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X-WR-CALNAME:Sex\, Lies and the Company State: An Indo-Persian Counter-Hist
 ory of the Early British Empire in India
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260714T065814Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_53188818082987
DTSTART:20260831T161500Z
DTEND:20260831T171500Z
DESCRIPTION:Talk by Robert Travers\n\nIn around 1818 in Allahabad\, an agei
 ng munshi\, Sadasukh ‘Niyazi’ Dihlawi\, formerly in the employ of the 
 British East India Company\, wrote an unusual and salacious Persian histor
 y of the age of Mughal decline and British expansionism. This talk reads M
 unshi Sadasukh’s little-known text\, Muntakhab-ut-tawarikh\, as a ‘cou
 nter-history’ of early British India from the perspective of a middle-ra
 nking\, Persian-educated munshi. It shows how Sadasukh’s creative recons
 truction of the era of British conquests inserted the figure of the late M
 ughal munshi as a put-upon steward of imperial virtue facing down escalati
 ng threats of financial and sexual corruption. Situating Sadasukh’s fabu
 lous history in the Persianate world of north Indian scribal elites\, the 
 talk asks how attending to the political thought of ‘middling’ scribes
  can offer an alternative perspective on the political culture of early co
 lonial India.     \n\n \n\nRobert Travers is Professor of History and inco
 ming Director of the South Asia Program at Cornell. He is the author of tw
 o books about colonial state formation in eastern India in the late eighte
 enth century\, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The Britis
 h in Bengal (Cambridge\, 2007)\, and Empires of Complaints. Mughal Law and
  the Making of British India\, 1765-1793 (Cambridge\, 2023). He is current
 ly working on a new history of the parliamentary impeachment trial of the 
 British Governor of Bengal\, Warren Hastings.
GEO:42.447296;-76.482254
LOCATION:Uris Hall\, G08
SUMMARY:Sex\, Lies and the Company State: An Indo-Persian Counter-History o
 f the Early British Empire in India
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.cornell.edu/event/sex-lies-and-the-company
CATEGORIES:Seminar
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