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This chapter provides both an overview of Indian Islamic history and an outline of a new methodology for studying it. Bringing texts and geography together, the approach is one of ‘spatializing texts’ and ‘textualizing space’. It argues for the importance in the making of the Muslim communities of South Asia of Sufis as not only living social actors, but also as dead makers of shrine-based memory spaces by developing the notion of the lieu de mémoire or ‘memory space’.

This chapter examines the migration of large numbers of Afghans into India/Pakistan during the medieval and early modern periods. By drawing on a large number of Persian histories of the Afghans written in India, it argues that it was in the cosmopolitan cultural mix of the Indian diaspora that an ‘Afghan’ identity was first created by drawing on and adapting models of history and identity from high prestige Muslim groups in India. With the Afghans’ absorption into the Mughal empire earlier patterns of accommodation to the Indian environment were overturned through the writing of history, whereby the Afghan past and present were carefully mapped through the organising principle of genealogy. While the Afghan religious world was being re-shaped by the impact of empire, in response tales of expressly Afghan saints served to tribalise the ties of Islam. With the decline of Mughal power, the collective ‘Afghan’ identity of the diaspora was transmitted to the new Afghan state, where the relationship of this tribal template of Afghan authenticity to the non-Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan remains the defining controversy of national identity. Early modern migration is thus seen to have longstanding effects in the present day.

This chapter places Sufis into a competitive Indian geography of multiple holy men whose shrines and other physical outposts competed for followers in early modern and early colonial India. Developing the concept of a ‘narrative landscape’, the chapter traces how India’s geography was made meaningful through the different (and at times conflicting) stories told about its past, stories which mirrored claims over the land in the present. The chapter focuses on stories told in Marathi and Indo-Persian about the great fortress of Daulatabad and how that symbol of military power was linked to stories of the miraculous powers of Brahmin and Sufi blessed men.

This chapter notes that the Afghan rulers drew on the ideals and institutions of medieval Indo-Persian tradition of governance, which were evolved over centuries of interaction between the classical Islamic norms and the Persians norms. The ruler projected himself as the shadow of God on earth who was not expected to discriminate between Muslims and non-Muslims. The chapter subsequently discusses Balban, Bahlul Lodi, Sikandar Lodi followed by Sher Shah. Sher Shah's achievements in the field of politics and administration have been corroborated by Afghan as well as non-Afghan and Persian authorities. Sher Shah was the first ruler to establish a uniform system of government. He appointed provincial governors who enjoyed vast powers like collection of revenue and maintenance of law and order. Executive head of Sarkar was faujdar and that of paragana was a shiqdar. Attempts by Sher Shah witnessed a larger degree of diffusion of state authority at the local level. Thus in evolution of administrative institutions and ideals of governance, Afghan regime presented a notable stage.

This chapter discusses Mughal political culture in general and its prevalence in Bengal in particular. It creates a broader context for the prevalence of a Persianized culture in Mughal (and pre-Mughal) India by describing its status and currency in the eastern part of the Islamic world. The author describes the elements that composed Mughal political culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, the chapter explores the general prevalence of Mughal political culture in Bengal together with its limitations in order to provide a context for understanding and appreciating the long shadow cast by the Indo-Persian tradition of tarikh writing on a range of narratives composed in early modern Bengal.

This chapter uses the Indies mentality to relearn British racial discourse, focusing on Julius Soubise, the Afro-British assistant of celebrity fencing master Domenico Angelo. During his own lifetime, Soubise's celebrity rivaled that of his better remembered Afro-British contemporaries, Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho. Soubise's “life geography” overflowed the borders of the Black Atlantic: born in Saint Kitts, he grew up in London and spent the last two decades of his life in Calcutta. The chapter first details his time in London, where he catalyzed tropologies of Eastern royalty in order to fashion himself as a “Black Prince,” thereby carving out a racialized but still exalted place for himself in the beau monde. It then follows Soubise to Calcutta, tracing how his racial self presentation altered in his journey from metropole to colony, from the circum-Atlantic to India. While British ideas about race certainly traveled from the former to the latter, India's colonial racial formation was also shaped by Mughal precedents. Indeed, aspects of the subcontinent's Indo-Persian racial formation even migrated westward through imperial networks, influencing the evolution of racial ideologies in the British Atlantic world.

Chapter 6 examines Persianate histories, literary retellings of Sanskrit stories, and manuscript notes in order to capture the wide-ranging Persianate receptions of Akbar’s cross-cultural interests in particular. Ultimately I argue that Mughal encounters with Sanskrit came to partially define Indo-Persian culture.

The Conclusion details the end of Sanskrit as a major tradition at the Mughal court and also investigates broad questions of imperial authority, the dynamics of literary traditions, and cross-cultural endeavors.

This chapter concerns one of the forerunners and eventual targets of the Mughals, namely the Sultanate of Gujarat. It seeks to contribute to the renewal of a broad diplomatic history upheld and defended by Riazul Islam in his several works on the subject of “Indo–Persian relations”, by exploring Gujarat's relations with the Ottomans on the one hand and the maritime powers of the Portuguese Estado da Índia on the other. Moreover, from the very outset the Mughals operated in a broad inter-state and diplomatic context, which thus obliged them to render their political and sovereign expressions commensurable with others—whether Islamic or European.

