Curiosities and Oddities: Local, Epistemic, and Material Responses to Early Modern Globalisation in Deccan and South India, 1600 - 1800

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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw intensive contact between the peninsular region of theIndian subcontinent and the global world - West Asia, Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia. Historiographyof early modern South Asia however has leaned towards political shifts in the shadow of imperialdevelopments (Alavi 2008), and the economic impacts of early modern globalisation as a prelude tocolonial conquest (Rayachaudhuri, Habib 2008). Recent work has begun to place the peninsular region inglobal spheres of cultural change by studying the spread of Islamicate and Persianate culture (Eaton2019, Overton 2020) and European-Asian encounters (Subrahmanyam 2011, Van Meersbergen 2021).However, that scholarship has not yet begun to explore the impacts of early modern globalisation onepistemological thinking, visual and material culture and production in the South Asian peninsula, as wellas local perspectives and responses to the changing order. My project explores how society in theDeccan and South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries perceived, responded to andadapted to cultural plurality emerging from early modern globalisation. The questions I aim to answerare:- How did a growing consciousness of states, religions, and cultures of the wider world affect ideology,patronage and intellectual trends in seventeenth-century Deccani and Nayaka courts?- How did commodity exchange from Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa affect knowledge of materialproduction and consumption along the Coromandel Coast?- How did local populations engage with eighteenth-century European settlements such as Madras andPondicherry? How did foreign presence fit into their worldview?