from dynastic narrations of the Mughal past to highlight the role of elite households and familial networks in peninsular India, the only region of the subcontinent never fully incorporated into the imperial realm. Drawing on rare documentary and literary materials in Persian and Urdu alongside the Dutch East India Company's archives, this book takes readers on a journey from military forts and regional courts in the Deccan to the ports and weaving villages of the Coromandel Coast. It examines how regional elite alliances, feuds, and material exchanges intersected with imperial institutions to create new forms of affinity, belonging, and social exclusion. Subah Dayal brings attention to the importance of ghar--or home--in the creation of forms of mobility that anchored the Mughal frontier across the variable geography of peninsular India in the seventeenth century.Back Jacket
Dayal's impressive archival discoveries open up entirely new ways of thinking about mobility in South Asia. In this exciting multi-lingual study of households and their crucial role in building Deccan kingdoms, she offers a dazzling view of how households forged connections across ecological and political frontiers, mobilizing the power of literati, merchants, and military entrepreneurs in new forms of world-making in the early modern Deccan.
--Purnima Dhavan, author of When Sparrows Became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699-1799
Author Biography
Subah Dayal is Assistant Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.