Documenting the World in Indo-Persianate & Imperial English: Idioms of Textual Authority in Hyderabad

Abstract

In late-nineteenth-century Hyderabad, the Persian administrative idiom gave way to bilingual English/Urdu conduct of governance, along with rising prominence of other languages, networks, and political ideologies. Before and after this shift, state bureaucrat-intellectuals published exhaustive accounts of Hyderabad’s administrative and political structure and history in Persian, Urdu, and English. This article considers several documentary texts and their authors’ social trajectories in the context of multiple scales of governance. It identifies a reorientation to a shifting global context in Hyderabadi documentary culture, and a productive engagement with British rule and colonial knowledge forms amidst other social and political possibilities.