Old Geographies, New Histories: Courtly Crossings, Monastic Journeys, and Spatial Imagination in 18th-Century Northeast India

This presentation looks at the connected lives of small-scale royal courts and Vaishnava (worshippers of the Hindu god Vishnu) monastic centers in the borderlands of northeast India, in the eighteenth century. Through a close examination of a set of hagiographic materials, written in literary Assamese, the presentation studies the dialogues between text, space, and narrative in the formation and circulation of knowledge in early modern South Asia, more specifically northeast India. Towards this end, the presentation asks, what was the relationship between monastic journeys and the imagination of sacred and political geographies in eighteenth-century northeast India? How were such journeys situated within territorial imaginations emerging from diplomatic and cultural interaction between royal courts of northeast India and the Himalayan region? Did ‘Courtly Crossings’ and ‘Monastic Journeys’ inform new patterns of political practice, most importantly royal patronage, in eighteenth-century Northeast India? Finally, what are the stakes for the historian in the reconstruction and interpretation of courtly-monastic histories from the borderlands of Mughal Hindustan beyond recovering these narratives towards an understanding of ‘region’ and ‘polity’ in the historiography of premodern South Asia?