Sex, Lies and the Company State: An Indo-Persian Counter-History of the Early British Empire in India

Talk by Robert Travers (History, Cornell University)

In around 1818 in Allahabad, an ageing munshi, Sadasukh ‘Niyazi’ Dihlawi, formerly in the employ of the British East India Company, wrote an unusual and salacious Persian history of the age of Mughal decline and British expansionism. This talk reads Munshi Sadasukh’s little-known text, Muntakhab-ut-tawarikh, as a ‘counter-history’ of early British India from the perspective of a middle-ranking, Persian-educated munshi. It shows how Sadasukh’s creative reconstruction of the era of British conquests inserted the figure of the late Mughal munshi as a put-upon steward of imperial virtue facing down escalating threats of financial and sexual corruption. Situating Sadasukh’s fabulous history in the Persianate world of north Indian scribal elites, the talk asks how attending to the political thought of ‘middling’ scribes can offer an alternative perspective on the political culture of early colonial India.     

 

Robert Travers is Professor of History and Director of the South Asia Program at Cornell. He is the author of two books about colonial state formation in eastern India in the late eighteenth century, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), and Empires of Complaints. Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-1793 (Cambridge, 2023). He is currently working on a new history of the parliamentary impeachment trial of the British Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings.