Letters from the Mughal Court

Letters from the Mughal Court PDF Author: John Correia-Afonso
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jesuits
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description

Letters from the Mughal Court

Letters from the Mughal Court PDF Author: John Correia-Afonso
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jesuits
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description


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.

The Key to Power?

The Key to Power? PDF Author: Dries Raeymaekers
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900430424X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Proximity to the monarch was a vital asset in the struggle for power and influence in medieval and early modern courts. The concept of ‘access to the ruler’ has therefore grown into a dominant theme in scholarship on pre-modern dynasties. Still, many questions remain concerning the mechanisms of access and their impact on politics. Bringing together new research on European and Asian cases, the ten chapters in this volume focus on the ways in which ‘access’ was articulated, regulated, negotiated, and performed. By taking into account the full complexity of hierarchies, ceremonial rites, spaces and artefacts that characterized the dynastic court, The Key to Power? forces us to rethink power relations in the late medieval and early modern world. Contributors are: Christina Antenhofer, Ronald G. Asch, Florence Berland, Mark Hengerer, Neil Murphy, Fabian Persson, Jonathan Spangler, Michael Talbot, Steven Thiry, and Audrey Truschke.

Urdu Letters of Mirza Asadu'llah Khan Ghalib

Urdu Letters of Mirza Asadu'llah Khan Ghalib PDF Author: Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780887064128
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
Mirza Asadu'llah Khan Ghalib was the brightest luminary of his time in the South Asian, Muslim literary community. A poet in Urdu and Persian, he was endowed with exquisite imagination, sparkling wit, and a charming presence. Ghalib was a brilliant conversationalist, skilled in the art of human relations. In the last twenty years of his life, the political conditions of northern India caused the death or dispersion of many of his best friends. He satisfied his gregarious urges by writing exquisite letters in Urdu, in a delightfully conversational style. By these means Ghalib kept in touch with his scattered friends. These letters were so novel in style that the first collection was published only a month after the poet's death. In this book, Daud Rahbar provides thoroughly annotated English versions of 170 Urdu letters. These letters exemplify the possibility of elevating human relations to an art form, and Rahbar's translation reproduces the delicate flavor of the original Urdu prose.

The Mughal Feast

The Mughal Feast PDF Author: Salma Yusuf Hussain
Publisher: Roli Books
ISBN: 9788193704974
Category : Cooking, Indic
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
* The Mughal Feast is a delightful transcreation of the original handwritten Persian recipe book Nuskha-e-Shahjahani from the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan's time* Go on a culinary journey into the Mughal imperial kitchen of one of India's greatest empires in this informative and practical guideThe Mughal Feast is a delightful transcreation of the original handwritten Persian recipe book Nuskha-e-Shahjahani from the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan's time. A culinary journey into the Mughal imperial kitchen, where food was cooked with just the right amount of spices to enhance the base flavors of the dishes, this book is divided into seven sections and includes a plethora of recipes, ranging from the familiar shami kabab and baqlawa to the more exotic amba pulao (tangy mango lamb rice) and indersa (sweet, deep-fried rice-flour balls). The book also provides helpful tips for cooking, including methods to clean fish and soften bones, throwing light on the creativity of the Mughal cooks. An informative introduction offers an intriguing glimpse into the royal lifestyle of one of India's greatest empires. This book effortlessly recaptures the nostalgia of Mughal times while remaining a practical guide for the modern reader.

Empire and Information

Empire and Information PDF Author: Christopher Alan Bayly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521663601
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
In a penetrating account of the evolution of British intelligence gathering in India, C. A. Bayly shows how networks of Indian spies were recruited by the British to secure military, political and social information about their subjects. He also examines the social and intellectual origins of these 'native informants', and considers how the colonial authorities interpreted and often misinterpreted the information they supplied. It was such misunderstandings which ultimately contributed to the failure of the British to anticipate the rebellions of 1857. The author argues, however, that even before this, complex systems of debate and communication were challenging the political and intellectual dominance of the European rulers.

The Emperors' Album

The Emperors' Album PDF Author: Stuart Cary Welch
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 0870994999
Category : Calligraphy, Islamic
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Fifty leaves that form the sumptuous Kevorkian Album, one of the world's greatest assemblages of Mughal art. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

India in the Persian World of Letters

India in the Persian World of Letters PDF Author: Arthur Dudney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019285741X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book traces the development of philology (the study of literary language) in the Persian tradition in India, concentrating on its socio-political ramifications. The most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the eighteenth-century was Sirāj al-Dīn 'Alī Khān, (d. 1756), whose pen-name was Ārzū. Besides being a respected poet, Ārzū was a rigorous theoretician of language whose Intellectual legacy was side-lined by colonialism. His conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change in part to theorize the tāzah-go'ī [literally, fresh-speaking] movement in Persian literary culture. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranian native-speakers versus Indian imitators), the primary sources show that contemporary concerns had less to do with geography than with the question of how to assess innovative fresh-speaking poetry, a situation analogous to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in early modern Europe. Ārzū used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation or be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. Ārzū also shaped attitudes about reokhtah, the Persianized form of vernacular poetry that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, helping the vernacular to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India. This study puts to rest the persistent misconception that Indians started writing the vernacular because they were ashamed of their poor grasp of Persian at the twilight of the Mughal Empire.

Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters

Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters PDF Author: Baidik Bhattacharya
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009422642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book is a radical reimagination of the idea of the literary through colonial histories and world literature.

The Modern Review

The Modern Review PDF Author: Ramananda Chatterjee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 874

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Book Description
Includes section "Reviews and notices of books".