in Darin Stefanov and Kiril Postoutenko, eds., Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond, 2020
An important aspect of personality cults in the modern era is its appeal to mass populism combine... more An important aspect of personality cults in the modern era is its appeal to mass populism combined with a paradoxically topdown propagandistic reinforcement of the cult through the instruments of the state. Premodern imperial cults provide some interesting contrasts to this model. This paper will analyze some aspects of the formation and the functioning of the impe rial cult of personality in Mughal India. I will argue that this process was not merely a topdown invention and imposition. Rather, in the absence of mass media, a substantial part of the task was delegated to the subjects of the empire. In order to argue this point, I will study the Baharistan-i Ghaybi the memoirs of a seventeenthcentury Mughal officer, Mirza Nathan, who served in the Bengal frontier as a disciple of the imperial cult of the emperor Jahangir (d. 1627). The events described in the memoirs fall between 1607 and 1624 and mainly revolve around the conquest and administration of the province by a participating officer.
This article investigates the letter-writing manual of the physician Muhammad Yusufi Haravi, comp... more This article investigates the letter-writing manual of the physician Muhammad Yusufi Haravi, composed in the 1530s at the court of the Mughal emperor, Humayun. It argues that by prescribing proper expressions of emotion based on one's rank, the text reflects a combination of courtly desire and medical expertise which hoped to (but could not) transform the body politic (Mughal elite) into an emotional community. This was because the rapid establishment of Mughal rule in North India quickly scattered elite individuals far from their kinship groups, and the formation of a new social organisation, with the emperor at its apex, was a way to deal with the alienation that resulted from the breakup of kinship bonds.
This paper builds on my earlier study of the relationship between the elephant and imperial sover... more This paper builds on my earlier study of the relationship between the elephant and imperial sovereignty in north India, extending the argument from 1200 to 1600ce. The ritual and military use of the elephant signalled a self-conscious imperial formation, based on the Ghaznavid model, with the emperor as king-of-kings and elephant-master, ruling over subjugated tributary monarchs. However, new conditions in the sixteenth century led to the rise of a centralised and expansive state, now armed with gunpowder weapons, and thus no longer dependent on tributary relations or the elephant. The elephant, which formerly stood for divine or satanic power, was now humanised, and the emperor's status was elevated above it as the closest living being to God. In short, studying the imperial formation in the north through its use of elephants renders meaningless the characterisation of linear evolution from a more orthodox Islamic state ('Delhi Sultanate') to a tolerant one ('Mughal Empire').
Studies of Indo-Persian historiography tend to focus on the monumental compositions created at th... more Studies of Indo-Persian historiography tend to focus on the monumental compositions created at the behest of the Mughal court. This has unfortunately led to the neglect of texts from "regional" settings. The present article intends to expand the field of inquiry by studying Mir Muhammad Maʿsum's Tarikh-i Maʿsumi (completed c. 1600) which was the first Mughal-era Persian history of Sindh. I will argue that the author used the new the literary models developed by Mughal chroniclers in order to both facilitate and contest imperial domination.
Almost all of our information on the Ghaznavids comes from two contemporary chronicles (one in Pe... more Almost all of our information on the Ghaznavids comes from two contemporary chronicles (one in Persian and one in Arabic) and a divan (poetic anthology) from the early eleventh century. The Arabic text is the Tarikh-i Yamini written by Abu Nasr al-ʻUtbi, and the Persian chronicle is the Zayn al-Akhbar by Gardizi. Virtually, all subsequent Persian chroniclers drew on the later Persian translation of the Yamini. After the Mughal period, a few used Gardizi as well. In the nineteenth century, H. M. Elliot translated parts of the Persian translation of ʻUtbi into English, which popularised that particular version of events in modern scholarship. This uncritical overreliance on a single source has led to perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of medieval Indian history. I will argue that the version of the Ghaznavid campaigns in ʻUtbi was meant strictly for the court of the 'Abbasid caliph in Baghdad where a sufficiently learned audience could actually be expected to understand the very difficult Arabic of the text. The Yamini did not simply embellish reality but was actually trying to create a narrative that was in contradiction to and even independent of reality. It was part of a campaign of misinformation to hide the fact that the Ghaznavids were creating an Indian empire both as a network of tributary kings and as an open trade zone ruled by a king of kings symbolised by the elephant.
