Cynthia Talbot

Temples, Donors, and Gifts: Patterns of Patronage in Thirteenth-Century South India

The common model of the Hindu temple of South India has stressed its significance as the main integrative factor binding the disparate elements of precolonial society into one social fabric. As a focal point for economic redistribution, the South Indian temple was the conduit through which exchange occurred: material goods were transformed into the symbols of prestige and influence known as temple honors (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976). The legitimacy of the medieval South Indian ruler rested on his role as the donor par excellence , and his sovereignty had a ritual basis that was far stronger than his more mundane methods of control (Stein 1980: 45–46). The foremost reason South Indian temples were able to perform this integrative function was their wide appeal in the society—their ability to incorporate members of different communities into one community of worship. By providing employment to artisans, peasants and shepherds and by lending money to agriculturalists in their vicinities, South Indian temples also redistributed the property of the wealthy to other segments of society (Spencer 1968:292). The widespread approval accorded to patrons of temples meant that, during the later Vijayanagara age, religious gifting could be used as a strategy by outside warriors for creating allegiances on the local level in Tamil Nadu (Appadurai 1977:55–59).

Justifying Defeat: A Rajput Perspective on the Age of Akbar

Abstract This article explores a darker side of cultural dialogue—the experience of subjugation to a cultural “other”—through a case study of Rao Surjan of Bundi, a Rajput warrior who was defeated by Mughal emperor Akbar in 1569. Surjan’s surrender of Ranthambhor fort was celebrated in Mughal chronicles such as the Akbarnama but condemned in Nainsi’s Khyat and other Rajput texts. Drawing primarily on Surjanacarita, a Sanskrit poem from about 1590, this article examines the literary strategies that were employed to justify Surjan’s submission to Akbar and his subsequent career as a Mughal mansabdar (imperial rank-holder).

Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative

The Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India, edited by Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh

Seldom does a collection of essays have the historiographic significance of After Timur Left, which provides a wealth of new perspectives on what its editors call ‘the long fifteenth century’. This period of Indian history, commencing with Timur’s sacking of Delhi in 1398, and ending with Humayun’s return to power in 1555, is typically given short shrift because of its political fragmentation and its presumed lack of cultural sophistication. This volume however ‘foregrounds and embraces the diversity’ of North India in an era of localised polities and ‘investigates the links between politics and cultural production’, especially as manifested in literary forms and language choices (p. 2). A range of scholars based in Europe, as well as in India, the USA, and the UK, are represented in this excellent set of thirteen essays. A lengthy Introduction by the editors, Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh, contextualises the individual contributions and, in the process, offers a fresh interpretation of the fifteenth century that supersedes all previous scholarship. The title of the volume is a tribute to an influential 2004 article by Simon Digby titled ‘Before Timur Came’, so it is appropriate that Digby authored the lead essay. Commenting on political trends in fifteenth-century North India, he notes the ascent to power of families elevated by Timur, the prominence of various Afghan groups, and the multiple locations from which power-holders typically operated. Sunil Kumar’s essay continues the emphasis on political actors by looking at the nature of bonds between lords and their subordinates. Kumar goes against the general thrust of the volume in arguing that the fifteenth century did not constitute a notable disjuncture from the previous two centuries. The remaining essays in After Timur Left take a close look at language and literature through a historical lens, and offer fresh insights into fifteenth-century society and culture in the process. Especially innovative is the insistence on the multilingual character of North Indian society which Dilorom Karomat establishes through careful examination of how Turki and Hindavi words were used in Indo-Persian dictionaries. Taking the lexicographic dimension further, Stephano Pello notes that the abundance of new dictionaries in the fifteenth century belies the usual understanding of it as an era in which interest in the Persian language declined. Instead, he suggests that Persian spread further into the localities, with dictionaries helping readers appreciate the great poetry of the past, partly by means of Hindavi equivalents. In her concluding essay, Francesca Orsini reminds us of the oral milieu in which the Persian written archive was situated, points out some strategies for recovering this multilingual environment, and recommends applying translation theory to its analysis in preference to notions of borrowing or syncretism. Other authors represented in the volume move beyond Persian lexicography and poetry to ask questions about language choice and its social ramifications. In a discussion of written vernaculars in the Deccan, Richard Eaton stresses the impact of the Bijapur Sultanate’s adoption of Marathi as the language of local administration in the making of a larger Marathi discursive community. In the inscriptions of the Gujarat Sultanate that Samira Sheikh has studied, on the other hand, merchants and courtiers recording their religious benefactions preferred to use the prestigious cosmopolitan languages and sometimes employed both Sanskrit and Persian. Digambara Jain poets in North India favoured Apabhramsa, Eva De Clercq informs us, perhaps because the trans-regional nature of this literature mirrored that of its dispersed

Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia

the volume lies in its academic case studies and its demonstration of complexity rather than in these Pollyanna-ish recommendations. The academic analysis is grounded in a survey of important authors on civil society in India, such as Chandoke and Chatterjee, and a brief history of civil action in India going back to the Brahmo and Arya Samaj. The lessons that I would derive from the analyses in the book are: (1) on the ground situations are not nearly as simple as master narratives suggest (the opponents of dam construction are not always on the side of the angels; diaspora support for the BJP is not as important or as determining of events within India as often represented); (2) action on the ground cannot be captured through “best practice” or the audit culture (there is inevitably a gap between what is demanded by funders and what activists can achieve; therefore, dependence on foreign funders necessarily means carrying out a kind of deceptive impression management); (3) transnational connections are shot through with relations of power and inequalities between the developed world and developing countries, as well as between well-placed urban actors with international connections, on the one side, and their clients and dependants in various projects, on the other. There is little space in a book of this length to go into the cases in depth, and therefore one gains only a brief introduction to the complexities of local situations and no sense of activist biographies or the different ways in which structural limits and opportunities affect particular activist lives. On the other hand, the strengths of the book are its lucid exposition, its coverage of a number of contrasting case studies, and its clear and unromantic acknowledgment of the limitations and constraints on activist action; all this makes it highly suitable for use in undergraduate teaching, whether on South Asia or on human rights and civil society more generally.

