This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question. Scholars have puzzled over these sites through recalcitrant genres such as the ghazal (Pritchett, 1985) and qissa (Mir, 2010; Khan, 2019), early modern imaginaries such as tales of martyrdom (Halder, 2023; Hyder, 2006) and spectral hauntings (Kumar, 2023), pre-print practices of literary circulation (Orsini, 2009;  Bhattacharya, 2023), and changing patronage networks and aesthetic paradigms (Busch, 2011). This panel reopens the question of genres at the cusp of the early modern/modern with a specific attention to affect. Understanding the early modern/modern as repositories of images, emotional states, and generic conventions helps us transcend conventional categorizations of historical epochs. We are specifically interested in how literary actors—writers, readers, translators, publishers, performers, literary historians, among others—strategically negotiated with, resisted, and/or produced boundaries between the early modern and the modern. Through what logics—such as linguistic registers, performative idioms, and circulation practices—can we map these negotiations? How did the social and cultural contexts of reception shape such choices? We therefore invite papers that offer situated accounts of cross-fertilization between the early modern and modern in literary traditions of the Subcontinent.

Please send your 250-word abstracts to Jaideep Pandey (jpandey@umich.edu) and Sthira Bhattacharya (sthira@uchicago.edu) by 30th July, 2026.