Indo-Persian Cultural History

The city here described is Fatehpur Sikri. Not far from Agra, it was a time the capital city of the great Mughal emperor, Akbar, and its intellectual glory is recaptured in some of these photos from/for Marg, the heart of my essay delivered at a 1985 Harvard conference on Fatehpur Sikri chaired by Oleg Grabar.

Intendiamo aprire, con questo studio, una discussione sulla poetica e sulla filosofia della natura nell’opera di Mīrzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil (1644- 1720), il maggiore poeta di lingua persiana dell’India mughal, e nella sua scuola. Riprendendo alcune suggestioni di Alessandro Bausani, ormai risalenti a quasi sessant’anni fa, ci concentriamo qui in modo particolare sull’ecologia testuale e metaforica della nuvola (abr) e di alcune realtà fisiche a questa connessa, in modo particolare la bolla (ḥabāb), che si trasformano, nella lettura bideliana, in veri e propri specchi per una riflessione concettuale fondata sul metodo del taḥqīq, insieme “indagine” e “realizzazione”. Il principale testo di nostro inte- resse è un mathnawī relativamente breve, il Ṭūr-i maʿrifat (Sinai della conoscen- za), recentemente tradotto in italiano e tra le opere meno note del maestro di Patna: un vero e proprio safarnāma, o resoconto di viaggio, focalizzato esclusi- vamente sull’osservazione e la narrazione del paesaggio naturale dell’India del nord nel momento del monsone. A questo poema si affiancano, nell’analisi, al- cuni versi tratti dai ghazal di Bīdil e, soprattutto, dall’opera di due suoi discepoli krishnaiti, Amānat Rāy e Shivrām Dās Ḥayā (entrambi attivi nella prima metà del Settecento), che riprendono, nei loro versi persiani, la tematica naturale del maestro declinandola in chiave vedantica e devozionale.

The sitar and setar are the foremost classical instruments of India and Iran. They are seen by most people as being distinct instruments from different countries and traditions. However, they share a common ancestry, and their name is in fact the same word (Persian, ‫ﺳﮫ‬ ‫ﺗﺎر‬). It was transliterated into English in slightly different ways during colonial times. As we scratch just beneath the deceptive surface of Indian and Iranian music, we find the rich confluence that is the Indo-Persian world, a realm of connected histories and creativity, and a space to imagine new ones.

This article presents an annotated translation of "The Equivalence between Giving and Receiving" (al-Taswiya bayna al-ifāda wa-l-qabūl), a short Arabic treatise on essence (dhāt) and existence (wujūd) composed by the South Asian philosopher-Sufi, Shaykh Muḥibb Allāh Ilāhābādī (996–1058/1587–1648). Although modern scholarship has habitually referred to Muḥibb Allāh as an ardent defender of the doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd (“unity of existence”) associated with the figure of Ibn al-ʿArabī, such generalized formulations fail to do justice to the uniqueness of Muḥibb Allāh’s intellectual contributions. Most authors who had set out to provide a philosophical defense of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teachings – including the well-known likes of Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī, Dāwud al-Qayṣarī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Mullā Ṣadrā, and so on – had tended to prioritize a philosophically utilizable formulation of wujūd or “existence.” Muḥibb Allāh, in notable contrast, favors a presentation of the divine Reality in terms of “pure essence/quiddity” (dhāt/māhiyya maḥḍa), at times going to considerable lengths to uphold his alternative formulation. Such a strategy of argumentation is uncommon amongst philosophical defenders of Ibn al-ʿArabī, the distinctiveness of which is further enhanced by Muḥibb Allāh’s peculiar mode of disputation, which straddles the line between metaphysics and natural philosophy/physics. The Taswiya occasioned at least sixteen commentaries and refutations; this translation benefits from consulting the earliest of these, composed by Mullā Maḥmūd al-Jawnpūrī (d. 1062/1652) and Khwāja Khwurd (d. 1073/1663), as well as three later commentaries by Ḥabīb Allāh Paṭnaʾī (d. 1140/1728). Most significantly, this translation makes extensive use of Muḥibb Allāh’s own Persian auto-commentary, the Sharḥ-i taswiya, which is a critical aid for deciphering the author’s at times opaque manner of expression and argumentation.