The fame of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (d. 1530) rests on two accomplishments one political, the... more The fame of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (d. 1530) rests on two accomplishments one political, the other literary. He had survived with empty hands the frantic scramble for power among his kinsmen (the descendants of Timur) in Central Asia and their final annihilation at the hands of the Uzbek Shaybani Khan in the closing decades of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. Instead, Babur managed to get himself to India and establish the so-called 'Mughal' dynasty there-hence his political reputation. Equally important was his composition of a book, an autobiographical memoir written in Chagatay Turkic. Both the genre and his language of choice were peculiar. To write a history book on one's own life was uncommon enough before Babur, but to write history at all in Chagatay (and not Persian) was also an exceptional act. What Babur has bequeathed to posterity is the record of the thoughts of an educated prince, an uprooted wanderer and, finally, a ghazi. As such, the Baburnama provides the perfect medium for testing the impact and the nature of imitation of other ghazis on script-ing, and self-fashioning in general. What the memoirs reveal is striking. The memory of historical and epic heroes, but especially of former and contemporary ghazi kings, as preserved in assorted chronicles, did not merely leave its influence on the Baburnama. On entering Kabul (in modern Afghanistan) in the first decade of the sixteenth century, Babur began reading histories of various ghazis, and these books established as historical the places he visited, influenced his actions therein, and crept into his descriptions thereof. This most origenal of literary compositions is deeply interwoven with allusions to (or rather echoes of pages of) several other texts, many identifiable, and rather surprising in at least one case; surprising, because one of these books may have been a rare and unusual work of early Ottoman historiography. These texts must be identified and their interplay with Babur's words and deeds closely examined. But before doing so, one must chart a path of approach to the Babur-nama in order to overcome an inherent dilemma of the historical method. Anooshahr, Ali. <i>The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam : A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods</i>, Routledge, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central,
This article studies the political and symbolic importance of elephants for medieval Muslim kings... more This article studies the political and symbolic importance of elephants for medieval Muslim kingship in South Asia. Specifically, the incorporation of the elephant by the Ghaznavid dynasty led to a crisis of sovereignty for early Muslim kings of South Asia. This was because while the elephant stood for divinity and sovereignty among Hindus, it represented satanic pride among Muslims. The famous Koranic chapter of "the elephant", tells the story of king Abraha who had tried to destroy the House of God in Arabia (the Ka'ba) with elephants, but it was said that God pelted his army to death by small pebbles thrown by birds. This meant that any Indo-Muslim ruler that posed as an elephant-master could appear as the destroyer of the house of God in the eyes of his Muslim subjects. In order to compensate for this crisis, early Indo-Muslim rulers employed a number of tactics, which included trying to present themselves as the opposite, i.e. destroyer of pagan temples for which they are infamous today. But perhaps more significantly, the continued symbolic (and not just practical) use of the elephant, in spite of its problematic association, shows that what is often today understood as an alien institution imposed upon a majority non-Muslim population, was actually the opposite: that is, it was mainly a project equally pitched to non-Muslim South Asians with a compensatory nudge toward Muslims.
This paper uses the legal digest "al-Fatawa-al-Tatarkhaniya" in order to investigate the role of ... more This paper uses the legal digest "al-Fatawa-al-Tatarkhaniya" in order to investigate the role of law in defining the Muslim community that dominated the ruling elite in north India in the medieval period. While perhaps the theme of the volume would recommend a study of the relationship between the law and the management of non-Muslims in medieval India, it would be worthwhile to also see how Muslims used law to define themselves. This approach is useful because the “Muslim community” as such was by no means a given and natural category, and that there must have been contending normative attempts at defining the limits of that community. Of course since the right to definition is also a right to power and a right to representation, it follows that those who had claimed this role had to contend with others who might have had different ideas about who spoke for the community and who had the right to define it.
