A Prosopography in Circulation: Advertising Scribal Travails in Arabic Manuscripts across Early Modern South Asia

Abstract

Much ink has been spilled on early modern scribal cultures of the South Asian subcontinent. Scholarship over the last decades approached state-formation processes in the Mughal dispensation and beyond by directing the focus to the centralisation of imperial administrations. The interrelated rise of scribal communities and the socio-cultural reconfigurations of political cultures attracted much attention since these were the groups that fundamentally shaped the historical record for posterity. At the same time, the seventeenth-century increase in the use of paper on the Indian subcontinent, which fuelled these transformations, created the concomitant phenomenon of an increased circulation of manuscripts in different shapes and colours. Shifting the focus away from the purview of imperial dispensations, I argue that Arabic manuscript circulation increased which enabled and was shaped by a larger and vibrant field of scribal activity across scholarly cultures of seventeenth-century South Asia. A growing scribal community used colophons to inscribe themselves into the learned Arabic cultures of the subcontinent. In the absence of other media for professional advertisements, such as prosopographical works, scribes used colophons at the end of manuscripts as “prosopographies in circulation”. Thereby, they advertised their skills to a larger learned community in South Asia. A focus on scribal colophons historicises paratextual elements and considers scribes as significant participants in learned cultures of South Asia.