In the field of Medieval Indian historiography, an eight-volume magnum opus, History of India as told by its own Historians, by Sir Henry Myers Elliot (1808-53) and the editor-compiler of his posthumous papers, John Dowson (1820-81), was published from London between 1867 and 1877. These meritorious volumes continue to retain their popularity even nearly hundred and fifty years later, and scholars still learn from and conduct their research on the basis of this work. However, an enterprise of this scale and magnitude was bound to suffer from some serious shortcomings.

An eminent Indian scholar, S.H. Hodivala undertook the daunting task of annotating Elliot and Dowson’s volumes and worked through all the new material, selecting or criticizing and adding his own suggestions where previous comments do not exist or appear unsuitable. The first volume of Hodivala’s annotated ‘Studies’, was published in 1939, while the second volume was published posthumously in 1957.

Over the years, while the work of Elliot and Dowson has seen many reprints, and is even available online now, Hodivala’s volumes have receded into obscurity. A new edition is presented here for the first time.
Hodivala also published critical commentaries on 238 of about 2000 entries included in another very famous work, Hobson-Jobson (London, 1886) by Sir Henry Yule (1820-89) and Arthur Coke Burnell (1840-82). These have also been included in the present edition.

These volumes are thus aimed at serving as indispensible compendium of both, Elliot and Dowson’s, and for Yule and Burnell’s excellent contributions of colonial scholarship. At the same time these would also serve as a guide for comparative studies and critical appreciation of historical texts.

Author/ Editor:

SHAHPURSHAH HORMASJI DINSHAHJI HODIVALA (1867-1944), is an iconic
figure in the fields of medieval Indian numismatics and historical
studies. He made unequalled contribution to the study of Mughal
Numismatics and his seminal work, Historical Studies in Mughal
Numismatics (Calcutta: 1923) has been serving as a beacon of light to
the students of Mughal Numismatics. He had the honour of becoming
the first Indian President of the Numismatic Society of India (Delhi
Session, 1922). Besides, he is also best known for his Studies in Parsi
History, (Bombay: 1920). His another perdurable but rather less-known
contribution to medieval Indian historiography is presented here.

DR. SANJAY GARG (b. 1965) is a numismatist and economic historian of
international repute. He has extensive research experience in history of
South Asia, with specialization in economic and monetary history,
currency and coinage, historical architecture, and archival studies. His
research findings have been widely published in print and multimedia,
and include an edited volume of S.H. Holdivala’s numismatic
contributions, Studies in Mughal Mint-Towns & Other Essays,
(Manohar, New Delhi: 2014). (See profile at
http://sanjaygarg.wikidot.com/).

At present Dr. Garg is posted as the Director, Swami Vivekananda
Cultural Centre, Astana (Kazakhstan).

Several mentions of the Kitab-i-Nauras are found at Dhrupad conferences and books on music, yet the text itself has never been spotlighted. Its central theme of nauras or nine rasas, however, has not only resonated across centuries, but it has been absorbed, assimilated and re-purposed in Indian culture.

The Nalanda-Sriwijaya Series, established under the publications program of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, has been created as a publications avenue for the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre. The Centre focuses on the ways in which Asian polities and societies have interacted over time. To this end, the series invites submissions which engage with Asian historical connectivities. Such works might examine political relations between states; the trading, financial and other networks which connected regions; cultural, linguistic and intellectual interactions between societies; or religious links across and between large parts of Asia.

This article investigates the letter-writing manual of the physician Muhammad Yusufi Haravi, composed in the 1530s at the court of the Mughal emperor, Humayun. It argues that by prescribing proper expressions of emotion based on one's rank, the text reflects a combination of courtly desire and medical expertise which hoped to (but could not) transform the body politic (Mughal elite) into an emotional community. This was because the rapid establishment of Mughal rule in North India quickly scattered elite individuals far from their kinship groups, and the formation of a new social organisation, with the emperor at its apex, was a way to deal with the alienation that resulted from the breakup of kinship bonds.

Disgusted with ISIS, some Kurds turned away from Islam following the fall of Mosul in 2014. Many became atheists, while others sought comfort in Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism, according to converts, was the “original” religion of the Kurds before they embraced Islam. In 2015, two Zoroastrian centers opened in Sulaimani, both of which are recognized by the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. Notably, neither has tried to recreate Zoroastrianism the way it is currently and has been historically practiced in Iran and South Asia. Instead, they have created their own versions of Zoroastrianism, which is nationalist, postmodern, and liberal. Kurdish Zoroastrians argue that the reason Kurds are “backward” is Islam. They seek to rectify the present situation through a Kurdish “authenticated” and “original” form of Zoroastrianism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at these two centers, the present article examines this new religious movement in Sulaimani, an important city in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. It analyses the rise and distinctiveness of Kurdish Zoroastrianism looking at how Zoroastrian Kurds articulate their views on Islam, women’s rights, human rights, and Kurdish independence.

