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Courting India : seventeenth-century England, Mughal India, and the origins of empire
\"When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I's first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe represented a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified 'Great Britain' under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. In this fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, Nandini Das offers an insider's view of Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue, scandal, lotteries, and wagers that unfold as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Exercises in peace: Āẕar Kayvānī universalism and comparison in the School of Doctrines
In 1650, an encyclopedia of comparative religion known as Dabistān-i Maẕāhib (the School of Doctrines) was completed near the city of Hyderabad. Asserting that the religions of the world are reflections of a single inner truth, its author Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī, known by the poetic penname ‘Mūbad’, travelled widely across India to record encounters with diverse religious figures. This article re-examines the composition and legacy of the Dabistān in light of new manuscript evidence relating to its author and the world he inhabited. It argues that the Dabistān's universalist project reflects a widely held theory of the interrelatedness of the macrocosm, in which sociality with diverse populations was understood to be a spiritual exercise leading to saintly perfection in the same way that venerating the cosmos and ascetic bodily practices were. The article provides a close reading of the Dabistān's shortest chapter on the religion of the Tibetans, the earliest such description in Persian. Situating the Dabistān within the diverse expressions of ‘Universal Peace’ (ṣulḥ-i kull) during the Safavid and Mughal periods, it argues that the Dabistān's project of recovering a universal theology that was attributed to ancient Iran and India led to expressions of dual religious belonging—to particular religions of revelation as well as to the universal religion of the philosophers—parallel to and connected with what Jan Assmann has termed the ‘religio duplex phenomenon’ in early modern Europe. Finally, the article briefly traces the legacy of the Dabistān into the modern period. The free do not think of religion, doctrine, and spiritual guidance—Those shackled by seeking liberation are not truly free.For how long must we wander the alleyways of religion and nation?—There is no highway through the land of verification (taḥqīq) besides heresy (ilḥād).—‘Mūbad’ Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī (fl. 1060s ah/1650s ce)1
Journal Article
Overcoming Childlessness: Narratives of Conception in Early Modern North India
This article discusses early modern North Indian ways of expressing how barrenness could be mapped onto a woman’s maternal identity. Scholars have engaged with the historical evolution of women’s identities, focusing overwhelmingly on their economic and political potential. This article is the first to use medical and erotological sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to study women as procreative agents, and the socio-sexual anxieties prompted by infertile female bodies. Through a critical study of a wide range of medical material, I demonstrate that by the eighteenth century, several transformations in medical discourses can be mapped onto textual transmissions from Sanskrit (and Braj Bhasha) to Persian, as well as between competing but conterminously flourishing medical paradigms, Ayurveda and Yunani. While cures for childlessness have a much longer history, a new genre of ‘anonymous’ sources, particularly focused on the sexual diseases of men and women emerged in early modern North India. Lastly, my comparative methodological approach to different textual genres will complicate our understanding of early modern medical episteme and its intended audience.
Journal Article
Letter writing as the mingling of souls: remote knowledge exchange among eighteenth-century Naqshbandis
Historians of Islamicate intellectual practices in pre-colonial South Asia have long argued that authoritative knowledge was located in persons rather than books, and that religious texts were thus typically transmitted in the context of face-to-face meetings between teacher and student. While it has been noted that some early modern Sufi networks engaged in the remote transmission of authoritative knowledge by means of letters, with reduced emphasis on face-to-face meetings, the causes for this development are still debated. Looking at the correspondence, theoretical treatises, and authorisations (ijāzas) produced in the circle of the celebrated eighteenth-century Naqshbandi reformer Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, this article argues that the willingness to engage in the transmission of remote knowledge was not simply a product of the changing material conditions of late-Mughal India, but rather was underwritten by emergent spiritual and psychological ideas about the nature of personhood. Because a person was not merely a material entity bounded by a corporeal (living) body, bodily proximity between two individuals was less valuable than their spiritual congruence. This congruence could be strengthened during periods of face-to-face companionship but could also be generated and maintained through letters alone. Indeed, these scholars sometimes assert the superiority of the letter over physical companionship because it allowed for a coming together of two spirits without the intrusion of the gross material body. Working within this intellectual framework, scholars in this network regularly exchanged books of all genres as well as ijāzas remotely (often over vast distances).
