Characterising the Culture of the Mughal Era Chronicles of a Munshi:Review of Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary, Delhi: Primus Books (by arrangement with University of California Press, Berkeley)

Abstract

Writing Self, Writing Empire by Rajeev Kinra is a biography of Chandar Bhan Brahman, a 17th-century Mughal munshi. (He died in the 1660s, Brahman was his caste and also his takhallus or pen name.) Simultaneously, Writing Self, Writing Empire is also a history of the political and administrative culture of the Mughal empire during Shah Jahan’s reign (1627–58), and a contribution to the literary history of Persian in India. The book is part of a larger trend of writing Mughal and medieval Indo–Islamic history (also referred to as “early modern”) that has focused largely on cultural history of the Indo–Islamic milieu and shown how this was a “cosmopolitan” venture comparable to other similar “early modern” polities in West Asia and Europe (Breckenbridge et al 2002; Lefèvre et al 2015). Theoretically, “cosmopolitan-ism” has been expounded by academic figures based in the West such as Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah sees cosmopolitan-ism as “a rejection of the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities,” and as “regard[ing] all the peoples of the earth as so many branches of a single family, and the universe as a state” (Appiah2006).1 However, cosmopolitan-ism does not convincingly explain why a humanbeing should feel belonging towards all of humanity more than towards any other community. In fact, is it possible to transcend cultural moorings and become “universal,” and would not any such transcendence not inaugurate yet another cultural formation that would with time become “particular”? The history of all ideologies, for example, Christianity,Islam, Marxism, Democracy or AryaSamaj, suggests so.