In 1653 the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh (1615–59) reportedly had a series of meetings with the ascetic Baba La‘l Das; their dialogues were subsequently rendered into Persian prose. This chapter argues that these dialogues are discursively linked with a body of early-modern Indo-Persian works on Vedantic themes that are similarly structured around a dialogue between a seeker and a spiritual preceptor. Delineating the dialogue genre as a distinct type within the larger corpus of Persian indological writings helps illuminate broader trends in early-modern engagements between Persian and Indic intellectual traditions.

This chapter seeks to provide material that will help illuminate some lesser known textual aspects of the relationship between the multiple socio-religious commonalities, identifications and self-identifications in Shi‘i Lucknow: the significant presence of poets who define themselves (or are defined by contemporary Persian-writing literary critics) as “Hindus” (hindū) in the Persian poetic circles of the capital of Awadh allows us to analyse the literary dimensions of this cultural dynamics. By looking at a specific collection of biographies of Persian poets active in Awadh during the 18th century, the Safina-yi Hindī by Bhagwān Dās Hindī, and focusing on the notices about non-Muslim authors (especially Vaishnava), it analyses how their social and religious identifications are semiotically constructed in relation to a dominant Islamicate expressive ideology. A special attention is paid to the peculiar questions raising from the interactions of these intellectuals with the specific Shi‘i codes of expression and terms of textualization.

This chapter offers a tentative classification of the genres of illustrated book production under the north Indian sultanates of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. Through an analysis of the extant codexes, the chapter proposes five categories: the first one, of manuscripts linked by archaizing Persian painting styles whose texts belong to classical or Indo-Persian literature; the second, of manuscripts produced by artists who had worked previously in non-Muslim contexts; the third, containing paintings with contemporary Persian themes and texts; and the fourth being renderings of the Candāyan. The fifth group consists of manuscripts of illuminated Qur’ans. The chapter finds that while its classification found evidence of archaizing tendencies and a range of subject choices, more work needs to be done to classify these manuscripts and engage in stylistic analysis of illustration and illumination.

This chapter explores Indo-Persian historical thoughts and writings spanning the 400 years (1350–1750) of the late medieval and early modern centuries. It traces the Indo-Persian connection back into the Delhi Sultanate (a pre-Mughal state of the thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries). It shows that Indo-Persian historians set themselves a laudable goal in the context of the time and the world they lived in, namely to uphold the ethical and didactic purpose of history-writing. Regardless of their inadequacies, shortcomings, and failings, almost all of them stood their ground.

The Indo-Persian and vernacular literatures from the late seventeenth to nineteenth centuries on rhythm and drumming in northern India bridge an enormous gap between archaic Sanskrit sources and the theory and practice of the last 100 years. This chapter sets many of these key texts in historical perspective and explores the trajectory of their descriptions and notations of tāl-metric-rhythmic structures that have always served to organize composition and improvisation. A shift is noted from quantitative to qualitative measurements as writers employed the tools of Arabic prosody and began to articulate new concepts: ṭheka-configurations of strokes by which tāls are identified and maintained in performance; ḵẖālī, the “empty” or “unsounded” beat; and band, patterns transformed by the absence of bass drum sonorities. Such changes are arguably due to the rapid rise of the tabla in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which gradually usurped the roles of other drums.

The famous plunder of Delhi that followed the 1739 defeat of the Mughals at the Battle of Karnal by Nader Shah (r. 1736–1747) represents, in retrospect, the last world-conquering design to have risen from the Islamicate world before the 20th century. This chapter argues that Nader Shah’s building projects, initiated after the Indian campaign, introduced a self-consciously historicized articulation of an Indo-Persian empire in the 18th century. His venture, echoing those of Timur in his post-Indian conquest, included looting of building materials and technologies that were made available by hundreds of Indian craftsmen and artists taken as booty and assigned to work with locals to make a spectacularly hybrid monument as the centerpiece of an urban retreat at a natural fortress famed as Kalat-e Naderi in northeastern Iran. Nader Shah’s patronage represents an unexpectedly un-European visualization of the exotics of empire on the eve of colonial expansions.

In the conclusion, I come back on key issues of my analysis of Ālāol’s poetics. Whereas performance and the absence of theoretical frame recorded in treatises on grammar or poetics are defining features of the vernacular tradition, we witness attempts to describe and systematize vernacular poetics in eastern South Asia. Sanskrit played a major role in this attempt at systematizing vernacular poetics to foster connoisseurship. The domain of reference of vernacular poets was not poetics per se or rhetoric, but lyrical arts and musicology. But efforts to describe vernacular poetics also display an awareness of the importance of heteroglossia and fluidity in vernacular aesthetics in contrast with Sanskrit. The opening up of the Sanskrit episteme constituted by vernacular poetics also made possible the recourse to literary models and quasi-experimental uses of vernacular poetic idioms. Old Maithili, Avadhi, and Persian were visible components of the making of vernacular poetics in Bengal.

This chapter will show how the Mughals in India entered a world in which the value of Timurid sovereignty (initially crucial following the capture of Delhi by Timur) had become irrelevant, leaving behind only the traumatic memories of destruction and pillage. However, thanks to the influx of other Timurid mirzas from Central Asia, the emperor Humayun unsuccessfully tried to reclaim that legacy through the efforts of three historians. The survey of texts includes generally overlooked Persian histories from the courts of Delhi, Mandu, Kalpi, and Gujarat from the fifteenth century, as well as Kabul, Gwalior, and the Deccan from the sixteenth century.