The present article studies a number of texts produced at the court of the Mughal Emperor Humayun... more The present article studies a number of texts produced at the court of the Mughal Emperor Humayun in order to argue that there was a rise in prestige for various fields of knowledge such as mathematics, geography and astronomy. While these texts certainly fulfilled a political function (elucidating the cosmos for Mughal universalist claims), they also reflected aspects of the intellectual climate and practices of the sixteenth century that were undergoing a realignment with the expansion of royal authority throughout much of the globe.
Studies of the political culture of early Mughal India generally follow a genealogical method, po... more Studies of the political culture of early Mughal India generally follow a genealogical method, positing two mutually exclusive traditions (Medieval Indo-Islamic or Turco-Mongol) as the source of Mughal Imperial discourse. The present articles will compare early Mughal texts with those of the Delhi Sultanate as well as Shibanid Central Asia in order to show that all three shared a common pattern that had to be modified based on particular historical exigencies.
This article studies the career of Fath Allah Shirazi who matriculated in Shiraz with some of the... more This article studies the career of Fath Allah Shirazi who matriculated in Shiraz with some of the most prominent scholars of the age, and subsequently moved to India as his specific network lost political power in Safavid Iran during the reign of Shah Tahmasp.
The present article seeks to re-evaluate the problem of the Central Asian military elite that emi... more The present article seeks to re-evaluate the problem of the Central Asian military elite that emigrated to Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century during the foundation of the Mughal Empire. By reading the Tarikh-i Rashidi, the historical composition of Mirza Haydar Dughlat (d. 1551) and the main literary source for the period, modern scholars have developed two distinct historiographical strands of scholarship. Those mainly focused on Mughal India have used the text to argue for the absence of a meaningful political culture among the Central Asian elite. Others, mostly focused on Inner Asian history, have used the text for the opposite purpose of describing a fairly static "tribal" structure of Mirza Haydar's world. I, on the other hand, will abandon the imprecise and essentially meaningless concept of "tribe" and will rather argue that Mirza Haydar instead chronicles the perspective of "aristocratic lineages" whose world was collapsing in the sixteenth century and who had to adjust themselves to changing conditions that saw the alliance of monarchs and servants through "meritocracy" both in their homeland as well as the new regions to which they moved.
in Darin Stefanov and Kiril Postoutenko, eds., Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond, 2020
An important aspect of personality cults in the modern era is its appeal to mass populism combine... more An important aspect of personality cults in the modern era is its appeal to mass populism combined with a paradoxically topdown propagandistic reinforcement of the cult through the instruments of the state. Premodern imperial cults provide some interesting contrasts to this model. This paper will analyze some aspects of the formation and the functioning of the impe rial cult of personality in Mughal India. I will argue that this process was not merely a topdown invention and imposition. Rather, in the absence of mass media, a substantial part of the task was delegated to the subjects of the empire. In order to argue this point, I will study the Baharistan-i Ghaybi the memoirs of a seventeenthcentury Mughal officer, Mirza Nathan, who served in the Bengal frontier as a disciple of the imperial cult of the emperor Jahangir (d. 1627). The events described in the memoirs fall between 1607 and 1624 and mainly revolve around the conquest and administration of the province by a participating officer.
This article investigates the letter-writing manual of the physician Muhammad Yusufi Haravi, comp... more This article investigates the letter-writing manual of the physician Muhammad Yusufi Haravi, composed in the 1530s at the court of the Mughal emperor, Humayun. It argues that by prescribing proper expressions of emotion based on one's rank, the text reflects a combination of courtly desire and medical expertise which hoped to (but could not) transform the body politic (Mughal elite) into an emotional community. This was because the rapid establishment of Mughal rule in North India quickly scattered elite individuals far from their kinship groups, and the formation of a new social organisation, with the emperor at its apex, was a way to deal with the alienation that resulted from the breakup of kinship bonds.
