After Timur Left

Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India

Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh

Only available volume on north India in the long-neglected fifteenth century.
Provides a wide-coverage and discusses all socio-cultural aspects of 15th century north India: evolution of modern north Indian languages, religious vocabularies (including Bhakti), and political formations (including linguistic regions).
Editors and contributors are renowned experts in the field.

After Timur Left

Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India

Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh

Description

Timur invaded northern India in 1398 but returned to Samarkand a year later. In 1555 the Timurid emperor Humayun came back to India after being forced into exile in Persia and re-established Mughal rule in northern India. Between these two significant dates stretches an era largely consigned to oblivion-the 'long' fifteenth century.

The Mughal dynasty has long occupied a pre-eminent position in research on Indian history. It has also been credited with ushering in a radically new age of innovation in art, literature, and statecraft. But what of the period before the Mughals?

With the empire-centred study of history privileging periods of political centralization, the multi-centred fifteenth century has remained relatively unexplored and undervalued.

After Timur Left presents a path-breaking interdisciplinary set of writings on the politics, languages, religions, literatures, and arts of the fifteenth century. Together they reveal it to be a period of considerable political and social mobility, of cultural connectivity and consolidation, of innovation in literature and language choices, and of new forms of religious organization and expression.

After Timur Left

Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India

Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh

Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
List of Plates and Figures
1. Introduction by Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh
STATES, SUBJECTS, AND NETWORKS
2. After Timur Left: North India in the
Fifteenth Century by Simon Digby
3. Bandag? and Naukar? : Studying Transitions in Political Culture and Service under the North Indian Sultanates, Thirteenth-Sixteenth
Centuries by Sunil Kumar
PUBLIC LANGUAGES
4. The Rise of Written Vernaculars: The Deccan 1450-1650 by Richard M. Eaton
5. Turki and Hindavi in the World of Persian: Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century
Dictionaries by Dilorom Karomat
6. Local Lexis? Provincializing Persian in Fifteenth-Century North India by Stefano Pello
7. Languages of Public Piety: Bilingual Inscriptions from Sultanate Gujarat, c. 1390-1538 by Samira Sheikh
TELLINGS OF KINGS, SUFIS, AND WARRIORS
8. Universal Poet, Local Kings: Sanskrit, the Rhetoric of Kingship, and Local Kingdoms in Gujarat by Aparna Kapadia
9.Warrior-Tales at Hinterland Courts in North India, 1370-1550 by Ramya Sreenivasan 242
10. Emotion and Meaning in Mirig?vat? : Strategies of Spiritual Signification in Hindavi Sufi Romances by Aditya Behl
CULTURAL SPACES AND LITERARY TRANSACTIONS
11. The Art of the Book in India under the Sultanates by Éloise Brac de la Perriere
12. Apabhramsha as a Literary Medium in Fifteenth-Century North India by Eva De Clercq
13. Early Hindi Epic Poetry in Gwalior: Beginnings and Continuities in the R?m?yan of Vishnudas by Imre Bangha
14. Traces of a Multilingual World: Hindavi in Persian Texts by Francesca Orsini
Bibliography
About the Editors and Contributors
Index

After Timur Left

Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India

Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh

Author Information

Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Samira Sheikh is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

Contributors:

Imre Bangha is University Lecturer in Hindi at the University of Oxford; Aditya Behl (1966-2009) was Associate Professor of South Asian Studies and Head of the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; Éloïse Brac de la Perrière is Associate Professor in Art History and Archeology of the Muslim World at the University of Paris-Sorbonne; Eva De Clercq is Professor of Indology at Ghent University (Belgium); Simon Digby (1932-2010)worked for some time for the Ashmolean Museum and served as Honorary Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. Apart from his monograph on Sufis and Soldiers in Awrangzeb's Deccan (2001), he was the author of a number of seminal essays on Sultanate India; Richard M. Eaton obtained his doctorate in history at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with the late John F. Richards; Aparna Kapadia is Assistant Professor in History at Williams College; Dilorom Karomat is a Fellow of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies in Kolkata; Sunil Kumar is Professor of medieval history in the Department of History, Delhi University; Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Stefano Pellò is Lecturer in Persian and Indo-Persian studies at the University "Ca' Foscari" of Venice, and has been Visiting Lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at Columbia University, New York; Samira Sheikh is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University; Ramya Sreenivasan is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.