Inscribing empire: Sovereignty and subjectivity in Mughal memoirs.

Abstract

This dissertation traces the role of first-person narratives in the writing of Mughal history. Beginning with the autobiographical writing of Babur (b. 1526), the first Mughal emperor, and concluding with the writing of Bhimsen Saxena (b. 1649), a news-writer employed by the Mughal imperial army, this dissertation argues that the relationship between autobiographical accounts and Mughal empire was reciprocal. Changes in idioms of empire were recorded through first-person narratives, and such narratives in turn produced, mapped, and imagined empire. Furthermore, Mughal autobiographical accounts formed a textual space in which narratives of subjectivity and interiority were preserved, and changing notions of sovereignty and authority articulated. There exists no comprehensive approach to the genre of the first-person narrative in the pre-modern Islamicate world, and this dissertation formulates one such approach in the context of Mughal India. In doing so, this dissertation demonstrates that a historicization of the first-person narrative is needed for an understanding of Mughal notions of sovereignty and subjectivity.