SASC Colloquium Series: Did the Mughals write History? Historical Consciousness and writing in Early Modern South Asia, Abhishek Kaicker

Did the Mughals write History? Historical Consciousness and writing in Early Modern South Asia
Zoom link: https://cutt.ly/SASC317
The event is hybrid, Zoom with limited Yale-only in-person access.
It has long been held that there were rich and varied traditions of historical writing in South Asia in the premodern period. But, given the great variance in the very idea of history over the early modern era, in what way can we speak of the pre-colonial forms of engagements with the past as historical? What, in other words, was historical about the writing of history in early modern South Asia? This talk approaches the question with a focus on the Mughal empire, which saw the greatest development and proliferation of historical writing in the period before modernity. By recourse to the idea of historical consciousness, we will propose a new arc for the history of historical writing in India from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.