The present article studies a number of texts produced at the court of the Mughal Emperor Humayun in order to argue that there was a rise in prestige for various fields of knowledge such as mathematics, geography and astronomy. While these texts certainly fulfilled a political function (elucidating the cosmos for Mughal universalist claims), they also reflected aspects of the intellectual climate and practices of the sixteenth century that were undergoing a realignment with the expansion of royal authority throughout much of the globe.

The paper deals with Mīrzā Muḥammad Ḥasan Qatīl, an important Persian-writing Khatri poet and intellectual active in Lucknow between the end of the 18th and the first two decades of the 19th century, focusing on his ideas regarding the linguistic geography of Persian. Qatīl dealt with the geographical varieties of Persian mainly in two texts, namely the Shajarat al-amānī and the Nahr al-faṣāḥat, but relevant observations are scattered in almost all of his works, including the doxographic Haft tamāshā. The analysis provided here, which is also the first systematic study on a particularly meaningful part of Qatīl's socio-linguistic thought and one of the very few explorations of Qatīl's work altogether, not only examines in detail his grammatical and rhetorical treatises, reading them on the vast background of Arabic-Persian philology, but discusses as well the interaction of Qatīl

“Nuqtavi Messianic Agnostics of Iran and the Shaping of the Doctrine of ‘Universal Conciliation’ (sulh-i kull) in Mughal India,” in Norm, Transgression and Identity in Islam: Diversity of Approaches and Interpretations (Norme, transgression et identité en Islam: diversité d’approches et d’interprétationsi) ed. O. Mir-Kasimov (Brill, Leiden, 2014), 367-92.

Studies of Indo-Persian historiography tend to focus on the monumental compositions created at the behest of the Mughal court. This has unfortunately led to the neglect of texts from "regional" settings. The present article intends to expand the field of inquiry by studying Mir Muhammad Maʿsum's Tarikh-i Maʿsumi (completed c. 1600) which was the first Mughal-era Persian history of Sindh. I will argue that the author used the new the literary models developed by Mughal chroniclers in order to both facilitate and contest imperial domination.

Hamza. It will also analyse its cultural relevance, as this story encompasses a wide variety of cultures which exist within the Islamic territories. Its historical and cultural relevance will be analysed through a critical insight into the storytelling tradition which has been widely popular among Muslim populations. It will highlight the Pre-Islamic and Islamic values as exhibited in the plot, characters and themes of this story. The paper will establish the story of Amir Hamza, as a significant specimen of multiculturalism and religious pluralism despite being produced within the Islamic literary environment. It will also highlight the religious tolerance and coexistence as an important thematic dimension of the story of Amir Hamza.

All external links were active on 22/09/2015 and archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/ Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at http:// www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741021#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-102-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-103-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-104-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-105-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9978-1-78374-106-9

