This panel builds on recent discussions of periodization and early modernity in South Asian history by centering on theories of time, temporality, and history in sources composed between 1500 and 1800 on the peripheries of the Mughal Empire. While some recent studies have shifted away from viewing the political formation of the empire as the sole site of South Asian early modernity, the identification of large-scale, unprecedented connectivity as a defining feature of this period has meant that much scholarship has focused on Eurasian imperial courts and the networks between them. In contrast, the papers in this panel illustrate that looking to how historical actors conceptualized time outside the imperial “center” raises important questions about this periodization’s defining characteristics. They reveal that writers on empire's peripheries articulated novel relationships to the past and the future, while allowing room for considering interplays between innovation and tradition; local communities that seem to fall outside globally connected networks; and conceptions of time that diverge from modern periodizations in elucidating ways.

To this end, our papers investigate how authors writing outside empire (and in vernacular languages including Kannada, Urdu, Bangla and Malayalam) conceptualized time and situated themselves in relation to the past. The first presenter discusses parallels between Kannada and Persian texts by Hindu and Muslim authors in how they understood the relationship between time and space. The second presenter turns to the performances of Vedic sacrifices in Bengal, arguing that eighteenth-century engagements with ancient traditions allowed political actors to make sense of a rapidly changing world. The third presenter analyzes the earliest literary histories in Urdu to discuss the relationship between early modern networks and the language’s emergence. Finally, the fourth presenter explores how origin stories of Islam and Brahminism—written by Muslims and non-trivarṇa castes—disrupted long-standing Brahminical claims to authority over knowledge of the past in early modern Malabar. By considering how writers on the peripheries of empire thought about history and placed themselves within it, the panel argues for the utility of the “early modern” for understanding not only large-scale connected networks, but also how global shifts were conceptualized from regional perspectives. Together, our papers make the case for a more expansive view of this period that considers the interplay between global connections and local forms of knowledge.