ROADS OF (MIS) UNDERSTANDING: EUROPEAN TRAVELLERS IN INDIA (FIFTEENTH TO SEVENTEENTH CENTURY) (original) (raw)
Related papers
So Close and Yet Often so Far Away: the History of India as Told by Historians in Iran around 1500
Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 2021
Khvandamir's general history Habib al-Siyar (Beloved of Careers), one of the major historiographical narratives of the Persianate world, was composed for the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, Shah Ismaʿil, in the 1520s. Some years later, the author ideologically reshaped his work at Babur's Timurid-Mughal court in Agra. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the book was widely copied across the Islamic lands and, judging by the number of extant manuscripts (c. 600), the Habib al-Siyar might be called a premodern bestseller. Interestingly, several chapters dealing with the history of India (Hindustan) were apparently added by the author later on and have not been included in the printed editions. Based on the examination of widely scattered manuscripts, this article examines the textual transmission of these chapters. Furthermore, it explores the question of how Khvandamir integrated information about India into the main narrative and which sources he relied on in order to situate the region within an overarching narrative of Islamic history. This approach gives further insights into the precise quality and quantity of knowledge about the Indian subcontinent available in Iran around 1500, as well as into copying processes of texts in premodern times.
Communalism and the Writing of Medieval Indian History: A Reappraisal
Social Scientist, 1983
Until very recently the writing of medieval Indian history primarily turned on an eloquent enumeration of the glorious achievements of great emperors; equally eloquent was the description of their failures. One way or the other, the emperor stood at the centre of all that was considered worthy of the historian's concern. One way or the other, the emperor stood at the centre of all that was considered worthy of the historian's concern. To a considerable extent this concern was inherited from the large number of Indian historians who wrote their books during the medieval centuries themselves, contemporaneously or near contemporaneously with the events they had narrated, the contemporary historians as we call them. These contemporary historians were invariably members of the imperial or the provincial court and were often partisans of one or the other faction of the intrigue-ridden polity. Not seldom did they actually participate in the events they had described; equally frequently they or their friends or relations were eye-witnesses to such events. Inevitably, arising from each historian's predilections, his version of events was at considerable variance with those of the others even as they described the same events. 1 Yet, there was much that they shared with one another. As members of the court, their attention was confined to their surroundings. The events they narrated were events in which the court's involvement was immediate and direct: accession of a ruler, rebellions against him, his conquests, administrative measures, punishments meted out by him as also rewards given, conspiracies hatched for or against him, his deposition or
Indian Historical Writing, c. 600–c. 1400
The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 2: 400- …, 2012
The eight hundred years under review in this chapter were both eventful and formative for the evolution of South Asian society and culture. The Gupta period (350-550) inaugurated processes of economic, political, and cultural development which over the next millennium were to bring nearly all regions of the subcontinent into a single historical trajectory. This period, sometimes called 'early medieval', saw the continual evolution of diverse warrior lineages into regional and sub-regional 'court polities' with developing agrarian bases. The dynastic history of this period of Indian history is extraordinarily complex-major families included the Rāṣṭrakūṭas of Malkhed, the Chālukya families of the Deccan and Gujarat, the Cholas of Tanjavur, and the Paramāras of Dhar. Despite the seeds of variation which regional development inevitably brought, certain economic, political, and cultural features linked these polities into a sort of coherent 'ecumene', characterized by the expansion of agriculture, peasantization of nonagrarian groups, evolution of refi ned court cultures, and support for the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava temple religions. From the eleventh century, northern India, whose history had always been partly tied to Central Asia, saw the increasingly frequent presence of Turkish and Afghan Muslim warrior groups, a phenomenon which culminated at the beginning of the thirteenth, with the establishment of a Muslim sultanate in Delhi. This marked the beginning of a profound reconfi guration of elite cultures in the subcontinent, gradual at fi rst, but deep enough in its implications, and only fully realized later, during the Mughal period. Despite meteoric military success and political consolidation in the fi rst 150 years, the Delhi Sultanate was strained by provincial rebellions and its fi nal collapse was precipitated by Mongol attacks from Central Asia, after which regional sultanates exercised autonomy.
