Abstract: This talk explores how early modern Gujaratis imagined land, sea, and the wider world. Drawing on painted maps, pilgrim scrolls, and hybrid cartographic experiments produced between the Mughal and early colonial periods, it presents Gujarat as a site where multiple spatial logics collided and coexisted. These mappings reveal vibrant circulation of techniques between the sailors, pilots, astrologers, surveyors, cultivators, and scribes who embedded knowledge in visual — and sometimes non-visual — form.  Most of all, they foreground relationships: between work and environment, devotion and commerce, sovereignty, and plurality. 

Bio: Samira Sheikh is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. She is author of Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders, and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200-1500 (2010), and co-editor of After Timur Left (2014). Having recently completed a book on late Mughal Bharuch, she is now working on a book and exhibition on early modern mapping practices in India. She is currently the fifth Obaid Siddiqi Chair at the Archives at NCBS, Bangalore (2025-26).