This book consists of incisive and imaginative readings of culture, politics, and history in eastern India from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Focusing especially on Assam, Odisha, Bengal, and their margins, the volume explores Indo-Islamic cultures of rule as located on the cusp of Mughal-cosmopolitan and regional-local formations.

Tracking sensibilities of time and history, senses of events and persons, and productions of the past and the present, the volume examines the interchanges between literary cultures and contending nationalisms, culture and cosmopolitanism, temporality and mythology, literature and literacy, history and modernity, and print culture and popular media.