Writing the mughal world: Studies on culture and politics.

• Author: Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud
• Position: Book review

Writing the mughal world: Studies on culture and politics. Muzzafar alam and sanjay subrahmanyam. New York: Columbia university press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 516. $89.50, [pounds sterling]62 (cloth); $29.50, [pounds sterling]20.50 (paper).

This book marks a third major collaboration between this pair of eminent scholars, who previously co-edited The Mughal State, 1526-1750 (1998) and co-authored Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800 (2007). The volume brings together ten jointly authored essays that were originally published between 1998 and 2010. Each essay contains synopses of one or more important Persian-language texts, brief biographies of the authors of those texts, and rich contextualizing discussions that build upon considerable amounts of primary and secondary source materials. The greatest value of the essays lies in the detailed analyses of select portions of the Persian documents that collectively provide a wide range of new insights into the world and world views of Persian-language writers in the Mughal empire. Many of the writers addressed in this text were dependent upon state or private patronage. We can generically refer to this class of patronized writers as munshis, and there was noticeable circulation of munshis between Mughal state service and private contract work. Many of the texts examined in this book are the products of patronage, but self-motivated and independently financed writing also receives considerable attention. Among the writers involved, there are prominent constituencies of Shia Muslims and Muslims with Chishti Sufi leanings, as well as Kayastha and Khatri Hindus who also exhibit Chishti sympathies. Beyond the archival and published Persian texts forming the basis of each chapter, the book as a whole also relies upon a rich corpus of documents in Portuguese and French, as well as writings in Arabic, Dutch, Italian, German, Ottoman Turkish, Tamil, and Urdu. and this large body of non-Persian material also includes published and archival sources. Many authors are addressed across sequential chapters. which helps to chronologically unify essays with distinct thematic foci.

The first chapter is an international diplomatic history of the Gujarat in the 1530s. It examines a trilateral set of multi-layered relationships between Indian, Ottoman, and Portuguese authorities. The focus is on the Gujarati Sultan Bahadur Shah, who wrote four letters to various Portuguese authorities in 1535 and 1536, and then died mysteriously by drowning in 1537 while attending a meeting at sea with the Portuguese official Nuno da Cunha. Sultan Bahadur Shah's four letters are reproduced in full in the original Persian with English translations at the end of the chapter. The authors contextualize these letters in a web of contingent communications between three imperial information systems, namely...