Proprietà letteraria riservata Riproduzione, in qualsiasi forma, intera o parziale, vietata Gli hindu e il persiano 23 sia a livello testuale che extra-testuale. Come scrive Sheldon Pollock, del resto, "the naive dichotomy that some scholars draw between poetic image and historical fact needs to be undone; poetic images are, in a non trivial sense, historical facts" 7 . Com' è noto, il linguaggio letterario può definirsi come un metalinguaggio che esprime, oltre a una gamma di significati a diversi livelli, anche il proprio rapporto con la lingua stessa; allo stesso modo, la letteratura esprime in modo mediato anche il proprio rapporto con lo spazio sociale e culturale nella quale nasce, dando vita a un piano di realtà testuale autonomo, in relazione creativa biunivoca con il proprio contesto e mai riducibile a esso, in qualche modo configurandosi come una 'metacultura' . 8 Come nel caso delle comunità linguistiche, può essere altresì difficile determinare chi appartenga (e, soprattutto, se di 'appartenenza' si possa parlare tout court) alla medesima comunità, o cultura, letteraria. 9 Questo è particolarmente evidente nell'ambito delle letterature dell'India pre-moderna, dove il sovrapporsi di molteplici identità linguistiche e religiose dà vita a una situazione apparentemente confusa, irrisolvibile senza adottare un approccio che, fatta salva la preminenza assoluta del testo, tenga conto delle relazioni esistenti tra il discorso letterario (che è pur sempre un esercizio di comunicazione) e vari altri aspetti delle comunità che lo circondano, in primo luogo, naturalmente, quello linguistico. Prima di interrogarsi su quali siano le caratteristiche dell'interazione tra gli intellettuali che definiamo qui genericamente 'hindu' 10 e la lingua persiana nel contesto oggetto di questo studio, ed eventualmente sull' esistenza di uno specifico spazio 'hindu' nella letteratura indo-persiana, può essere così utile fare qualche riflessione 7 Pollock (2001a: 409). 8 Si veda, a proposito della possibilità di un approccio antropologico alla letteratura intesa come autorappresentazione attraverso la finzione, Iser (1993), della cui sottile lama interpretativa ci serviamo costantemente nel corso del testo. 9 Sono illuminanti in questo senso le osservazioni di Sheldon Pollock a proposito della definizione del concetto di "literary culture" . 10 Si vedano le osservazioni fatte a riguardo in Introduzione.

This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on immigrants from Safavid Iran who travelled back and forth between their home cities and Hind during the early modern period. Intending to better comprehend some of the key mentalities and social practices of these cosmopolitan Persianate communities, I explore the literary strategies by which migrants worked to negotiate their place in rapidly transforming and highly competitive political environments in both Hind and Iran. Focusing on migration narratives that were commonly embedded in Persian historical works, I examine a cluster of local and dynastic histories that were composed in dialogue with one another and that emerged around a particular corridor of migration linking the Iranian city of Yazd with various cities in the Deccan. Previous scholarship has argued that immigrants could acquire social capital in their new environments by commemorating ties to Iranian cities through narratives of migration. I demonstrate that migrants also brought migration stories they had found in the Deccan back to their hometowns in Iran, where they redeployed them for similar political ends in new works of history.

In 1788 Ephraim Pote, a British merchant in Patna, sent a large portion of the manuscript collection which formerly belonged to Colonel of the East India Company Antoine Polier. Among those manuscripts there was a Divan by Badr al-Din Hilali, who was executed by the Uzbek Sultan ‘Ubaydallah right after the conquest of Herat in 1529. The calligrapher responsible for compiling the impressive selection of Hilali’s Divan was the famous Mir ‘Ali Haravi. He produced it in fond memory of his perished friend and their beloved Herat, when he was already working for ‘Ubaydallah in Bukhara, where he had been brought as part of the Sultan’s intellectual booty.
The manuscript is exceptionally important from various points of view: history, literature, artistic decoration and provenance. It is not only the earliest surviving copy of Hilali’s Divan, but allows the siege of Herat to be attributed with more chronological precision than was possible before.
When the manuscript arrived to Delhi by the time of Emperor Shahjahan, it had spectacular marginal decorations of arabesque, floral and animalistic motifs in gold and polychrome. This makes the manuscript a brilliant example of intercultural communication between Persia, Central Asia and India in the sixteenth century.

History suggest that the system of information existed in structured manner during pre-Mughal period, and the role of Afghan ruler Sher Shah was vital to systemize it. With the establishment of the Mughal rule in India, the system developed to secure the flow of information from the Centre to the peripheries and vice-versa, besides between different centers in a more scientific and systematized way. This method of supplying information was probably taken from Abbasids, who had evolved it on the line of Romans and Iranians, and it was initially introduced in India by the Ghaznavids. The rulers' appointed news writers during the period between 16th and 18th centuries used to write newsletters on daily, or biweekly basis; and this same system for collection and reporting of news in manuscript form continued to exist and even flourish in North India right until the uprising of 1857. These reports, rich in details about the social and cultural life of the subcontinent, provide significant material for historical research. Inland trade in India increased in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a result of emergent urbanization. In the fifteenth century the network of local roads radiating out from the provincial capitals increased considerably. Nonetheless, the art of vaqaye nawisi and communication progressed to an extent during Akbar's period, which could be termed as the initial phase of the modern newspaper and postal system. These newsletters which were termed as Waqaye, Sawaneh, Roznamcha, Akhbar etc were suffixed by words like Huzur, Darbar, Darbar e Mo'alla etc.

