The poetry of history: Region and empire in early modern Hindi literature

This project on Hindi historical literature, which flourished at regional Indian courts operating within the power shadow of the Mughal dynasty (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries), explores an important form of precolonial historical practice in South Asia to determine what these texts tell us about local Indian ways of being historical, and of being political, prior to colonial modernity. The study opens up entirely new domains of inquiry for Hindi literary studies and at the same time contributes regional Indian perspectives to the field of Mughal history, which has been dominated by imperial Persian and exogenous European sources.