Author

Shayan Rajani is an Assistant Professor of History at the Michigan State University. He previously taught at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. His research focuses on early modern South Asia and the Mughal world. In particular, he studies the region of Sindh. This includes examining the role of leaving legacies in constructing the individual and the world, following the material and gendered choices that contribute to producing, sustaining, and transmuting these two interrelated assemblages across the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire.

His first book project, "Leaving Legacies: Making Individual and the World in Early Modern South Asia," examines the enterprise of assembling texts, monuments, and children as a concerted effort to leave memorials for posterity. In doing so, it investigates the intellectual, social, and material history of the individual in South Asia, specifically in Sindh, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

He received his doctoral degree in History from Tufts University.

Book Description 
Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia offers a new interpretive framework for understanding the actions and intentions of historical actors in early modern South Asia. Focusing on the western region of Sindh between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the book argues that individuals during this period engaged in a form of selfhood that, while distinct from modern individualism, was nevertheless deeply concerned with the self and its extension through time. Through practices such as the construction of monuments, the composition of literary texts, and the begetting of sons, elite men sought to leave material traces that would secure their remembrance by future generations. These acts, though often couched in a rhetoric of humility and self-effacement, reveal a pervasive ethics of legacy that allowed individuals to intervene not only in their own time but also in multiple futures.

The book draws on a wide and seldom-used archive, placing architectural, literary, and historical materials into conversation in order to identify the rise of the individual as a historical phenomenon. It situates this development within the broader context of Mughal state formation, particularly the centralizing reforms of Emperor Akbar, which disrupted the hereditary transmission of office and wealth. In response to these shifts, individuals increasingly turned to legacy-making as a means of preserving their name and merit beyond death. Rather than viewing remembrance as an incidental by-product of piety or patronage, Leaving Legacies presents it as a conscious and relational practice that shaped the structures of family, empire, and regional belonging. The book contributes to the historiography of early modern South Asia by offering a new account of individualism and by proposing an alternative ethics of historical continuity that values engagement, incorporation, and the plural extension of the past.