Journal Article
Property and Social Relations in Mughal India: Litigations and Disputes at the Qazi's Court in Urban Localities, 17th-18th Centuries
Abstract
Critiquing the commodity-centered frames of reference, this paper looks at property not within an economic logic, but as a set of practices that served to structure and reconfigure social relations. Based on a study of property documents and court papers, the essay argues that property was not simply an index of wealth, but a medium through which social relations were affirmed, reproduced and contested. Owing to the identification of property with the honor of families and caste groups, transactions in property were socially regulated activities that bore the imprint of local power relations. Property documents were imbued with a plethora of meanings, and this was because the scribal-literate tradition in Mughal India co-existed with an oral-performative culture. Writing was used by social actors in a wide variety of ways, and for different sets of objectives, sometimes to reinforce the social order, on other occasions to disrupt it.
Journal Article
Instructive Memory: An Analysis of Auto/Biographical Writing in Early Mughal India
Abstract
This article analyzes three early Mughal auto/biographical texts written at the order of Akbar as forms of instructive memory, and contextualizes these texts within an existing body of writings about akhlāq literature and literary genres. In doing so, this article discusses how auto/biographical narratives in Mughal India were both collected and collective, and how the didactic undercurrents of these texts relied upon individuated notions of character and kingship presented through the figure of Humayun. By reading lived experience across genres that often contained elements of one another, this article places interconnected Mughal lives as central to textual renderings of the past.
Journal Article
MONGOL-AFGHAN CONFLICT DURING THE DELHI SULTANS
Most of the inquiries produced by historians on medieval and Mughal India usually limited the scope of the Mughal- Afghan conflict only to the period of the Greater Mughals (1526-1707). In fact there occurred some major Afghan uprisings during the Mughal era but one cannot overlook the relationship of Mongols the predecessors of the Mughals during the Delhi Sultans. The available literature on the subject revealed an overlapping development of the events occurred in Kabul the Afghan borderland and the Delhi Sultanate. As the Afghans lay on the main route of the Mongol invaders therefore their policy and response towards them must be judged to understand its varying dimensions. Both the nations portrayed a tribal social and political cohesion which made them a little closer with each- others. The paper aims at to discover the activities of the Afghan nobility in India during the Mongol's Indian invasion.
Journal Article
Rereading the Black Legend
The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.” A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.
eBook
MUGHALS AND THE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS
Akbar (1556-1605) laid down the foundations of an empire after conquering and occupying territories of local Indian rulers. He introduced many reforms which consolidated the Mughal rule. His attempt to establish a house of worship and allow followers of different faiths to come and discuss religious issues there not only helped to spread knowledge of various religions but also created religious tolerance. Akbar was condemned as secular and irreligious because he had patronised all faiths and consequently weakened the Muslim community of India. As he encouraged the policy of integration, he was said to have polluted the purity of Islam.
Journal Article
CONTESTING NATIONS AND CANONS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY OTTOMAN AND IRANIAN PRESS
During World War I and the immediate postwar years, a series of heated debates broke out about the relationship between the Persian and Ottoman Turkish literary canons and the nature of Iranian and Turkish nationalisms. The protagonists of these debates included an older generation of Ottoman literary and political figures, a younger generation of committed Pan-Turkist intellectuals, and Iranian activists, poets, and students residing in Tehran, Istanbul, and Berlin. Using Ottoman and Persian poetry, memoirs, press articles, polemical tracts, and speeches, this article explores the formation of alternative readings of Persian and Turkish literatures. Several Pan-Turkist intellectuals contested the privileged position enjoyed by Persian literature in Ottoman educational institutions and literary circles, eliciting a spirited response from Ottoman and Iranian authors critical of such a move. This article argues that as nationalism gained greater credence in both Iran and the Ottoman Empire, intellectuals forced literature, language, and culture into territorially bound structures through their obsession with origins, influence, and exclusive national ownership of literary and cultural figures. It thereby traces the transition from Pan-Islamic discourses of solidarity prevalent during the early years of the war to more exclusivist forms of nationalism in the postwar era.
Journal Article