Scribal Network in Medieval India
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We slowly move from formation of urban spaces to those who inhabit these spaces , so we focus on the various literate communities of early modern India. Literate communities were those who possessed a specialised kind of literary knowledge, this knowledge could be in religious literature, Vedic literature, Brahmanical literature. How is studying of these literate communities help in perceiving Early modern empires like the Mughal empire. An analysis of literate communities help us in shifting our notions of the empire from being just an empire which focussed on extracting revenue , to a situation where we understand these knowledgeable communities and see the early modern empires as being based on knowledge and information obtained from these communities. By tapping these literate communities,and the knowledge they possessed the state was able to garner sufficient knowledge about the workings of the society and use it for monopolisation of revenue. Similarly, the Mughal state retained their control over resources and maintained a stable empire by tapping in the knowledge base of the various literate communities in society.
Chris Bayly in his empire and information talks of two forms of knowledge upon which the Mughal state relied:
Patrimonial knowledge collected from Zamindars, local chieftains, other big families who had their own contingency of literate communities.
Affective knowledge, was more dispersed in society and was obtained from diverse sections of society namely barbers, mid-wives. This also included the knowledge from all those literate communities who possessed a specialised literate knowledge.
The Mughal empire had a large system to obtain knowledge, there were news-writers and news-readers who gathered knowledge from various parts of the Mughal empire, sending it to the imperial capital. Various infrastructural facilities like sarais, daks were established to transmit the knowledge gathered from various parts of the empire. Thus,the study of literate communities is very important to understand that the power of an early-modern empire like the Mughal was based on a kind of knowledge economy primarily exercised through the literate communities and this relation of power and knowledge was not just a prerogative of the colonial state as theoretised by post-colonial scholarship.
There were primarily two types of literate communities impinging upon the Mughal empire:
Persianate literary community – This comprised of people well versed in Persian language and immersed in a persianate literary and cultural tradition. The people who were at the fore front of this community were surprisingly not Persian speaking by birth. These who constituted the core of this Persianate, rathar Indo-persianate network were not Persian by birth but learnt the language and served as a knowledge collecting apparatus of the Mughal state. Their services were important not only for gathering information but they were also given a kind of rank and status within the Mughal bureaucracy to allow its proper functioning. Slowly, a large number of people who were non-persian learnt Persian to get a position within the bureaucracy and became a part of the Indo-Persianate literary community. The vast majority of people employed in this fashion were, however non-muslims. The castes traditionally associated with scribal learning and networks like kayasthas were the most predominant group who learnt Persian and constituted this persianate literary community and were incorporated within the Mughal administration. These Kayasthas who were part of a pre-Mughal scribal network were given positions of munshi constructing a scribal network within the Mughal bureaucracy. Many Kayasthas who served as Mughal munshis made it their family profession and there actually were leading families of Munshis, where the entire family served the state in this capacity. One example was definitely Mohanlal who came from a family of Mughal munshis which had served from the period of Shahjahan and Mohanlal accompanied Captain Burns.
The value attached to writing and the value of the written word in the early modern societies saw the munshis being highly revered in society irrespective of their caste or religion. There were also clerks and scribes of merchants and traders so a network of scribes throughout the society. This entire literate Indo-Persianised scribal bureaucracy of the Mughal empire straddled two worlds, the world of a caste, religion contained Indian society and the world of the Mughal ruling class. These Indo-Persianate literary and scribal groups brought information about the local society while being deeply immersed within a persianate tradition, thus, helping the empire to thrive by synchronising itself with persianate traditions while at the same time also embedding the empire within the local society. At one level, the traditional society had great respect for these Indo-Persianate scribal groups, like the kayasthas in imperial service but by the 16th and 17th centuries, their imperial service made these kayasthas outsiders to the people who often questioned them on their ritual entitlement and position within the varna order.
There was also a sanskritic literary community, whose members were Brahmins and well versed in Sanskritic brahmanical texts and their presence showed the reliance of the Mughal empire on this significant component of literary community. This amply demonstrated that there were spaces within the Mughal political culture for other kinds of literary communities apart from the Indo-Persianate to flourish. The empire thus was not as hegemonic as considered. The Brahmanic literary communities were aware of notions of governance and kingship in Sanskritic texts which were different from notions in a Persian text, and these literary communities allowed the Mughal state to engage with other forms of state, kingship embodied in these texts of other languages. Bayly argues Akbars interaction with Sanskritic Brahmins was a kind of effort to capture such knowledge from these kinds of literary communities and he tried to compile the knowledge from them into compendiums. So, Bayly argues that compilation of Mughal chronicles was not an ordinary case of a medieval monarch narrativising his history but marked the beginnings of a process of appropriation of knowledge possessed by these Sanskritic literary communities to learn more about the indigene people,their customs and traditions regarding polity, administration and through this to subjugate people and maintain effective control over them allowing the empire to stabilise itself.
The interaction with these literary communities both Sanskritic and Persianate allowed the early modern empires