Shounak Ghosh

I am a postdoctoral research associate for the INTRECCI project on early modern global history. My research explores the shifting meanings of diplomatic practice among the Persianate court societies of Mughal South Asia, Safavid Iran, and the Deccan sultanates in peninsular southern India. My doctoral dissertation is a cultural history of early modern diplomacy through a critical analysis of diplomatic correspondence in this Persianate transregional geography, focussing on ambassadorial performance, epistolary arts, and diplomatic materialities. I command expertise in working with Persian manuscripts’ collections across genres, especially epistolary compositions (inshā’).

I will be contributing to INTRECCI by studying how both state and non-state actors navigated the challenges of institutional transformation as they participated in the global trading networks of the Indian Ocean world. It unravels their agency by examing how they altered and improvised upon institutionalized mechanisms through constantly evolving behaviours and strategies to negotiate the ever-widening world of mercantile and imperial competition. I am simultaneously working on my first book project that reconstructs the versatile profile and multifaceted role of the ambassador (īlchī) by tracing how diplomatic identities were shaped, performed, and interpreted in contemporary textual practices using epistemological and conceptual categories offered by Persian chancery records.