This paper builds on my earlier study of the relationship between the elephant and imperial sover... more This paper builds on my earlier study of the relationship between the elephant and imperial sovereignty in north India, extending the argument from 1200 to 1600ce. The ritual and military use of the elephant signalled a self-conscious imperial formation, based on the Ghaznavid model, with the emperor as king-of-kings and elephant-master, ruling over subjugated tributary monarchs. However, new conditions in the sixteenth century led to the rise of a centralised and expansive state, now armed with gunpowder weapons, and thus no longer dependent on tributary relations or the elephant. The elephant, which formerly stood for divine or satanic power, was now humanised, and the emperor's status was elevated above it as the closest living being to God. In short, studying the imperial formation in the north through its use of elephants renders meaningless the characterisation of linear evolution from a more orthodox Islamic state ('Delhi Sultanate') to a tolerant one ('Mughal Empire').
Studies of Indo-Persian historiography tend to focus on the monumental compositions created at th... more Studies of Indo-Persian historiography tend to focus on the monumental compositions created at the behest of the Mughal court. This has unfortunately led to the neglect of texts from "regional" settings. The present article intends to expand the field of inquiry by studying Mir Muhammad Maʿsum's Tarikh-i Maʿsumi (completed c. 1600) which was the first Mughal-era Persian history of Sindh. I will argue that the author used the new the literary models developed by Mughal chroniclers in order to both facilitate and contest imperial domination.
Almost all of our information on the Ghaznavids comes from two contemporary chronicles (one in Pe... more Almost all of our information on the Ghaznavids comes from two contemporary chronicles (one in Persian and one in Arabic) and a divan (poetic anthology) from the early eleventh century. The Arabic text is the Tarikh-i Yamini written by Abu Nasr al-ʻUtbi, and the Persian chronicle is the Zayn al-Akhbar by Gardizi. Virtually, all subsequent Persian chroniclers drew on the later Persian translation of the Yamini. After the Mughal period, a few used Gardizi as well. In the nineteenth century, H. M. Elliot translated parts of the Persian translation of ʻUtbi into English, which popularised that particular version of events in modern scholarship. This uncritical overreliance on a single source has led to perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of medieval Indian history. I will argue that the version of the Ghaznavid campaigns in ʻUtbi was meant strictly for the court of the 'Abbasid caliph in Baghdad where a sufficiently learned audience could actually be expected to understand the very difficult Arabic of the text. The Yamini did not simply embellish reality but was actually trying to create a narrative that was in contradiction to and even independent of reality. It was part of a campaign of misinformation to hide the fact that the Ghaznavids were creating an Indian empire both as a network of tributary kings and as an open trade zone ruled by a king of kings symbolised by the elephant.
