OBJECTIVES: The project aims at proposing a new integrative perspective on the connected cultural histories of South Asia and Europe through the lens of identifying competing patterns of patronage, performance and circulation in literary and knowledge production in the times of change leading tothe gradual emergence of the new cultural order of the British Colonial Empire in India as produced by multiple and various actors and agents. While taking inspiration from recent scholarship, the project shall explore original literary sources from India and on India, selected inscriptional evidence as well as historical archives extant in Europe and India in order to trace and map patterns of decline and emergence in the networks of cultural circulation of texts, artefacts and ideas within and across the regions of influence of major political powers between 1674 and 1890. This gross perspective shall be enriched by the more localized three case studies of local and regional culture-and-power orders that variously transformed themselves over the period while showing their adaptive potential to take part in the processes of transformation including different gradient of resilience, continuity and change involving original ways towards modernity.