In What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, a work that according to its two authors, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, 'should be read as a dialogue or a debate on microhistory', Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon considers the breaking of metanarratives to be the goal of a microhistorian (SG Magnússon and Szijártó 2013, 10, 115). However, to not let 'the grand narrative' monopolize attention poses a great challenge for any historian working especially in the context of an empire. In the study of the Mughal empire, for instance, one is often blindsided by the grandeur of its rise and fall. It was in the year 1526 that Babur, the descendent of the famous conqueror Amir Timur, won a victory over the Delhi sultanate. Defeating the Lodi dynasty, he established an empire that ruled over the Indian subcontinent for more than three hundred years (1526–1857). Eventually, due to several debatable reasons—wars of succession, factionalism, foreign invasions, weak rulers, the rise of regional forces, etc.—the empire perished giving way to colonial rule in India. At the heart of this blog post is, therefore, the question that do sources of life narratives, such as letters, have value in providing actual flesh to the empire’s well-established, awe-inspiring skeleton?

I have already discussed, in my previous post titled 'The Practice of Microhistory: Challenges in capturing the veins, emotions and rhythms', that the historians of the Mughal empire have always had a fixation with the elite with their historical reconstructions based on court/state-related sources. Moving on, Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir argues that no doubt drawing broad generalizations from sources such as court records or memoirs can be problematic but among these problematic sources, one must include private letters as well (Halldórsdóttir 2007, 39). Even so, according to her, what distinguishes these letters is that they have a more personal and candid form than chronicles and memoirs, which are usually written long after the events they recount. Letters illustrate what takes place then and there. Once they are sent in the mail, there is no way that they can be changed or revised (39). This makes one agree with Liz Stanley as well who considers letters and photographs as having similar 'temporal complexities'. In other words, they not only capture memories but also serve as a reflection of the time in which they were written. This is a characteristic that Stanley terms as 'flies in the amber' quality (Stanley 2004, 208) - something indicative of a bygone era that still exists in the present in the same or similar form; like an ancient insect preserved in amber.

Stanley asserts that, as far as research is concerned, some 'documents of life' are considered tricky. Consequently, they are either face neglect or are rendered marginal, with diaries receiving scant attention and letters even less (202). Highlighting how social scientists remain suspicious of the value of letters, though many insights can be gained from their study, Stanley enumerates various features that mark out epistolary as a distinct genre of writing. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, letters are comparable to photos in that they are always in the present tense, created at a specific moment in time. Secondly, letters involve a performance of self. Put another way, letters are representative of the particular writer, functioning as a proxy for them. Thirdly, letters possess a fragmented epistolary form, meaning they have an inherently incomplete quality. This is primarily because the temporal and spatial interruptions have a huge impact on the letters, so much so that, they always remain in some way unfinished. Stanley writes:

Any particular letter is a part of a sequence in a correspondence; consequently, there are always things not present in any one letter, with an incremental and fragmented emplotment existing across a series concerning what happened before. These 'gaps' concern things that need not be written and can be assumed, concerning contextual and cultural knowledge, about relationships and shared events, leading to letters that are often highly elliptical, with few or no clues even in a collection as to the meaning (208, 213–14).

Therefore, often contextual and shared cultural knowledge, between the writer and the reader, makes one not mention certain things in detail, or these are written in one letter but not repeated in others. These details are usually indirectly spelt out, making the letters ambiguous and 'unfinished'. Finally, letters typically anticipate a response, meaning that both the 'after' and the 'before' are usually considered in an exchange of correspondence (214). At the same time, Stanley notes that a paradox lies at the core of epistolary matters since:

[T]he 'real' message of the letters is not quite what is written; letters 'stand for' the writer, but only in their absence; the writer is not the 'actual person' but an epistolary version or emanation of them; what they write about is not the world as it is but which is represented; and the moment of writing is conveyed to the reader but only after it has gone by (214).

What then makes letters authoritative, not just as a genre of writing or literature, but as sources of history? As Stanley explains, a collection of letters serves as a record of an individual when only one side of the correspondence remains, or as a shared epistolary life when both sides are preserved (221). Additionally, the collection also constitutes a narrative. Firstly, according to the basic definition of narrative, the collection follows a chronological or sequential structure. Secondly, letters are fragments of the past that remain, and what remains offers the only possible epistolary narrative, shaped by the passage of time and its uncertainties (221). Among the various factors that are indispensable to the practice of microhistory, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon includes the role of narrative (SG Magnússon and Szijártó 2013, 147).

For my research, accordingly, Abdul Jalil’s letters, a collection of 22 letters written to his son, during the period extending from Aurangzeb’s reign (r. 1658–1707) to the reign of Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–48), thus, provide us an excellent opportunity to build a micro-narrative of the life a petty eighteenth-century official, providing an ant’s eye view and offering itself as a unique history of Mughal decline.

Worth mentioning in this context is that in the reconstruction of an epistolary life narrative, correspondence can often be considered a kind of dialogue or communication filled with an unrestricted flow of emotions. However, it is imperative that one should refrain from regarding letters simply as sentimentally satisfactory conversations on paper. As Halldórsdóttir writes, '[t]here is a difference in time (the time that passes between writing and reception), the discursive styles on paper and in face-to-face conversation, and no facial expressions can be shown in a letter' (Halldórsdóttir 2007, 41). This is exactly what Sigfús Jónsson, the protagonist of her work Jakobína Jónsdóttir or Bína’s brother seemed to be aware of when he wrote to her in 1864 that he would spend his afternoon 'talking' to her. She quotes:

[B]ut when I sit down to write I feel how different it is, to let a stiff pen "make a speech" that cannot reach your eyes or ears until after so long a time, that it has become a fading echo, or if I could speak to you orally and hear you and see you near me (41).

Another of Bína's cousins wrote previously in 1863:

[T]he pen is so stiff that it cannot show you what I want to say, and the paper is so cold that it cannot deliver you but so little of my thoughts and emotions, and then perhaps more eyes that yours can see it (39).

On the other hand, our protagonist, Abdul Jalil, in one of the letters to his son wrote:

I wrote a letter to you, and so powerful … [was] my desire to see you, that I almost made myself a line of my own letter. My heart and my sight fly separately towards you: although I am in a cage, I have wings and many feathers (Bilgrami 1798, 144).

The difference between an oral or a face-to-face conversation and written communication is, therefore, well-marked and so is Abdul Jalil's restricted emotional engagement through written correspondence. Recognizing the significance of letters in general despite their limitations, and Abdul Jalil's correspondence in particular as having survived the vagaries of time and providing a unique window for historians to peek in, a line of Abdul Jalil's own letter, therefore, adorns the blog post as its title.

References 

Bilgrami, Abdul Jalil. 1798. "Original Letters, from a Father to His Son, On Various Subjects." In The Oriental Miscellany: Consisting of Original Productions and Translations (Volume I), compiled by Anonymous, 133–287. 

Halldórsdóttir, Erla Hulda. 2007. "Fragments of Lives - The Use of Private Letters in Historical Research." Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 15 (1): 35–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740701253551.

Magnusson, Sigurður Gylfi, and István M. Szijártó. 2013. What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice. Routledge. 

Stanley, Liz. 2004. "The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences." Theorizing Letters and Correspondences, Auto/Biography 12: 201–235.