What We Can Learn From India’s Medieval Past (Published in thewire.in, September 2015)
The medieval past matters deeply in modern India. The most prominent people, dynasties, and historical incidents from this period are common subjects of public discussion even today. This investment in the past is generally healthy for Indian society as people robustly debate how to best interpret their history and its possible lessons and meanings for the present. But there is an ugly side to modern India’s attraction to its younger self. History, especially during the medieval period of so-called Islamic rule, is often flattened and rewritten in modern India until it bears only the faintest resemblance to any reality of what actually happened. Moreover, the battle over India’s past increasingly begins and ends in the present. The truth of any given historical narrative is irrelevant to many, and medieval history is often brazenly altered to reflect modern day political agendas, some of them profoundly troubling.
Presently, varied schemes of periodization of history are prevalent in historical studies, the most common being the tripartite scheme of ancient-medieval-modern periods. In European history, ancient, medieval and modern eras have remained the dominant standard epochal frontiers since the eighteenth century. In the wake of colonial rule, this scheme was applied by the European historians and orientalists to the colonized regions in Africa and Asia, including India, for historiographical purposes.
Book Review India and the Islamic Heartlands An Eighteenth Century World of Circulation and Exchange
Drawing on the chance discovery of a number of letters exchanged during the period, in India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange author Gagan D.S. Sood attempts to capture the lives of ordinary people to reconstruct the connective tissues of a world lived beyond the purview of the sovereign. While the nature of the source material occasionally limits the book's scope of analysis, this work successfully weaves together an insightful narrative to draw attention to a neglected arena and period, finds he calls 'tissues', of a series of letters exchanged among the people inhabiting this arena of circulation, whose interrelationships were governed by 'large distances and long silences'. Sood successfully weaves a narrative on the basis of these exchanges to point out the obvious lacuna in existing scholarship on the region. According to him, this has largely ignored the ways in which polities, authorities and the cosmic and temporal world were imagined or understood by those who lived mostly outside the direct purview of the sovereign. By demonstrating the unabated circulation and exchange of trade, ideas and worldviews despite the continuous political turmoils that the region had been undergoing in the eighteenth century, this book opens up a fresh line of enquiry about the ways in which people of the region engaged with their polities and networks of circulation, and how these shaped their world and worldviews. Developing the narrative on the basis of letters that the author found in the British Library and which did not reach their intended recipients due to the British seizure of the ship, Santa Catharina, that was carrying them, the book is divided into eight chapters as well as a very informative introduction and conclusion. The letters were written between 1745 and 1748 by the people – scholars and traders, partners and agents, men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, nephews and uncles – who inhabited diverse spaces, cultures and linguistic spheres from Basra to Bengal. The letters cut across the political and cultural boundaries of many empires and polities and are written mostly in Arabic and Persian, although a few are also written in Latin and Hebrew scripts. The writers of these letters were those who lived in the 'administrative, commercial, educational and spiritual centers of Islamicate Eurasia, and who actively participated in its arena of circulation and exchange' (24). However, they remained mostly, if not totally, outside the direct purview of their sovereigns, and thus together the letters provide glimpses of everyday lives in the region during this era in its various vicissitudes.
A meaningful understanding of the pre-modern pasts of India stems from the recognition and explanation of identifiable changes in its socio-political situations, material cultures and religious experiences. Such changes need to be situated beyond dynastic shifts, although socioeconomic and cultural developments were, of course, interlocked with the then politics and polities. Such an approach naturally negates the perceptions of the immutable social, economic and cultural (especially religious) institutions and practices over millennia in the subcontinent. The image of the unchanging East, typified by 'traditional India', which is perceived to have thrived on sanatana dharma, is largely constructed by preferring to represent pre-modern India through normative treatises (sastras), mostly written in Sanskrit and from a predominantly Brahmanical perspective and ideology. That the narrative literature may often present images of society, economy, political and cultural activities distinct from and contrary to the ideals upheld by normative treatises has of late gained considerable historiographical visibility. What needs to be underlined here is that the pre-modern pasts of India can hardly be grasped by the Sruti–Smriti literary traditions which leave a strong impression of memorialised orality, the practice of written words and documents, therefore, being reduced to marginality. The present review article precisely proposes to highlight the significance of written documents in the form of inscriptions for generating data and impressions of the pasts of India with certain distinctiveness which is hardly available in other categories of evidence, especially in the normative texts. This is not to claim that inscriptions are stand-alone sources for the study of pre-modern India. Inscribed texts, as