| This dissertation comprises an analysis of the historical and cultural milieu of Chandar Bhan "Brahman," a celebrated South Asian litterateur and munshi, or imperial secretary. Chandar Bhan rose from a provincial clerkship in seventeenth-century Punjab all the way to the rank of imperial Chief Secretary (mir munshi under the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58 CE), the renowned builder of the Taj Mahal. In addition to performing their quotidian official duties, most Indo-Persian secretaries have, historically, also been deeply enmeshed in the literary and political worlds, and have, over the centuries, been responsible for producing an enormous range of texts in myriad genres, from historical chronicles and treatises on philosophy, religion, and ethics, to lexicographical studies and div ans of poetry. They were masters of the refined art of stylized prose, or insha'---a form of writing which they deployed not only in their official capacity, but also in personal letters, travelogues, and occasional writings of all kinds. Thus even as imperial secretaries like Chandar Bhan officially carried out the administrative duties that the Ottoman scholar Cornell Fleischer has called "the basic work of empire," from the viewpoint of intellectual history there has always been a symbiotic relationship among their literary, epistolary, philosophical, creative and political selves. Historicizing the life and career of a master munshi like Chandar Bhan can thus teach us a great deal about early modern Mughal literary and political culture more broadly, as it was lived and practiced. Moreover, given the continuing prevalence of modern-day assumptions about rigid premodern "tradition" and intolerant religious orthodoxy, one cannot help but be struck by the degree to which a brahman like Chandar Bhan, like most other members of the growing demographic of seventeenth-century Hindu munshis in Mughal India, was able, almost seamlessly, to assimilate and contribute greatly to the composite of Mughal literary culture, mystical philosophy, gentlemanly virtue, (relatively) non-sectarian social tolerance, taste, aesthetics, and etiquette that Muzaffar Alam has recently summed up as "the ethos of Persian." And thus, from the literary and political traditions that he inherited, to those that he cultivated and passed on to later secretarial generations---well into the British colonial era---Chandar Bhan offers us a perfect lens through which to envisage the Hindu munsh i's-eye view of life in Mughal South Asia and beyond. |
