Shounak Ghosh

I am a postdoctoral research associate for the INTRECCI project on early modern global history. The meanings and shifting forms of diplomatic practice among the court societies of Mughal South Asia, Safavid Iran, and the Deccan sultanates in peninsular southern India that communicated in Persian constitutes the core of my research. My doctoral dissertation examined the processes of diplomatic mediation such as ambassadorial performance, epistolary arts, material cultures, and courtly etiquettes through a critical analysis of diplomatic correspondence in this transregional geography. I command expertise in working with Persian manuscripts’ collections across genres, especially epistolary compositions (inshā’).

As a research associate for INTRECCI, I will be contributing towards the cultural dimension of the project by exploring the role of individuals in forging intellectual, spiritual, and mercantile networks that linked the distant shores of the western Indian Ocean and fostered and sustained centuries of interactions between their littoral and hinterland societies. Alongside, I am working on my first book project that builds on my dissertation and aims to reconstruct the figure of the ambassador in the Islamic world using epistemological and conceptual categories offered by the Persian chancery records.