Leaving Legacies

This book describes a distinctive practice and ethics of individuality through a close examination of epigraphy, architecture, and manuscripts. It shows that a concern for the individual was instrumental to the production and reproduction of empire, family, and social order during Mughal rule and after.

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Leaving Legacies is a fresh account of the individual in early modern South Asia. A gendered practice carried out by men, leaving legacies involved assembling three kinds of material traces: monuments, books, and sons. Men laid claim to individual distinction within an ethics of remembering worthy individuals by joining their traces with those of men past and reworking older legacies. Their legacies joined their present to the past and future, while also drawing women and non-elite men into a hierarchical order centered upon the individual during Mughal rule and after. This book shows that a concern for the individual self was not an exclusively western phenomenon. Rather, the practice of leaving individual legacies was a crucial means for the production and reproduction of empire, family, and social order in South Asia.