Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T05:14:10.867Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge Between Person and Paper*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2009

NILE GREEN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Bunche Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA Email: green@history.ucla.edu

Abstract

This paper addresses several questions that appear preliminary to understanding the circulation of knowledge in early modern India (circa 1500 to 1800): What work did writing do? What was the relationship between writing and speaking? And what can our answers to these questions tell us about cultural formulations of ‘knowledge’ in this period? After addressing these questions on ‘modes’ of circulation, this paper turns to the more practical issue of ‘means’ of circulation, looking at the intersection between religious and bureaucratic patterns of the production and consumption of books in the absence of printing in Indian languages. Overall, the paper argues for early modernity as a period of tension and transition between ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘bibliocentric’ attitudes towards the location and thence circulation of knowledge in a Persianate context. The issues are exemplified by reference to the various and, at times, perplexing uses of books in an imperial dervish lodge or takiyya.

Type
Forum: Knowledges in circulation in early modern India
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 On early printing in India, see Boxer, C.R., A Tentative Check-list of Indo-Portuguese Imprints 1556–1674 (Bastora, Goa: Tip. Rangel, 1956)Google Scholar (note that these Goan texts relied on the Romanization of Indian languages) and Ternaux-Compans, H., Bibliothèque asiatique et africaine, ou, Catalogue des ouvrages relatifs à l'Asie et à l'Afrique qui ont paru depuis la découverte de l'imprimerie jusqu'en 1700 (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1841)Google Scholar. For evidence of Mughal awareness of printed books in the geographical context explored by this paper, see Seyller, J., ‘Farrukh Beg in the Deccan’, Artibus Asiae 55, 3–4 (1995), p. 339CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Primrose, J.B., ‘A London Printer's Visit to India in the Seventeenth Century’, The Library, series 4, 20 (1939), pp. 100104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Here, as throughout this paper, I acknowledge a debt to three works for initially provoking my thoughts: Bayly, C.A., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, Messick, B., The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar and Robinson, F.C.R., ‘Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print’, Modern Asian Studies 27, 1 (1993), pp. 229251CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Green, N.S., ‘Journeymen, Middlemen: Travel Trans-Culture, and Technology in the Origins of Muslim Printing’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, 2 (2009), pp. 203224CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem., ‘Persian Printing and the Stanhope Revolution’, Comparative Studies, of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (In Press).

5 For attempts to define early modernity and India's place in it, see Goldstone, J.A., ‘The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, 3 (1998), pp. 249284CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richards, J.F., ‘Early Modern India and World History’, Journal of World History 8, 2 (1997), pp. 197209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Subrahmanyam, S., ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3 (1997), pp. 735762CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Bayly, Empire and Information (1996), pp. 42–44.

7 The word ‘ascesis’ comes from the Greek askesis and means ‘exercise’, ‘effort’, ‘exploit’. Monastic tradition has given to this term a very precise meaning; it designates the interior combat necessary in order that the spiritual acquire a mastery over the material [Editorial addition].

8 Mnemonics is the art of assisting the memory by using a system of artificial aids—rhymes, rules, phrases, diagrams, etc. [Editorial addition].

9 Oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad.

10 On the historical origins of the Islamic promotion of the spoken word, see Cook, M.A., ‘The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition in Early Islam’, Arabica, 44, 4 (1997), pp. 437530CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 On early Quranic reading strategies and perceptions of the oral or bookish quality of the revelation, see Afsaruddin, A., ‘The Excellences of the Quran: Textual Sacrality and the Organization of Early Islamic Society’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, 1 (2002), pp. 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Binning, R.B.M., A Journal of Two Years’ Travel in Persia, Ceylon, etc., 2 vols (London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1857), vol. 1, p. 314Google Scholar. Thanks to Rudi Matthee for recommending this source.