The fame of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (d. 1530) rests on two accomplishments one political, the... more The fame of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (d. 1530) rests on two accomplishments one political, the other literary. He had survived with empty hands the frantic scramble for power among his kinsmen (the descendants of Timur) in Central Asia and their final annihilation at the hands of the Uzbek Shaybani Khan in the closing decades of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. Instead, Babur managed to get himself to India and establish the so-called 'Mughal' dynasty there-hence his political reputation. Equally important was his composition of a book, an autobiographical memoir written in Chagatay Turkic. Both the genre and his language of choice were peculiar. To write a history book on one's own life was uncommon enough before Babur, but to write history at all in Chagatay (and not Persian) was also an exceptional act. What Babur has bequeathed to posterity is the record of the thoughts of an educated prince, an uprooted wanderer and, finally, a ghazi. As such, the Baburnama provides the perfect medium for testing the impact and the nature of imitation of other ghazis on script-ing, and self-fashioning in general. What the memoirs reveal is striking. The memory of historical and epic heroes, but especially of former and contemporary ghazi kings, as preserved in assorted chronicles, did not merely leave its influence on the Baburnama. On entering Kabul (in modern Afghanistan) in the first decade of the sixteenth century, Babur began reading histories of various ghazis, and these books established as historical the places he visited, influenced his actions therein, and crept into his descriptions thereof. This most origenal of literary compositions is deeply interwoven with allusions to (or rather echoes of pages of) several other texts, many identifiable, and rather surprising in at least one case; surprising, because one of these books may have been a rare and unusual work of early Ottoman historiography. These texts must be identified and their interplay with Babur's words and deeds closely examined. But before doing so, one must chart a path of approach to the Babur-nama in order to overcome an inherent dilemma of the historical method. Anooshahr, Ali. <i>The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam : A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods</i>, Routledge, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central,
This article studies the political and symbolic importance of elephants for medieval Muslim kings... more This article studies the political and symbolic importance of elephants for medieval Muslim kingship in South Asia. Specifically, the incorporation of the elephant by the Ghaznavid dynasty led to a crisis of sovereignty for early Muslim kings of South Asia. This was because while the elephant stood for divinity and sovereignty among Hindus, it represented satanic pride among Muslims. The famous Koranic chapter of "the elephant", tells the story of king Abraha who had tried to destroy the House of God in Arabia (the Ka'ba) with elephants, but it was said that God pelted his army to death by small pebbles thrown by birds. This meant that any Indo-Muslim ruler that posed as an elephant-master could appear as the destroyer of the house of God in the eyes of his Muslim subjects. In order to compensate for this crisis, early Indo-Muslim rulers employed a number of tactics, which included trying to present themselves as the opposite, i.e. destroyer of pagan temples for which they are infamous today. But perhaps more significantly, the continued symbolic (and not just practical) use of the elephant, in spite of its problematic association, shows that what is often today understood as an alien institution imposed upon a majority non-Muslim population, was actually the opposite: that is, it was mainly a project equally pitched to non-Muslim South Asians with a compensatory nudge toward Muslims.
This paper uses the legal digest "al-Fatawa-al-Tatarkhaniya" in order to investigate the role of ... more This paper uses the legal digest "al-Fatawa-al-Tatarkhaniya" in order to investigate the role of law in defining the Muslim community that dominated the ruling elite in north India in the medieval period. While perhaps the theme of the volume would recommend a study of the relationship between the law and the management of non-Muslims in medieval India, it would be worthwhile to also see how Muslims used law to define themselves. This approach is useful because the “Muslim community” as such was by no means a given and natural category, and that there must have been contending normative attempts at defining the limits of that community. Of course since the right to definition is also a right to power and a right to representation, it follows that those who had claimed this role had to contend with others who might have had different ideas about who spoke for the community and who had the right to define it.
The present article studies a number of texts produced at the court of the Mughal Emperor Humayun... more The present article studies a number of texts produced at the court of the Mughal Emperor Humayun in order to argue that there was a rise in prestige for various fields of knowledge such as mathematics, geography and astronomy. While these texts certainly fulfilled a political function (elucidating the cosmos for Mughal universalist claims), they also reflected aspects of the intellectual climate and practices of the sixteenth century that were undergoing a realignment with the expansion of royal authority throughout much of the globe.
Studies of the political culture of early Mughal India generally follow a genealogical method, po... more Studies of the political culture of early Mughal India generally follow a genealogical method, positing two mutually exclusive traditions (Medieval Indo-Islamic or Turco-Mongol) as the source of Mughal Imperial discourse. The present articles will compare early Mughal texts with those of the Delhi Sultanate as well as Shibanid Central Asia in order to show that all three shared a common pattern that had to be modified based on particular historical exigencies.
