Mobile Manuscripts departs from the established historiography on trade, shipping, and pilgrimage to argue for the emergence of Arabic learning as a crucial form of transoceanic mobility from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. From Egypt to the Hijaz, Yemen and further on to Gujarat and the Deccan, networks of manuscript circulation created shared social and cultural spaces across the early modern western Indian Ocean, in which South Asia was a key node of connection. Largely unstudied Arabic manuscripts from collections in eight different archives offer a new source base to explore the region as a hub of Arabic scholarly culture, while marginalia and notes provide an empirical treasure trove for the study of social spaces and cultural practices. This is the first book to trace these truly transoceanic encounters between scholars, sultans, scribes, readers, and librarians.

In this book talk, I am going to exemplify the main argument of the book by tracing the emergence of one specific manuscript copy from early modern Bijapur. I will demonstrate how transoceanic scholarly mobilities, political transformations in the Deccan, new paratextual practices, and the growing prestige of Arabic learning made this manuscript copy possible and thereby reflect on larger questions regarding social and cultural mobilities of texts in this period.

Christopher Bahl is Associate Professor in South Asian History at Durham University, UK. He received his PhD from SOAS, University of London, in 2018. Before joining Durham, he was a Research Associate at the Orient-Institut, Beirut, Lebanon. He previously studied in Heidelberg, Damascus, and Hyderabad. He is particularly interested in the political, social, and intellectual histories of Muslim communities in early modern South Asia and their links with communities across the western Indian Ocean region. His first monograph, entitled Mobile manuscripts – Arabic learning across the early western Indian Ocean was published in 2025. He is currently working on a new book project that studies the history of an ‘Indian community’ in Mecca and Medina from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.