13 Hudson, L., ‘Reading Al-Sha‘rani: The Sufi Genealogy of Islamic Modernism in Late Ottoman Damascus’, Journal of Islamic Studies 15, 1 (2004), p. 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 On fiqh in the historical settings of the personal legal opinion, see Masud, M.K., Messick, B. & Powers, D.S. (eds), Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and their Fatwas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

15 Heck, P.L., ‘The Epistemological Problem of Writing in Islamic Civilization: al-Haṭīb al-Baġdādī's (d. 463/1071) Taqyīd al-‘ilm’, Studia Islamica 94 (2002), pp. 85114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Graham, W.A., ‘Qur’ān as Spoken Word: An Islamic Contribution to the Understanding of Scripture’, in Martin, R.C. (ed.), Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

17 Kumar, S., The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192–1286 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), Chapter 4Google Scholar; and Safi, O., The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Inquiry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

18 Hermansen, M.K. & Lawrence, B.B., ‘Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications’, in Gilmartin, D. & Lawrence, B.B. (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

19 Ong, W., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 8Google Scholar.

20 Green, N.S., ‘Tribe, Diaspora and Sainthood in Afghan History’, Journal of Asian Studies 67, 1 (2008), pp. 171211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Carruthers, M., The Book of Memory: A Study in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

22 On formal premodern Muslim conceptions of the self, see Rahman, F., Avicenna's Psychology: An English Translation of Kitāb al-Najāt (London: Oxford University Press, 1952)Google Scholar.

23 On the Muslim ‘incorporation’ of writing more generally, see Kugle, S., Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the uses of writing in the production of the talisman (ta‘wīz) see Donaldson, B.A., ‘The Koran as Magic’, Moslem World 27 (1937), pp. 254266CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Marsden, M., Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan's North-West Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapter 6Google Scholar. For Quranic writing on clothing, see Demonsablon, P., ‘Notes sur deux vêtements talismaniques’, Arabica 33 (1986), pp. 216250CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rezvan, E. & Rezvan, M., ‘The Qur’ān, Woman and her Clothing in the Magic Sphere of Central Asia’, Manuscripta Orientalia 12, 1 (2006), pp. 3142Google Scholar. We know too little to say to what extent words were also written on the flesh as tattoos. However, for discussion of the relationship between words and body in a tantric context, see Flood, G., The Tantric Body (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005)Google Scholar. For a theoretical reconsideration of public epigraphy, see Bierman, I.A., Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 159Google Scholar.

24 Rosenkilde, V., ‘Printing at Tranquebar, 1712–1845’, The Library, series 5, 4 (1949), pp. 179195CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 On the spread of such institutions, see Green, N.S., ‘Auspicious Foundations: The Patronage of Sufi Institutions in the Late Mughal and Early Asaf Jah Deccan’, South Asian Studies 20 (2004), pp. 7198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 For fuller studies of Shāh Musāfir and his contemporaries, see Digby, S., ‘The Naqshbandīs in the Deccan in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century A.D.: Bābā Palangposh, Bābā Musāfir and Their Adherents’, in Gaborieau, M., Popovic, A. & Zarcone, T. (eds), Naqshbandīs: Chiminements et situation actuelle d'un ordre mystique musulman (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1990)Google Scholar, and Green, N.S., Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar. The circle was not affiliated to the ‘renewed’ Naqshbandī tradition of Ahmad Sirhindī.

27 For an inventory of the takiyya's much-diminished library before its eventual dispersion, see Hamidullah, M., ‘Literary Treasures of Aurangabad (Two Important Collections of Rare MSS)’, Islamic Culture 16 (1942), pp. 449456Google Scholar. For an overview of the library contents of another late Mughal Sufi lodge in the Deccan, see Naqshbandi, H., ‘List of Manuscripts of Shah Inayatullah Library Khanqah Sharif Naqshbandia Balapur (Berar)’, Khuda Bakhsh Library Journal 107 (1997), pp. 5970Google Scholar. For the fullest account of the contents of an Indo-Persian library of the period, see Stewart, Charles, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Library of the Late Tippoo Sultan of Mysore; To which are Prefixed, Memoirs of Hyder Aly Khan, and his son Tippoo Sultan (Cambridge: The University Press, 1809)Google Scholar, which inter alia includes extensive details of Sufi writings.

28 Awrangābādī, Shāh Mahmūd, Malfūzāt-e Naqshbandiyya: Hālāt-e Hazrat Bābā Shāh Musāfir Sāhib (Hyderabad: Nizāmat-e ‘Umūr-e Mazhabī-ye-Sarkār-e ‘Ālī, 1358/1939)Google Scholar, henceforth MN. The text has also been translated by Digby, Simon as Sufis and Soldiers in Aurangzeb's Deccan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. All references in this paper refer to the Persian text.

