Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Modern South Asia

Join the Qalam Pakistan Initiative and the Department of History for a book talk by Shayan Rajani (Michigan State University) featuring discussant Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University). 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. 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.

Shayan Rajani is a historian of early modern South Asia. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. His research focuses on the relationship between individual and community, and region and empire. He is also interested in questions of gender and sexuality, and animal-human relations. His first book, Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2024), examines the enterprise of assembling texts, monuments, and children as concerted material traces for posterity. It investigates the intellectual, social, and material history of the individual in South Asia between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Using little-known and to-date underutilized textual sources in Persian and Sindhi, alongside the study of buildings, epigraphy, and objects, the 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. Rajani’s second book project, titled Invisible, Everywhere: Women, Sexuality, and the Gender Order in Early Modern South Asia, explores the material and cultural history of gender segregation in the Mughal world.

Pier Mattia Tommasino is an Associate Professor of Italian at Columbia University. Tommasino’s teaching and research explores the generative contact between the Italian peninsula and the Muslim world from the fourteenth through the early eighteenth centuries. His first book is The Venetian Qur’an: a Renaissance Companion to Islam, published in Italian in 2013 and in English in 2018. He is currently finishing his second monograph, entitled Port Voices, Courtly Texts. Five Observations of Late Medici Orientalism, 1666-1673.