ABSTRACT
How did the early moderns articulate their place within an increasingly globalised and rapidly changing world? This chapter begins by outlining the Sanskrit and Persian cosmopolises, for Sanskrit and Persian were early modern India’s major classical and cosmopolitan languages. They were, moreover, changing via their encounter in the period covered in this book. At the same time, local tongues were not only steadily being literised but also gaining prominence, often via emulating and competing with the classical languages and their genres, with key phases of vernacularisation from the fifteenth century onwards; such languages are the subject of the second section. The third section turns from language to the arts – architecture, painting, and music – to explore a similar interaction between the local and the cosmopolitan. The local did not replace the global; they grew together in ways that would eventually shape the ‘national’. The conclusion sets these early modern developments in connexion with the ‘origins of nationality’.