29 On Bilgrāmī's writings, see C.W. Ernst, ‘Reconfiguring the Relation between Religion and World: Sufism and Reformist Islam in South Asia since the 18th Century’, Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies (In Press) and Toorawa, S. M., ‘The Shifā‘ al-‘Alīl of Āzād Bilgrāmī (d.1200/1786): Introducing an Eighteenth-Century Indian Work on al-Mutanabbī's Poetry’, Middle Eastern Literatures 11, 2 (2008), pp. 249264CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the operation of spoken memory, see Goody, J., ‘Memory in Oral Tradition’, in Fara, P. & Patterson, K. (eds), Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

30 Digby, S., ‘Before the Bābās Came to India: A Reconstruction of the Earlier Lives of Bābā Sa‘īd Palangpōsh and Bābā Muhammad Musāfir in ‘Wilāyat’’, Iran 36 (1998), pp. 139164CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The following section draws on the shorter discussion in Green, Indian Sufism (2006), pp. 39–45.

31 MN, pp. 9, 47–50. On book history and orality in the Aurangabad shaykhs’ homelands, see Akimushkin, O. et al. , The Arts of the Book in Central Asia, 14th–16th Centuries (Paris: UNESCO, 1979)Google Scholar, Béller-Hann, I., The Written and the Spoken: Literacy and Oral Transmission Among the Uyghur (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 2000)Google Scholar, and Dor, R., ‘Ecrire l'oral, traduire l’écrit: quelques remarques centrées sur des matériaux özbek’, Révue du Monde Musulman et de la Mediterranée 75–76 (1995), pp. 2951CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 On traditional forms of Islamic textual pedagogy, see Berkey, J., The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Eickelman, D.F., Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. For a generalized consideration of these issues, see Nasr, S.H., ‘Oral Transmission and the Book in Islamic Education: The Spoken and the Written Word’, Journal of Islamic Studies 3, 1 (1992), pp. 114Google Scholar.

33 MN, p. 117.

34 MN, p. 117.

35 Brenner, L., Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power, and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. On governmentality and manuscript culture in late Ottoman Yemen, see Messick, The Calligraphic State (1993).

36 On the continuity of such pedagogical forms in Moroccan and Iranian madrasas, see Eickelman (1985) and Fisher, M.J., Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

37 On the model of the ‘field’ in the study of knowledge circulation, see Chow, Kai-Wing, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, Introduction.

38 MN, p. 84.

39 There are also many references to such group readings in another Sufi text from Aurangabad, the Ahsan al-Shamā’il that details life in the circle of Shāh Musāfir's contemporary Nizām al-dīn Awrangābādī (d.1142/1729). See Kāmgār Khān, Ahsān al-Shamā’il (ms, shrine library of Hazrat Sulaymān Tawnsawī, Taunsa Sharif, Pakistan), henceforth AS, pp. 53, 89, 117. The text is discussed more fully in Green, Indian Sufism (2006), Chapter One.

40 E.g. MN, pp. 52, 84, 121.

41 For another Naqshbandī tazkira contemporary with the MN that also relied on oral informants, see Akimushkin, O.F., ‘A Rare Seventeenth Century Hagiography of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Shaykhs’, Manuscripta Orientalia 7, 1 (2001), pp. 6267Google Scholar.

42 Vajda, G., ‘De la transmission orale du savoir dans l'Islam traditionnel’, L'Arabisant 4 (1975), pp. 28Google Scholar.

43 However, on the manuscript proliferation of Ibn ‘Arabī's works in India, see Chittick, W.C., ‘Notes on Ibn al-‘Arabī's Influence in the Indian Sub-Continent’, Muslim World 82 (1992), pp. 218241CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 On the physical settings of the recitation of classical Persian poetry, see Brookshaw, D.P., ‘Palaces, Pavilions and Pleasure-gardens: The Context and Setting of the Medieval Majlis’, Middle Eastern Literatures 6, 2 (2003), pp. 199223CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 MN, p. 67 and p. 118.

