Lineages of the Present in Early Modern South Asia

This workshop was convened as part of the “Interdisciplinary Histories” research cluster that was established at UBC this year to foster an “ethical engagement with the multiple temporalities and modalities of historical research, seeking to resist the simple merging of the historical into the needs of the present, while at the same time acknowledging the urgency of the past’s relationship to now.” We see our own workshop as an opportunity to reflect on cognate concerns informed by the ongoing work of our participants on early modern South Asia across four themes: The first theme is documentation: how have past practices of documenting history formed our field of study? The second theme is temporality: how have assumptions about time, the pace of historical change, and periodization, gone into the making of past and present “regimes of historicity”? The third area of interest is in the question of presentism: how have the shifting horizons of the present shaped the work of historical research, from the early modern period itself to the formation of the historical discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? And finally, what is the nature of our own presentist concerns? What are the historical  lineages to which we, writing in the 21st century, yoke the study of early-modern South Asia? How has our field responded to the pressures of postcolonial politics, and what might a collective agenda for historical research look like today?

On October 12, the workshop brought together a group of scholars from UBC and other universities to discuss their own research on related themes. This followed the public lecture "Imagining Time in India: Persian Chroniclers and their Interpreters." by Dr. Shahzad Bashir, the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities at Brown University, on October 11.