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By examining the reuse, circulation, and materiality of copied Persian documents from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), this presentation reconstructs a moment of diplomatic crisis in the Mughal port-city of Masulipatnam on the northern Coromandel coast (southeastern India). It first excavates ‘stray’ objects - envelopes, seals, and registration notes - connected to secret letters that were exchanged amidst a showdown between the ambassador of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya, Mughal port-city officials, and merchants from the VOC factory ca. 1690. It concludes with a reflection on the stakes for reconstructing the unspoken relationships between objects and texts and the possibilities for writing a materially-informed social history of trans-imperial archives and intra-Asian diplomacy.
Subah Dayal is Assistant Professor of Pre-Modern Indian Ocean Studies at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her first book, Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation in Peninsular India, is forthcoming (2024) with the University of California Press. Her second project is a comparative study of the scribal cultures of Safavid and Mughal port cities, with a focus on Bandar 'Abbas, Surat, and Masulipatnam.
