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AbstractSociolinguists study the valorization of specific languages as a 'language ideology'. Contemporary nation-states frequently identify with and promote specific languages. Such linguistic nationalism is a language ideology, but not the only one. This article examines earlier millennia to uncover the dynamics by which imperial systems managed linguistic diversity and how and why they favored and disfavored particular languages and scripts. I analyze states and empires as coalitions of interest groups. I invoke the scribal masters of imperial chanceries and archives as one such group. I develop a heuristic framework (or "model") to understand the interactions of language and power that unfolded across West and South Asia. I begin with a great empire, the Persian, that did not employ its founders' ethnic speech but instead refined an older state language in governance. That choice entrenched an interest group that endured through a thousand years till displaced by Arab conquest after 660 CE. But a simpler 'New Persian' revived in the eastern Iranian lands. Turkish and Mongol conquest elites emerging from Inner Asia carried this language and its scribes into their growing domains in the Indian subcontinent. I then explain why the non-Persian Mughals in the 1550s selected Persian as their state language and rejected the constant pressure to use Urdu creole. Mughal rule left behind a tenacious Persian-writing elite that the early British empire employed. Finally, I explain the state processes behind the colonial-era decline of Persianate administration and the emergence of a new linguistic politics in colonial India.

This article seeks to reopen the argument regarding the economic structure of the Mughal Empire. The field saw vigorous debate in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by a stalemate. I seek to move beyond this impasse, first by studying British efforts at implementing a neo-Mughal tax system. This retrospective exhibits the practical difficulties that make it unlikely that the Mughals ever fully implemented their program. I then deploy underused Marathi sources to see what well-informed contemporaries guessed about the real working of the empire and analyze the effects of regimes of power in the creation and survival of the information that constitutes our evidence. I end by connecting key aspects of my structural analysis with the expansion of international trade and with India's political economy in the transition to British rule.

The last six centuries saw the emergence of major empires that dominated every part of the world. Inevitably then, these imperial formations governed diverse and polyglot peoples. They also developed complex systems of governance that deployed unprecedented numbers of scribes and accountants, often drawn from groups culturally distinct from the military elites. Literati serving Western empires have been much studied of late; but the phenomenon did not originate with them. This article examines one such prominent group—the Brahmans of peninsular India—through five centuries. It explores little-known aspects of their professional training. It then analyses how they rose to a dominance that persisted well into the colonial era and deeply impacted the contemporary politics of India to the present day.

AbstractThe past two decades have seen a dramatic renewal of interest in the subject of historical memory, its reproduction and transmission. But most studies have focused on the selection and construction of extant memories. This essay looks at missing memory as well. It seeks to broaden our understanding of memory by investigating the way in which historical memory significant to one historical tradition was slighted by another, even though the two overlapped both spatially and chronologically. It does this by an examination of how the memory of the Marathi-speaking peoples first neglected and then adopted the story of the Vijayanagara empire that once dominated southern India.

This article focuses on the history of the set of practices labelled jajmani. These practices have been cited as evidence that a fundamentally inegalitarian spiritual principle could transcend and limit the economic domain. That idea underpins the belief that human beings must be grouped in mutually exclusive 'civilisations'. Projected geo-politically. the 'civilisation' is then endowed by Samuel Huntington with the Hobbesian, self-aggrandising traits of the nation- state. I suggest that we eschew grand unifying principles and try understand the meanings and motives that generate the repetitive patterns of meaningful interaction which we refer to as a 'society', a 'social practice or an 'institution'.