This article analyses the diary entries made by a Persographic secretary (munshī), Aḥmad ʿAlī, who was employed by a retiring East India Company official to write an account of the journey they made together in 1780 across North India from Lucknow to the Mughal imperial capital in Delhi and back. Much of the landscape that they traversed—including a cluster of qasbahs, river passes, forests and fields—was formerly governed by a confederacy of Rohilla Afghans from 1737 to 1774. By 1780, however, this region was marked by the absence of well-defined, enduring state structures and witnessed an abundance of overlapping political claims. Under such conditions, Aḥmad ʿAlī, a novice secretary from this region who lacked access to major scholarly networks or courtly circles, found himself uniquely placed to observe and document the micro-level political and historical changes that he had lived through. Unlike his courtly counterparts, he witnessed transformations at a remove from both imperial politics and the regional courts that had developed through the eighteenth century. Rather than to a state or a single political project, his locus of service was aligned with the world of independent military entrepreneurs and their households, which were strewn across a region that he knew well. Questioning the view that secretaries were primarily cyphers of courtly culture or bureaucratic imperatives, the following pages demonstrate that while Aḥmad ʿAlī served his individual employer, he could imagine politics and history outside the constraints that came with corporate political affiliations, as a figure who was new to the work of secretarial penmanship and a seasoned bearer of textured regional knowledge.

本文分析了一位摄影秘书（Munshī）AḥmadʿAlī的日记条目，该秘书由一位退休的东印度公司官员聘用，以记录他们在1780年一起从印度勒克瑙到莫卧儿帝国首都穿越北印度的旅程。在德里往返。他们所穿越的大部分景观（包括一连串的卡斯巴，河流通行证，森林和田野）以前是由罗伊拉·阿富汗人（Rohilla Afghans）于1737年至1774年的邦联统治的。然而，到1780年，该地区的特点是缺乏井井有条，定义，持久的国家结构，并见证了大量相互重叠的政治主张。在这种情况下，该地区的新手秘书AḥmadʿAlī却无法进入主要的学术网络或法院圈子，发现自己处于独特的位置，可以观察和记录他所经历的微观政治和历史变化。与有礼貌的同僚不同，他目睹了帝国政治和十八世纪发展起来的地方法院的转变。他的服务地点不是去一个州或一个单一的政治项目，而是与独立军事企业家及其家属的世界保持一致，这些世界遍布他熟悉的地区。质疑秘书主要是宫廷文化或官僚机构的信奉者的观点，以下几页表明，阿迈德·ʿ阿里（AḥmadʿAlī）为自己的雇主服务时，他可以想象政治和历史不受公司政治派别带来的限制，