46 MN, pp. 73–74. The home of the latter text in the Herat of Jāmī has received more sustained reflection on its literary circles and modes of circulation than any other city in the Mughals’ cultural sphere. For the most useful results of this work, see Golombek, L., ‘Discourses of an Imaginary Arts Council in Fifteenth-Century Iran,’ in Golombek, L. & Subtelny, M. (eds), Timurid Art and Culture: Iran and Central Asia in the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992)Google Scholar; Subtelny, M.E., ‘Socio-economic Bases of Cultural Patronage under the Late Timurids’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 20, 4 (1988), pp. 475505Google Scholar; and Szuppe, M., ‘The Female Intellectual Milieu in Timurid and Post-Timurid Herat: Faxri Heravi's Biography of Poetesses, Javāher al-‘Ajāeb’, Oriente Moderno 15, 2 (1996), pp. 119137Google Scholar.

47 Bayly, Empire and Information (1996), p. 77.

48 O. Aslanapa, ‘The Art of Bookbinding’, in Akimushkin et al. (1979).

49 Seyller, J., ‘The Inspection and Valuation of Manuscripts in the Imperial Mughal Library‘, Artibus Asiae 57, 3/4 (1997), pp. 255278CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 On the books read there, see Green, Indian Sufism. (2006) pp. 40–45.

51 On the construction of such ‘recorded conversations’ texts, see Ernst, C.W., ‘The Textual Formation of Oral Teachings in Early Chishtī Sufism’, in Timm, J.R. (ed.), Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992)Google Scholar and Green, N.S., ‘Translating the Spoken Words of the Saints: Oral Literature and the Sufis of Awrangabad’, in Long, L. (ed.), Religion and Translation: Holy Untranslatable? (Buffalo/Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 2005)Google Scholar.

52 Jahānābādī, Kalīm Allāh, Maktūbāt-e Kalīmī (Delhi: Matba‘a-e Mujtabā‘ī, 1315/1897), 4.19, p. 95Google Scholar. As one Tantric text expressed the same sentiment, ‘The fool who, overpowered by greed, acts after having looked up [the matter] in a written book, without having obtained it from the guru's mouth, he also will be certainly destroyed.’ Cited in Heehs, P. (ed.), Indian Religions: A Historical Reader of Spiritual Expression and Experience (London: Hurst, 2002), p. 194Google Scholar.

53 On the operation of the Mughal postal service, see Alavi, R.A., ‘Working of the Postal and Intelligence Services in the Mughal Deccan’, in idem., Studies in the History of Medieval Deccan (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyyat-i Delli, 1977)Google Scholar.

54 Here too, lithography—and its possibility of printing illustrations as well as words—was to perform a much better service than manuscript technology. On such later meditation texts, see Green, N.S., ‘Breathing in India, c. 1890’, Modern Asian Studies 42, 2–3 (2008), pp. 283315CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Goody, J., The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Akkach, S., ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi: Islam and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), pp. 3435Google Scholar.

57 Akkach, Islam and the Enlightenment (2007, pp. 46–47) notes that these disputes may have reflected ‘the changing role of the text during his time’, while ‘Abd al-Ghānī's commentaries on ‘classical’ texts should correspondingly be seen as ‘creative attempts to recultivate classical literature within a new culture of reading’.

58 For overviews, see Mishra, H.K., Bureaucracy under the Mughals, 1556 A.D. to 1707 A.D. (Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1989)Google Scholar, Misra, B.B., The Bureaucracy in India: An Historical Analysis of Development up to 1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and Richards, J.F., Mughal Administration in Golconda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar. For a reconstruction of a Mughal munshī's education, see Alam, M. & Subrahmanyam, S., ‘The Making of a Munshi’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, 2 (2004), pp. 6172CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Guenther, A.M., ‘Hanafi Fiqh in Mughal India: The Fatāwā-i ‘Ālamgīrī’ in Eaton, R.M. (ed.), India's Islamic Traditions, 711–1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, especially p. 220.

60 MN, pp. 81, 143. Cf. Faroqhi, S., ‘Agricultural Crisis and the Art of Flute-Playing: The Worldly Affairs of the Mevlevi Dervishes’, Turcica 20 (1988), pp. 4370CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 On the history of adab texts, see Metcalf, B.D. (ed), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

62 Rao, V.N., Shulman, D. & Subrahmanyam, S., Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (New York: Other Press. 2003)Google Scholar.

