India and the Islamic Heartlands (SOUTH ASIA EDITION)

Based on the chance survival of a remarkable cache of documents India and the Islamic Heartlands recaptures a vanished and forgotten world from the eighteenth century spanning much of todays Middle East and South Asia. Gagan Sood focuses on ordinary people - traders pilgrims bankers clerics brokers scribes among others - who were engaged in activities marked by large distances and long silences. By elucidating their everyday lives in a range of settings from the family household to the polity at large Sood pieces together the connective tissue of a world that lay beyond the sovereign purview. Recapturing this obscured and neglected world helps us better understand the region during a pivotal moment in its history and offers new answers to old questions concerning early modern Eurasia and its transition to colonialism.