The rendering of Sanskrit texts into Persian constitutes one of the largest translation movements in world history. Sanskrit and Persian coexisted as languages and cultural systems on the subcontinent for hundreds of years, chiefly between the 14th and 18th centuries CE. During this period, intellectuals and poets performed hundreds of translations and adaptions of Sanskrit stories, knowledge systems, and philosophies into the Persian language. This sustained movement of Sanskrit based ideas, narratives, and even words into Persian resulted in a distinctive realm of Persianate culture on the subcontinent that is often characterized by the modern descriptor Indo-Persian. Today, however, Persian translations of Sanskrit materials are largely forgotten. Most Indo-Persian translations are severely understudied; many moulder away in manuscript libraries, unpublished and in want of sustained philological attention. In this article, I highlight my research on these overlooked texts in light of current trends in Indian historiography and historical memory.

This history of China from Pangu down to the Mongol conquest of China of Song dynasty is found in the Persian manuscripts of Jami-ut-Tawarikh (JT hereafter) preserved in the British Museum, the India Office Library, Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris), Topkapi Sarayi Library (Istanbul), and Royal Asiatic Society (London).  As stated in the original preface of the text of this history, it was written in A.H. 704 (which began on the fourth of August 1304 A.D. or the third of the seventh month of the eighth year of Dade under the reign of Chengzong of the Yuan dynasty).  It is a sketch of principal dynasties with the titles or names and numbers of years of the reigns of the rulers in China, sometimes unified and sometimes divided. The lists of the dynasties and rulers with numbers of years of the periods and reigns could have been copied and translated from some authoritative books of history in Chinese brought to the court of Ilkhan in Iran then.  That part of the work could not have come out of the memory of compiler or compilers. This work is therefore a physical evidence of the presence in Iran of a number of authoritative books in Chinese of the history of China and of the peoples on her borders. 
      The manuscripts were very well preserved.  Because of the lapses on the part of successive copyists and their lack of knowledge of the Chinese history and language, some forms of the transliteration in Persian letters of the Chinese characters are very defective.  However, by checking with available references in Chinese, it is not too difficult to restore them to proper forms. There appear also a few confusions of historical facts and persons by the compiler or compilers. It is likely that some of the books in Chinese available with the compiler compilers and officials then may not exist now.

This paper examines the social currency of copper-plate charters on the basis of Persian copper-plates from the Deccan. Indic religious systems have a long tradition of conferring land grants using this medium, partially rooted in beliefs of metaphysical qualities attributed to metals. The objects from this region are highly unusual because there are no other recorded instances of a sultan issuing or authorizing land grants on copper-plates. The Persian-language copper-plates appear from the sixteenth century onwards, and seem to be later copies of (or extracts from) paper-based charters issued by Bahmani sultans and other kingdoms in the Deccan. Issues of authenticity and forgeries, fakes and copies are also raised in this paper. This study examines objects that combine material culture and textual content. While the textual content of these objects has always been privileged as being a source of history, the mediumwhich itself has a history of receptionhas not been given its own historical narrative. The paper provides new perspectives on what we might call the "social life" of different documentary formats in medieval and early modern India, in particular the copper-plate grant.

دهه‌های پایانی قرن دهم هجری دورۀ اوج رواج غزل صریح و سادۀ عاشقانۀ به روش وقوع و واسوخت در مرکز ایران بود. در همان زمان، شاعران نازک‌خیال و پیچیده‌گویی که در مراکز ادبی داخل ایران ظهور کردند چندان با اقبال روبه‌ رو نشدند و به ناگزیر رهسپار هند شدند و به دربار اکبرشاه (ح. ۹۶۳–۱۰۱۴ق) پیوستند. اسناد و شواهد تاریخی نشان می‌دهند که ایرانیان مهاجر به دربار اکبرشاه و جهانگیر، طرز تازۀ نازک‌خیالی را در دهۀ آخر قرن دهم و اوایل قرن یازدهم هجری در هند و مخصوصاً در شهر برهان‌پور رواج دادند.در این مقاله به معرفی حلقۀ ادبی برهان‌پور و نقش دولتمردان و شاعران این مرکز ادبی سیاسی در تغییر مسیر شعر فارسی از تغزل سادۀ وقوعی به نازک‌خیالی می‌پردازم و با ورود به دورۀ تاریخی بین سال‌های ۹۹۰ تا ۱۰۲۵ق و بر اساس شواهد و اسناد آن زمان، واکنش جامعۀ ادبی ایران به خیالات دقیقۀ نوگرایان را تبیین می‌کنم. سپس، مهاجرت شاعران خیال‌پرداز به هند و استقبال دربار اکبرشاه از شاعران نازک‌خیال را پی می‌گیرم و می‌کوشم حلقۀ ادبی برهان‌پور را، که به گمان قوی مرکز تغییر مسیر شعر فارسی از سادگی به پیچیدگی و از واقع‌گرایی به خیالات جزیی است، معرفی و شاخص‌های ذوق حاکم و الگوهای ادبی این حلقه و عوامل ترویج این سبک را شناسایی و تبیین کنم و زمینه‌های شکل‌گیری طرز نازک‌خیال، شخصیت‌های مؤثر در ابداع، الگوهای ادبی، حامیان و مروجا

