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Shaikh Ali Hazin, one of the greatest Persian poets of the day, moved to Delhi from Isfahan in 1734, a couple of years after the great Safavid dynasty of Iran was ended by Nadir Shah Afshar. While he was widely venerated in India, Shaikh Hazin denigrated Indian writings in Persian, which he found corrupted and unfathomable. In response Khan Arzu, one of the greatest scholars of the age, an uncle to the poet Mir, and a philologist who anticipated William Jones by a few decades, defended Indians’ ability to compose in Persian as they liked by making a distinction between the spoken language and the learnt literary language…

The volume by Manu V Devadevan, The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India, is a significant contribution to pre-modern South Asian history. A reappraisal of the historiography of the period 600-1200 CE referred to as the ‘early medieval’, it is a valuable addition to the debate on what India is and how it should be understood. Critical of the scheme of periodization in Indian history and prevailing wisdom on early medieval period, the book is provocative and radical in its claim that India is a product of the early medieval times. It stands strongly against the popular imagination and existing knowledge that trace the beginnings of ‘Indian civilization’ to the second millennium BCE or the age of the Vedas…

This book is a collection of papers presented at a two-day seminar titled ‘Mughal Art and Culture’ organized by the KR  Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai in 2017. A wonderful exhibit of the institutional patronage provided by the Parsi community to historical research pertaining to Iran and India, the book is a welcome addition to the history of the Mughal era while retaining its specialized focus on the history of art and architecture of the period. It begins with a short Foreword by Muncherji Cama (since deceased), President, Cama Institute, and Owner-Editor of Bombay Samachar, the Gujarati newspaper…

So far as a rigorous history of the upsurge of 1857 is concerned, Professor Rudrangshu Mukherjee is a formidable name.  After every 50 years of the event, something spectacular has happened. Scholarship on the history of 1857 has been rising with state-funded seminars, conferences and publications, in 1957, and 2007.  Mukherjee’s interventions have been much more profound and way beyond such sponsored research. He has also paid special attention to Awadh and Kanpur…

The book Waiting for Swaraj: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries makes a distinctive contribution in locating the lives of revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) and Hindustan Republican Socialist Association (HRSA) beyond their acts of heroism. It is, as the author Aparna Vaidik calls it, the evaluation of an ‘emotional community’ that these revolutionaries primarily belonging to the North of India forged. They were crafting in the process an incipient Hindi speaking public sphere that contributed to a lexicon in Hindi to imagine a new discursive India…

Narrative Pasts narrates the formation of the Muslim community in 15th century Gujarat. The work highlights the representational power of various literary genres—biographical, historical, genealogical etc. and the way these memorialize the 15th century landscape. It successfully demonstrates that the region of Gujarat had a significant position in the world of Islamicate South Asia wherein it shaped the literary developments as well as the identity of the Muslim communities in the subcontinent. The region was also the focal point of textual knowledge formation as well as a thriving urban settlement. Moreover…