This Map is an Archive: Making and Sharing Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century

Samira Sheikh explores how knowledge became durable and authoritative in 18th-century western India through a painted map of Gujarat.
About this Event

How did knowledge become durable, portable, and authoritative in eighteenth-century western India? Based on a monumental painted map of Gujarat and the documentary world of the late Mughal empire, the lecture tracks how knowledge of the land was produced and shared. Folds of cloth and paper, the convergence of painting and devotional poetry, and the organisation of tax and merchants’ records reveal the labor and logic that stitched together South Asia’s eighteenth-century archive.

About the speaker

Samira Sheikh is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. A historian of early modern South Asia, she studies Gujarat, the Indian Ocean, and the material worlds of maps, manuscripts, merchants, sailors, and rulers. Her current work explores how early modern spatial relationships were expressed in genres of mappings across visual languages and shifting political worlds.