Nina Maria Gorrissen Lecture in History

The Intellectual Bureaucrat: Imperial Collapse in Pre-Modern India

What is the life of the mind in the midst of imperial collapse? What does it mean to be an intellectual during the erosion of the structures of privilege that enable intellectual life? How might commitments to ideas and aesthetics be maintained during such a time? In this talk, historian Abhishek Kaicker examines a dramatic example of such rapid political and cultural dissolution in a world far away from our own. In the life of intellectual, courtier, and bureaucrat Anand Ram Mukhlis (ca. 1697-1751), these questions were confronted during the unexpected disintegration of the Mughal Empire—the largest and most sophisticated polity in pre-modern India.