A decade after IESHR’s Special Issue of 2010, ‘Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal communities and historical change in India’, we return again to the challenges and dilemmas that scribes, bureaucrats, intellectuals and literati of different kinds faced during the early modern centuries. Building on recent advances in our understanding of these key communities, this Special Issue turns the focus to the eighteenth century. We explore the strategies of individuals as they navigated new conditions of service, unexpected opportunities for personal advancement and the complexities of affiliation amid personal networks that extended across boundaries of region, language and religion. We investigate the important role of scribal people in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century, and the new meanings that their participation gave to literary syncretism and hybridity. We return again to questions of intellectual history and the reflections of scribal service people as they sought to find meaning in the collapse of old political formations and the rise of new ones. This Introduction surveys the recent scholarly literature in these connected fields, situates the essays here in the context of this new work, and identifies some of the key questions which remain to be answered in this critical era of transition between the India of ‘early modernity’ and the coming of the colonial world.

在IESHR于2010年发行特刊“ Munshis，Pandits和唱片保持者：印度抄写员社区和历史变迁”十年之后，我们再次回到了早期文士，官僚，知识分子和文人面临的挑战和困境。现代的世纪。本期特刊基于我们对这些关键社区的最新了解而发展，将重点转向了18世纪。我们探索个人在新的服务条件，个人晋升的意料之外的机会以及在跨越地区，语言和宗教界限的个人网络中建立联系的复杂性时所采取的策略。我们调查了抄写员在18世纪文学文化中的重要作用，以及他们的参与赋予了文学融合和融合的新含义。我们再次回到知识历史的问题和涂服务人员的思考，他们试图在旧的政治组织的瓦解和新的政治组织的崛起中寻找意义。本导言对这些相关领域的最新学术文献进行了调查，在本文的背景下结合了这项新著作，并指出了在“早期现代性”印度之间过渡的关键时期中仍需回答的一些关键问题。殖民世界的到来