India Before Europe: Challenging central authority, 1650–1750

The roughly hundred years from 1650 to 1750 were marked by a series of radical political and social changes in South Asia. Many of these changes were triggered by developments that transpired during the nearly fifty-year reign of the sixth Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). This Mughal emperor remains the most controversial in the popular mind and even, to some extent, in scholarly literature. Aurangzeb is often compared unfavorably with Akbar, whose reign also spanned close to half a century. In part, this is due to the work of J. N. Sarkar, the first modern historian to write extensively on Aurangzeb. Sarkar held Aurangzeb personally responsible for the reversal of the tolerant policies first fostered by Akbar, which were instrumental in unifying the vast territories of the Mughal empire in the minds of many scholars. Instead, in Sarkars view, Aurangzeb promoted an aggressively Islamic state that discriminated against Hindus and other non-Muslims, leading to a loss of unity and the decline of empire. Other scholars have accused Aurangzeb of weakening the empire not so much by his orthodox religious stance as by his prolonged campaign to pacify and annex the Deccan. In this chapter, we look at both these charges against Aurangzeb, as well as at the Maratha community which opposed Mughal expansion fiercely, and at political developments after Aurangzebs death.

Southern India in the age of Vijayanagara, 1350–1550

The rise of the Delhi Sultanate, although it brought many changes to north India, had little direct impact on the lands south of the Narmada river. Only from around 1300, when the Delhi Sultanate began sending armies down into the peninsula, did the histories of these two parts of the subcontinent start to converge. The military successes of the Delhi Sultanate gave a north Indian state control over portions of south India for the first time in many centuries. Although the Delhi Sultanate did not retain this control for long, its intervention into the affairs of the peninsula was to have long-lasting repercussions. Because a separate state headed by Central Asian Muslim warriors known as the Bahmanis was founded in the Deccan in 1347, the Islamic religion and culture that had taken root in the Deccan under the Tughluq sultans of Delhi continued to flourish in subsequent times. Another significant result of Delhis military expeditions was the destruction of the existing regional kingdoms of the south. This paved the way for the emergence of Vijayanagara, a new state ruled by indigenous warriors that shaped the society and culture of south India for centuries thereafter. The empire of Vijayanagara is often credited with preserving a distinctly Hindu way of life in south India that had been lost in the north, a misconception that overlooks both the creativity and cosmopolitan nature of the Vijayanagara elite.

India Before Europe: Expanding political and economic spheres, 1550–1650

By the time of Akbars death in 1605, a qualitative change in the scale of political and economic activities in the Indian subcontinent had occurred. The sheer size of the empire Akbar left behind is an important factor, for an estimated 110 million people resided within its borders out of a total South Asian population of slightly less than 150 million. Akbar implemented a more systematic and centralized form of rule than had prevailed earlier, which led to greater uniformity in administrative practices over a vast territory. At the same time, Akbars economic policies stimulated the growth of commercial activity, which interconnected the various parts of South Asia in increasingly close networks. His stipulation that land taxes be paid in cash forced peasants into the market networks where they could obtain the necessary money, while the standardization of imperial currency made the exchange of goods for money easier. Above all, the long period of relative peace ushered in by Akbars power, and maintained by his successors throughout the seventeenth century, contributed to Indias economic expansion. The greater circulation of people, goods, and practices that characterized India in the centuries after 1550 is also found in Europe and other parts of the world in this era. After direct sea links were established between Europe, Asia, and the Americas around 1500, a global economy spanning diverse regions of the world gradually emerged.

Sixteenth-century north India: empire reformulated

A visitor touring South Asia in the year 1500 would have found a land divided into many different polities and a variety of elite cultures. By 1600, on the other hand, virtually all the northern half of the subcontinent had been brought under the umbrella of one state, the Mughal empire. This empire was a top-down enterprise: the many local societies it ruled were not eliminated or merged but rather kept together through the imposition of a set of administrative practices and a class of ruling nobles. Over time, however, imperial ideology and institutions were disseminated throughout its many constituent units and served as a catalyst for the growth of a new kind of elite Indian culture and society, one that was both composite and widespread. This chapter examines the stages leading to the revival of empire in north India and the main architect of the Mughal state, Emperor Akbar. We consider how Akbars concept of state evolved over time and its impact on politics and policies regarding Indias multi-cultural, multi-ethnic population. In addition, we analyze how state policies affected cultural production, both on an imperial as well as subimperial level, arguing that the use of specific languages and the production of architecture and even manuscripts were all part of a carefully planned political campaign. Toward empire Delhi under the Lodis Timurs sack of Delhi in 1398 left the traditional capital of the north Indian Sultanate a mere shadow of its former self.