This panel brings together scholars working on early modern texts from South Asia to consider the cultural and material conditions that shape our reading of the past as text and the ways such conditions shape our understanding of history through its multiple iterations in the vernacular textual archives. Moving beyond Sanskrit and Persian as predominant languages of historical inquiry of early modern South Asia, we are particularly concerned with the impacts of material conditions like questions of script, manuscript, and location in the construction of narrative, and the shaping of texts written in Assamese, Braj Bhasha, Hindi, and Punjabi in fundamental terms. We also consider the interaction between manuscripts and printed texts, and how differences in manuscript traditions are resolved and held in tension in later printed editions, reflecting the interests and concerns of later periods. Pillai’s presentation closely examines multiple verses in praise of Aurangzeb (a Mughal ruler who is remembered today as a Muslim fanatic) in an overtly Hindu seventeenth-century retelling of the Mahabharata that was composed in Bhasha or “Old Hindi.” Through close readings of three manuscripts of this poem that deliberately excise Aurangzeb’s name, she also reveals how the manuscripts of this Bhasha Mahabharata present us with a fascinating mini-reception history of this controversial Mughal emperor. Ahmad and Murphy’s paper examines the manuscript sources for Waris Shah’s mid-eighteenth century Sufi narrative Hīr, to explore what they tell us about the text, its development, and its reception. They also consider the ways in which the text developed in printed form, drawing on and in some cases quite dramatically developing the manuscript record. Based on an examination of two manuscripts of Kuir Singh's Gurbilās Pātshāhī Das, Vig interrogates what the editorial silences, absences, and additions in Ashok's printed edition might reveal about contemporary political, social, or religious concerns. She also discusses what a close reading of verses excluded from Ashok's printed edition might tell us about the context of production of the two gurbilās manuscripts. Studying a selection of early eighteenth-century Assamese hagiographic and historical texts, Ghosh looks at the ways in which monastic travel, royal pilgrimage, and courtly patronage inscribed new imagination of territoriality in the emerging discourse on polity and political practice in eighteenth-century northeast India, especially the floodplains of the Brahmaputra River. Ghosh, thus, probes into the problem of rethinking the work of the historian in interpreting monastic histories from the northeastern borderlands towards a study of Mughal Hindustan beyond ‘recovering’ these narratives to account for an understanding of ‘region’ and ‘polity’ in South Asian historiography. We thus seek, as a group of scholars, to consider the diverse forces shaping the texts we read today, to understand their materiality and content in tandem, and to understand how the form of the text, its circulation, and placeness shape its content. This, in turn, will allow us new purchase on the histories of early modern South Asia and their encoding in narratives hitherto unconsidered as crucial sources for the reading of South Asian past.