The Making of Indo-Persian Culture

The Making of Indo-Persian Culture PDF Author: Muzaffar Alam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Seminar papers.

The Making of Indo-Persian Culture

The Making of Indo-Persian Culture PDF Author: Muzaffar Alam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Seminar papers.

Writing Self, Writing Empire

Writing Self, Writing Empire PDF Author: Rajeev Kinra
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520286464
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s new open access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Writing Self, Writing Empire examines the life, career, and writings of the Mughal state secretary, or munshi, Chandar Bhan “Brahman” (d. c.1670), one of the great Indo-Persian poets and prose stylists of early modern South Asia. Chandar Bhan’s life spanned the reigns of four different emperors, Akbar (1556-1605), Jahangir (1605-1627), Shah Jahan (1628-1658), and Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (1658-1707), the last of the “Great Mughals” whose courts dominated the culture and politics of the subcontinent at the height of the empire’s power, territorial reach, and global influence. As a high-caste Hindu who worked for a series of Muslim monarchs and other officials, forming powerful friendships along the way, Chandar Bhan’s experience bears vivid testimony to the pluralistic atmosphere of the Mughal court, particularly during the reign of Shah Jahan, the celebrated builder of the Taj Mahal. But his widely circulated and emulated works also touch on a range of topics central to our understanding of the court’s literary, mystical, administrative, and ethical cultures, while his letters and autobiographical writings provide tantalizing examples of early modern Indo-Persian modes of self-fashioning. Chandar Bhan’s oeuvre is a valuable window onto a crucial, though surprisingly neglected, period of Mughal cultural and political history.

Iran and the Deccan

Iran and the Deccan PDF Author: Keelan Overton
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304894X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.

The Making of the Awadh Culture

The Making of the Awadh Culture PDF Author: Madhu Trivedi
Publisher: Primus Books
ISBN: 819089188X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
This book makes an extensive study of the art and culture of Awadh during the Nawabi period (c. 1722-1856), with a focus on the city of Lucknow. The work takes up evidence available in a variety of primary and secondary sources, especially in the Persian and Urdu languages, in its study of visuals and artefacts, as well as performance traditions and craft techniques which are derived from this period. Highlighting the literary milieu of the period, and the developments in the realm of music, painting, architecture and industrial arts, this volume also explores how some of the arts and crafts assumed considerable European colour, and demonstrates how the ethos of the syncretic Indo-Persian culture, the renowned ganga-jamuni tahzib, remained intact.

The Language of Tolerance

The Language of Tolerance PDF Author: Alyssa Gabbay
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780549154051
Category : Pluralism
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
In highlighting the notion of a language of tolerance as exemplified in the works of Khusraw, this dissertation offers an important corrective to present-day notions of how medieval Muslim communities interacted with other societies. It also brings to the forefront fresh awareness of medieval Islamicate contributions to the development of pluralistic ideologies. By affording a more penetrating understanding of how a rhetoric of tolerance emerges and operates, moreover, this work promotes a greater ability to identify and encourage such discourses in the present, where they are badly needed.

India in the Persianate Age

India in the Persianate Age PDF Author: Richard M. Eaton
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141966556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 'Remarkable ... this brilliant book stands as an important monument to an almost forgotten world' William Dalrymple, Spectator A sweeping, magisterial new history of India from the middle ages to the arrival of the British The Indian subcontinent might seem a self-contained world. Protected by vast mountains and seas, it has created its own religions, philosophies and social systems. And yet this ancient land experienced prolonged and intense interaction with the peoples and cultures of East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa and, especially, Central Asia and the Iranian plateau between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries. Richard M. Eaton's wonderful new book tells this extraordinary story with relish and originality. His major theme is the rise of 'Persianate' culture - a many-faceted transregional world informed by a canon of texts that circulated through ever-widening networks across much of Asia. Introduced to India in the eleventh century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan, this culture would become thoroughly indigenized by the time of the great Mughals in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This long-term process of cultural interaction and assimilation is reflected in India's language, literature, cuisine, attire, religion, styles of rulership and warfare, science, art, music, architecture, and more. The book brilliantly elaborates the complex encounter between India's Sanskrit culture - which continued to flourish and grow throughout this period - and Persian culture, which helped shape the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and a host of regional states, and made India what it is today.

Making History in Iran

Making History in Iran PDF Author: Farzin Vejdani
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080479281X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Iranian history was long told through a variety of stories and legend, tribal lore and genealogies, and tales of the prophets. But in the late nineteenth century, new institutions emerged to produce and circulate a coherent history that fundamentally reshaped these fragmented narratives and dynastic storylines. Farzin Vejdani investigates this transformation to show how cultural institutions and a growing public-sphere affected history-writing, and how in turn this writing defined Iranian nationalism. Interactions between the state and a cross-section of Iranian society—scholars, schoolteachers, students, intellectuals, feminists, and poets—were crucial in shaping a new understanding of nation and history. This enlightening book draws on previously unexamined primary sources—including histories, school curricula, pedagogical materials, periodicals, and memoirs—to demonstrate how the social locations of historians writ broadly influenced their interpretations of the past. The relative autonomy of these historians had a direct bearing on whether history upheld the status quo or became an instrument for radical change, and the writing of history became central to debates on social and political reform, the role of women in society, and the criteria for citizenship and nationality. Ultimately, this book traces how contending visions of Iranian history were increasingly unified as a centralized Iranian state emerged in the early twentieth century.

Persianate Selves

Persianate Selves PDF Author: Mana Kia
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503611965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
For centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the land of Iran was Persian, and Persians lived in many other lands as well. Thus to be Persian was to be embedded in a set of connections with people we today consider members of different groups. Persianate selfhood encompassed a broader range of possibilities than contemporary nationalist claims to place and origin allow. We cannot grasp these older connections without historicizing our conceptions of difference and affiliation. Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.

The World of Persian Literary Humanism

The World of Persian Literary Humanism PDF Author: Hamid Dabashi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674067592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Humanism has mostly considered the question “What does it mean to be human?” from a Western perspective. Dabashi asks it anew from a non-European perspective, in a groundbreaking study of 1,400 years of Persian literary humanism. He presents the unfolding of this vast tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.

Writing the Mughal World

Writing the Mughal World PDF Author: Muzaffar Alam
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231158114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
Between the mid-sixteenth and early nineteenth century, the Mughal Empire was an Indo-Islamic dynasty that ruled as far as Bengal in the east and Kabul in the west, as high as Kashmir in the north and the Kaveri basin in the south. The Mughals constructed a sophisticated, complex system of government that facilitated an era of profound artistic and architectural achievement. They promoted the place of Persian culture in Indian society and set the groundwork for South Asia's future development. In this volume, two leading historians of early modern South Asia present nine major joint essays on the Mughal Empire, framed by an essential introductory reflection. Making creative use of materials written in Persian, Indian vernacular languages, and a variety of European languages, their chapters accomplish the most significant innovations in Mughal historiography in decades, intertwining political, cultural, and commercial themes while exploring diplomacy, state-formation, history-writing, religious debate, and political thought. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam center on confrontations between different source materials that they then reconcile, enabling readers to participate in both the debate and resolution of competing claims. Their introduction discusses the comparative and historiographical approach of their work and its place within the literature on Mughal rule. Interdisciplinary and cutting-edge, this volume richly expands research on the Mughal state, early modern South Asia, and the comparative history of the Mughal, Ottoman, Safavid, and other early modern empires.