Leaving Legacies - The Individual in Early Modern South Asia

Leaving Legacies is a fresh account of the individual in early modern South Asia. A gendered practice carried out by men, leaving legacies involved assembling three kinds of material traces: monuments, books, and sons. Men laid claim to individual distinction within an ethics of remembering worthy individuals by joining their traces with those of men past and reworking older legacies. Their legacies joined their present to the past and future, while also drawing women and non-elite men into a hierarchical order centered upon the individual during Mughal rule and after. This book shows that a concern for the individual self was not an exclusively western phenomenon. Rather, the practice of leaving individual legacies was a crucial means for the production and reproduction of empire, family, and social order in South Asia.

List of contents

List of Maps and Images; Maps; Introduction; 1. The Individual in the Inscription; 2. The Rise of Self-Representation; 3. Books that Bind; 4. Pious Bodies; 5. Unraveling the Self; 6. Regional Man; Conclusion; Acknowledgments; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

About the author

Shayan Rajani is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. His research and teaching interests include Mughal history, the history of Sindh and South Asia, and the study of gender and sexuality. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the Wolf Humanities Center at University of Pennsylvania. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journal articles including the Journal of the Social History of the Orient, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Philological Encounters. He also has a book chapter in Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere (2023) published by Duke University Press.

Product details

• Authors: Shayan Rajani, Shayan (Michigan State University) Rajani
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2025
• EAN: 9781009509510
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0950951-0
• No. of pages: 308
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Antiquity; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, South East Asia, 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799, 17th century, c 1600 to c 1699, Ancient History, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, Ancient history: to c 500 CE, Indian sub-continent, South Asia (Indian sub-continent), 16th century, c 1500 to c 1599, c 1500 to c 1600, C 1600 To C 1700, C 1700 To C 1800, History of other geographical groupings and regions, History of other lands, For higher / tertiary / university education, HISTORY / Asia / South / General