Recent scholarship on connected histories in the early modern Persianate world has worked to reconstruct fluid, transregional networks of highly mobile merchants, scholars, and poets who circulated between Iran and South Asia. This work has demonstrated that while the net flow of movement was from Northwest to Southeast, migrants and their descendants moved in both directions, maintaining connections with their cities-of-origin. This paper builds on this study of cosmopolitan Persianate communities by examining a tangle of biographical and historical texts that center on Shushtar, a city most often studied for its ancient dams and hydraulic systems. These writings comprise a corpus of texts, composed by members of the Nuri family of Shushtari sayyids, who moved between Khuzistan, the Deccan, and the shrine-towns of Iraq, and whose writings spanned four generations. These works also encompassed a variety of genres, including local history, self-narrative, travel-writing, and jurisprudence. Furthermore, the texts of this corpus are deeply entangled; they preserve a set of intertextual dialogues between generations of family members, penned in various far-flung places within the Persianate cosmopolis. As such, the corpus consists of the authors’ deliberate engagements with their relatives’ memories of home and family.
Although some writers lived at a great distance from Shushtar, in their works they struggled to cultivate a sense of family solidarity and rootedness in the city. Doing so involved attempting to resolve a tension between competing cosmopolitan and vernacular sensibilities of belonging. As many scholars have shown, cosmopolitan cultures that encompass extensive transregional communities tend to engender this sort of tension by destabilizing discrete, local notions of place and, thereby, rendering the boundaries between home and abroad fluid and elastic. For the mobile Nuri sayyids, this displacement had the effect of upsetting familiar senses of belonging and orientation. Consequently, one can discern in this corpus the authors’ implicit attempts to negotiate these apparently contradictory cosmopolitan and vernacular strategies of orientation. I argue that we can identify a blueprint for understanding these writers’ processes of negotiation in the very dialogic and intertextual nature of the corpus. The logic by which these authors negotiated these fluid, cultural borderlands becomes more comprehensible when we focus on these textual confluences that correspond with them. Moreover, by observing the historically contingent variations in strategy through which these successive writers emplotted Shushtar’s history, I trace their development diachronically, alongside social transformations in this family’s communal networks.
