Assistant Professor Shayan Rajani recently published his first book, Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia, with Cambridge University Press. We are glad to highlight this significant achievement, and we spoke to Dr. Rajani to find out more about his new book.
What is the focus of Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia and what research areas does it address?
Leaving Legacies offers a new interpretive framework for the actions of early modern people, one that takes seriously their meaning and effects in their own time. It shows that at the heart of many of these instances is a concern for oneself, expressed in a mode of individualism starkly different from the modern and yet perfectly legible within its own time. I propose that this concern for oneself was not simply a desire for power and wealth. Rather, it was a hope to extend oneself beyond one’s life, leave a material trace, and through the practice of leaving legacies, and the ethics it engenders, be remembered by posterity.
Using research grounded in the western region of Sindh between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the book develops a conceptualization and periodization for this practice of the individual. Much of the built historical landscape and written literary traditions of Sindh, which are extant today, emerged from the sixteenth century onward. This archive offers a remarkably clear view of individual legacies as a new phenomenon emerging from this period.
All in all, the book explores the history of individualism, and the individual’s relationship to the Mughal court, family, regional belonging, and from the eighteenth-century onwards to a new idea of the people.
If you could sum up your book in three sentences, how you would describe it?
The book is a new account of the individual in early modern South Asia, which looks in particular at the gendered practice of leaving legacies, where men assembled three kinds of material traces–monuments, books, and sons–to be remembered by future generations. This book shows that a concern for the individual self was not an exclusively western phenomenon. Rather, the practice of leaving individual legacies was a crucial means for the production and reproduction of empire, family, and social order in South Asia.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
We tend to imagine human life as contained between the events of birth and death: this is the limited time afforded to historical actors on the stage. Individuals may not, it is generally understood, act across epochs. Attending to legacies, to material traces left behind by the dead, brings into view a distinctly non-epochal modality. These traces intervene not only in the future but also in multiple futures, across epochs, and do so partly through the intentionality imbued in them by their creators. Human life extends itself through these objects and people, out toward the future, where the dead make their presence felt and known.
Remembrance was an expected response to legacies, even as remembrance was not solicited directly. Instead, in book prefaces and tomb inscriptions, self-deprecation, even self-abasement, was common. While this has sometimes been interpreted as a lack of individualism, self-effacement, paradoxically, encouraged remembrance in the legacies of others. The best way to secure remembrance from the future was to oneself remember worthy men from the past and the present. It is perhaps because a claim for individual remembrance was made in such an indirect way that scholars have so far missed its import and pervasiveness in early modern South Asia.
Yet this method of self-extension is precarious and risky. It requires a similar ethics of leaving legacies, of historical thinking, in the future to enable its extension. Legacies achieve extension not by preservation or achieving material immutability but rather through their incorporation into and extension through new legacies, new material traces. I do not suggest that we must turn to legacies, and their ethics of relationality, out of an obligation to the dead. Rather, I recognize in these legacies a pedagogy that may be valuable in our present times, an ethics of self not premised on the rejection or appropriation of the past but one that extends the self into the future by extending those who came before.
The ethics of leaving legacies then is unlike modern preservation efforts, which detach a historic site or trace from lived use and maintain its original physical form through scientific management. In contrast, legacies seek extension by inviting engagement and entanglement, the adoption of the old to plural ends, accruing new meaning along the way.
Why is your book a good resource for scholars studying the history of the individual in South Asia between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries?
The book uses archives from Sindh that have seldom been used before. Moreover, the dominant tendency is to view architecture within the context of a larger architectural tradition, poetry within the context of a poetic tradition, history within the historical tradition and so on. In contrast, this book puts various media into conversation with each other. This distinctive archive and approach allows me to identify the rise of the individual across different material traces and its importance within early modern South Asia. In the late sixteenth century, Mughal Emperor Akbar sought to become the definitive source of all merit as part of a dramatic push for centralization. He created a numeric ranking system to grade his nobles and officials, imposing hierarchical distinctions among them based on their individual excellence. Rank was determined solely by the emperor. A noble could no longer pass his position or wealth on to his son. Upon death, both were resumed by the emperor and only at his discretion reassigned to a descendant or, if none was found worthy, to someone else entirely.