63 Thanks to Sanjay Subrahmanyam for pointing my thoughts in this direction.

64 On the imperial library, see Seyller (1997). On changes in early modern news-writing, see Fisher, M.H., ‘The Office of Akhbār Nawīs: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms’, Modern Asian Studies 27, 1 (1993), pp. 4582CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On more extensive early modern use of ijāzāt, see Schmidtke, S., ‘The Ijāza from ‘Abd Allāh b. Sālih al-Samāhījī to Nāsir al-Jārūdī al-Qatīfī: A Source for the Twelver Shi‘i Scholarly Tradition of Bahrayn’, in Daftary, F. & Meri, J.W. (eds), Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003)Google Scholar and for an earlier period Subtelny, M.E. and Khalidov, A.B., ‘The Curriculum of Islamic Higher Learning in Timurid Iran in the Light of the Sunni Revival under Shāh-Rukh’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 115, 2 (1995), pp. 210236CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65Malkāpūrī, Abd al-Jabbār Khān, Mahbūb-e Zū’l-Minan: Tazkira-e Awliyā-e Dakan (Hyderabad: Hasan Press, 1331/1912) [Urdu], p. 1099Google Scholar.

66 On this and other miracle narratives, see Green, N.S., ‘Stories of Saints and Sultans: Re-membering History at the Sufi Shrines of Aurangabad’, Modern Asian Studies 38, 2 (2004), pp. 419446CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Green, ‘Auspicious Foundations’ (2004).

68 For Bilgrāmī's main Sufi tazkira, see Bilgrāmī, Ghulām ‘Alī Āzād, Rawzat al-Awliyā (Dehli: Libartī Ārt Prēs, 1416/1996)Google Scholar. More generally, see Green, Indian Sufism (2006) chapters 1 and 2.

69 On financial connections between state and shrine in the Deccan, see Eaton, R.M., ‘The Court and the Dargāh in the Seventeenth Century Deccan’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 10, 1 (1973), pp. 5063CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ernst, C.W., ‘Royal Policy and Patronage of Sufi Shrines in Mughal Revenue Documents from Khuldabad’, in Kulkarni, A.R., Nayeem, M.A. and de Souza, T.R. (eds), Medieval Deccan History: Commemoration Volume in Honour of P.M. Joshi (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1996)Google Scholar. Eaton argues that the co-option of Sufi institutions by the state was already underway in the pre-Mughal Deccan, a position which Ernst's evidence seems to confirm.

70 On ‘Urūj's career, see ‘Malkāpūrī, Abd al-Jabbār Khān, Mahbūb al-Zamān: Tazkira-e Shu‘arā-e Dakan (Hyderabad: Hasan Press, 1327/1909), p. 837Google Scholar. [Urdu]

71 Green, Indian Sufism (2006), pp. 64–81.

72 On the development of the bakhar, see Deshpande, P., Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), Chapter 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ota, N., ‘Bēda Nāyakas and their Historical Narratives in Karnataka during the Post-Vijayanagara Period’, in Karashima, N. (ed.), Kingship in Indian History (Delhi: Manohar, 1999)Google Scholar.

73 Berry, M.E., Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 23et passimGoogle Scholar.

74 Berry, Japan in Print (2006), p. 15.

75 Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power (2004), p. 91. On the role of civil service examinations in the shaping of Chinese literary culture, see idem., pp. 90–109.

76 Green, N.S. & Searle-Chatterjee, M., ‘Religion, Language and Power: An Introductory Essay’, in idem. (eds), Religion, Language and Power (New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

77 On this topic, see Guha, S., ‘Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan, 1500–1800’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, 2 (2004), pp. 2331CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Lelyveld, D., ‘Disenchantment at Aligarh: Islam and the Realm of the Secular in Late Nineteenth Century India’, Die Welt des Islams 22, 1/4 (1984), pp. 85102Google Scholar; and Metcalf, B.D., ‘The Madrasa at Deoband: A Model for Religious Education in Modern India’, in Idem., Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

79 For a European case study, see Kwakkel, E.A New Type of Book for a New Type of Reader: The Emergence of Paper in Vernacular Book Production’, The Library, series 4, 3 (2003), pp. 219248CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Soteriou, A., Gift of Conquerors: Hand Papermaking in India (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1999)Google Scholar. On the history of Muslim paper-use more generally (albeit with limited reference to India), see Bloom, J., Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

81 Kirk, R.T.F., Paper Making in the Bombay Presidency: A Monograph (Bombay: n.p., 1908), p. 3Google Scholar.