As in all author-centric textual traditions, the canonization of texts has been accompanied by the production of authorial biography to explain the salience of certain proper names. Authorial biography, the assumption goes, explains authorial texts. What the modern university discipline of literary criticism calls "biographical criticism" was the dominant mode of academic interpretation in the nineteenth century. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-1781) and Charles Augustin St. Beuve's Portraits Littéraires (1840s) are landmark examples. This explanatory method had its rough Persianate equivalent in the six-centuries-long tradition of the tażkirah of poets, a biographical anthology compiled to showcase a certain vision of community. But this was only a rough equivalent because a tażkirah's life-sketch was not thought to "explain" the corresponding poetry but to convey the virtues that justified the author's inclusion. Biographical criticism was criticized for its positivism and empiricism by the novelist Proust in France and the New Critics in 1940s-1970s America. Sensations, Proust argued in his Contre St. Beuve (1895-1900), were never experienced as raw data but as meanings, and literature was the consciousness of meanings, not a record of natural laws or empirical data. The literary text was a coherent whole that demanded immanent analysis, argued the New Critics, not reduction to philology and biography. For all that biographical criticism has thus ebbed from academic discourse, it continues to flourish in literary journalism, arguably remaining the dominant and most enjoyable introduction outside academia to authors or texts. Mehr Afshan Farooqi's Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep; A Critical Biography is an ambitious attempt at synthesizing biographical explanation with literary analysis. In this, she writes in the wake of Alt̤ āf Ḥusain Ḥālī's famous 1897 biography Yād-gār-e Ġhālib,

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.

With this book, 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 interlinked 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.

This paper deals with a chapter of Amānat Rāy's Persian verse translation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, completed in Delhi in 1732-33, and a section of the Ṭūr-i maʿrifat by his poetic and philosophical mentor Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil (1644-1720), a mathnawī describing the monsoon in a hilly region of present day Rajasthan. The aim of our brief analysis is to introduce a debate on the poetics of physis in early modern Persian literary culture, in the context of a wider project on Bīdil and nature. Through a guided reading of the two au-thors' description of the cloud (abr), its interactions with the Sanskritic literary practices and conventions, and the diverse intertextual ties, we show how the connected analogical and metaphorical procedures employed create two complementary ways of dealing with the phenomenology of (natural) existence.

Between the eleventh century and the middle of the nineteenth century, Persian established itself as one of the Indian subcontinent's dominant literary languages. In the next two issues, we will examine the political, social, and cultural forces that rendered Persian's literary career possible in India. A little over 180 years have passed since the English Education Act of 1835 replaced Persian with English as the language of political administration. However, there are still ongoing questions about the extent to which Persian created a distinct identity in South Asia (from its counterpart in Iran and Central Asia), how it interacted with other literary cultures in the region, and why it began losing ground in the nineteenth century.

Translation of Indian literary works, written in indigenous languages, into the language of the colonizers was one of the most crucial and highly supported mechanisms throughout the whole process of western colonialism and imperialism. Among all, the translations and transformation of Indian historical texts was most pivotal and significant. After being translated into English Parisian histories became more accessible and useful for the English administration in India. These works contain the records of empires and rulers who ruled over this vast and diverse land of the Indian subcontinent. The information of statecraft, polity, diplomacy, economy, society, and religions, recorded in these histories were highly pivotal and critical for the new British regime in India. The present study has three main objectives; first, to discuss the importance of translation in general, second, to know the process and mechanism which supported this whole journey of retouch and reorientation from 1773 to 1793 AD., and third, to highlight the works which were transformed from Persian to English.

