This talk will focus on the Persian work Yadgar-e Bahaduri, an encyclopedic account of time and space completed in Lucknow in 1834 that encompasses information coming from Indian, Islamic, and European sources. This work belongs to a class of Indian texts, written circa 1750-1850, whose forms and contents invite reformulating global intellectual history before the establishment of European discursive hegemony. I suggest that thinking with this work helps to generate new ways to appreciate the past as a diversified field of imagination and contestation, in the nineteenth century as well as in our present time.