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Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary. By Rajeev Kinra. pp. xix, 371. Oakland, University of California Press, 2015.

Over the past decade or so there have been major steps forward in our understanding of Mughal history. Among them were: Ruby Lal’s Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge, 2005), which demonstrates that the women of the Mughal royal family, although confined to the women’s quarters were nevertheless major players in the family business of imperial rule; Munis Faruqui’s The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1500–1719 (Cambridge, 2012), which argues that the rebellions and internecine wars of succession, which were such a prominent feature of Mughal rule, far from being a source of weakness which historians supposed them to be, were actually a means by which Mughal rule was spread and deepened through widespread networks of friends and allies; Evrim Binbas’s Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Din Yazdi and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2016), which shows how important an understanding of the Timurid past may be, in particular its political ideas, for understanding the practice of Mughal sovereignty; and Azfar Moin’s Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York, 2012), which, although written a little before Binbas’s book, has demonstrated how these Timurid ideas came to be realised in a fruitful intermingling of dynastic culture and shrine-based Sufism under the Mughals. To these we should add Muzaffar Alam’s The Languages of Political Islam (Delhi, 2005), which shows how rulers and institutions adapted themselves to a variety of Indian contexts over 600 years and became deeply Indianised. Such interventions have brought much that is fresh to Mughal history. Rajeev Kinra is a pupil of Muzaffar Alam. His Writing Self, Writing Empire is another intervention, which turns much conventional historiography on its head. His focus is Chandar Bhan Brahman (c. 1600-c. 1666/70), a Punjabi Hindu who held high office under Jahangir and Shah Jahan and in retirement as the administrator of the Taj Mahal corresponded regularly with Aurangzeb. He was one of the great prose stylists of his time which is one of the reasons why his memoir of life at the Mughal court, Chahār Chaman (Four Gardens) and his separate collection of personal letters, often known as Munshaˀ at-i Brahman, have come down to us in numerous manuscripts. Kinra uses these documents as the prime focus both of his explanation of the culture of Mughal governance, broadly construed, and of an assessment of emerging strands of ‘modernity’. Kinra begins by setting out Chandar Bhan’s world: his rapid rise as an administrator, his period as secretary of Shah Jahan whom he would attend in his most private room, his ghusul khana or bathroom, the importance of his literary gifts in contributing to his success, and the fact of his being a Brahman being irrelevant in the Mughal context. This said, this last fact was important to Chandar Bhan, who emphasised it by using the pen-name ‘Brahman’ and felt that his Brahman background gave him insights into the Sufism which dominated the seventeenth-century Mughal world. His was an environment in which poetry was circulated amongst the top administrators, including the