When speaking of fables or tales, one inevitably thinks of India. Indian culture enjoys a vast and ancient tradition of narration. The Indian tales have travelled through the continents and have influenced the world's literature. Meanwhile the reciprocal effects of both Persian and Indian literature on each other are undeniable. A major part of Persian literature, prose and poetry, has been formed and developed through the support of the Indian governors. Thereafter the invasion of the Qaznavid (1020-1206 A.D.) to the sub-continent up to the decay of the Tymourid Dynasty (1526-1837 A.D.), the Persian language flourished in India and notable literary works were composed in Persian prose or poetry during centuries. The tradition of narration widely spread in India both at court, where professional narrators were always in search of new stories, as well as in the oral lore of the population. Thus many accounts and narratives of Persian origin were presented in several Indian versions, and a great quantity of Sanskrit stories were borrowed and translated into Persian. i You may have heard of Indian narratives such as A Thousand and One Nights, The Book of Sindbâd or Sindbâd-Nâma, Shukâ Saptati (The Seventy Tales of The Parrot), Panchatantra, Sanghâsin Bettisi, etc. in which much of the ancient sub-continental rituals, anthropological codes and thoughts are reflected and registered up to the present time.

Toponyms [from the Greek topos (τόπος) 'place' and ónoma (δνομα) 'nam e'] are often treated merely as words, or simple signs on geographical maps o f various parts o f the Earth. How ever, it should be remembered that toponyms are also invaluable elements o f a region's heritage, preserving and revealing differ ent aspects o f its history and culture, reflecting patterns o f set tlement, exploration, migration, etc. They are named points of reference in the physical as well as civilisational landscape of various areas. Place-names are an important source o f information regard ing the people who have inhabited a given area. Such quality results mainly from the fact that the names attached to localities tend to be extremely durable and usually resist replacement, even when the language spoken in the area is itself replaced. The in ternal system o f toponyms which is unique for every city, when analysed may give first-rate results in understanding various features, e.g. the original area o f the city and its growth, the size and variety o f its population, the complicated plan o f its markets,

During the height of the Mughal Empire in pre-colonial South Asia (16th–17th century CE), Muslim nobles facilitated the translation of numerous Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. While this “translation movement” (Ernst, 2003: 173) had long been attributed to the reputedly liberal, tolerant, and enlightened personal inclinations of the Mughal emperors, scholars in recent decades have begun to re-evaluate the phenomenon, arguing instead that practical socio-political considerations and quotidian cultural processes best explain the nature of the translation movement. What such analyses lack, however, is a sustained consideration of how the Islamic – and, in particular, Sufi – worldview(s) of the nobles in question shaped the inner workings of, and motivations behind, this movement. In this essay, I take up one such translation from the Mughal period – Mir Findiriski’s Muntakhab-i Jug Basisht, a translation of the Sanskrit Laghu-Yoga-Vasistha – examining not only its content in relation to the Sanskrit original, but also the manner in which Sufi thought and metaphysics informed the very process of translation itself.

Durant l’apogée de l’Empire moghol en Asie du Sud précoloniale (XVIe et XVIIe siècles de notre ère), des nobles musulmans ont facilité la traduction de nombreux textes sanscrits hindous en persan. Même si ce « mouvement de traduction » (Ernst, 2003: 173) a été longtemps attribué aux inclinations personnelles réputées libérales, tolérantes et éclairées des empereurs moghols, les chercheurs au cours des dernières décennies ont commencé à réévaluer le phénomène, soutenant plutôt que des considérations pratiques sociopolitiques et des processus culturels quotidiens expliquent bien mieux la nature de ce « mouvement de traduction ». Cependant, ce qui fait défaut à ces analyses, c’est la considération soutenue de la manière dont les vision(s) du monde islamique – soufi tout particulièrement – des nobles ont façonné les rouages à l’intérieur, et les motivations à l’arrière, de ce mouvement. Dans cet essai, je prends une de ces traductions de la période moghole – Muntakhab-i Jug Basisht de Mir Findiriski, une traduction du Laghu-Yoga-Vasistha en sanskrit – pour en examiner non seulement son contenu par rapport à l’original sanskrit, mais aussi la manière en quoi la pensée et la métaphysique soufies ont influencé le processus même de la traduction en elle-même.