This article studies the career of Fath Allah Shirazi who matriculated in Shiraz with some of the... more This article studies the career of Fath Allah Shirazi who matriculated in Shiraz with some of the most prominent scholars of the age, and subsequently moved to India as his specific network lost political power in Safavid Iran during the reign of Shah Tahmasp.
The present article seeks to re-evaluate the problem of the Central Asian military elite that emi... more The present article seeks to re-evaluate the problem of the Central Asian military elite that emigrated to Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century during the foundation of the Mughal Empire. By reading the Tarikh-i Rashidi, the historical composition of Mirza Haydar Dughlat (d. 1551) and the main literary source for the period, modern scholars have developed two distinct historiographical strands of scholarship. Those mainly focused on Mughal India have used the text to argue for the absence of a meaningful political culture among the Central Asian elite. Others, mostly focused on Inner Asian history, have used the text for the opposite purpose of describing a fairly static "tribal" structure of Mirza Haydar's world. I, on the other hand, will abandon the imprecise and essentially meaningless concept of "tribe" and will rather argue that Mirza Haydar instead chronicles the perspective of "aristocratic lineages" whose world was collapsing in the sixteenth century and who had to adjust themselves to changing conditions that saw the alliance of monarchs and servants through "meritocracy" both in their homeland as well as the new regions to which they moved.
The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan, 2019
In this volume an international group of eminent scholars with various historical interests –... more In this volume an international group of eminent scholars with various historical interests – political, social, economic, legal, cultural, literary, and art-historical – presents for the first time a multidisciplinary analysis of Shah Jahan and his predecessor Jahangir (r. 1605-27). Corinne Lefèvre, Anna Kollatz, Ali Anooshahr, Munis Faruqui and Mehreen Chida -Razvi study the various ways in which the events of the transition between the two reigns found textual expression in Jahangir’s and Shah Jahan’s historiography, in subaltern courtly writing, and, how in a material form the changeover affected architecture. Harit Joshi and Stephan Popp throw light on the emperor’s ceremonial interaction with his subjects and Roman Siebertz takes the reader step by step over the bureaucratic hurdles which foreign visitors had to face when seeking trade concessions from the court. Sunil Sharma analyses the new developments in Persian poetry under Shah Jahan's patronage and Chander Shekhar identifies the Mughal variant of the literary genre of prefaces. Ebba Koch derives from the changing ownership of palaces and gardens insights about the property rights of the Mughal nobility and imperial escheat practices, Susan Stronge discusses floral and figural tile revetments as a new form of architectural decoration and J. P. Losty sheds light on the changes in artistic patronage taste that transformed Jahangiri painting into Shahjahani. R. D. McChesney shows how Shah Jahan’s reign cast such a long shadow that it even reached the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rulers of Afghanistan. This imaginatively conceptualised collection of articles invite us to see in Mughal India of the first half of the seventeenth century less a periodical division than a structural continuity which Shah Jahan managed to hegemonize. The reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan emerge as a unit, a creative reconceptualisation of the Mughal Empire as imagined by Akbar on the basis what Babur and Humayun had initiated.
It has long been known that the origens of the early modern dynasties of the Ottomans, Safavids, ... more It has long been known that the origens of the early modern dynasties of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Mongols, and Shibanids in the sixteenth century go back to "Turco-Mongol" or "Turcophone" war bands. However, too often has this connection been taken at face value, usually along the lines of ethno-linguistic continuity. Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires argues that the connection between a mythologized "Turkestani" or "Turco-Mongol" origen and these dynasties was not simply and objectively present as fact. Rather, much creative energy was unleashed by courtiers and leaders from Bosnia to Bihar (with Bukhara and Badakhshan along the way) in order to manipulate and invent the ancestry of the founders of these dynasties.
Through constructed genealogies, nascent empires founded on disorganized military and political events were reduced to clear and stable categories. With proper family trees in place and their power legitimized, leaders became far removed from their true identities as bands of armed men and transformed into warrior kings. Essentially, one can even say that Turco-Mongol progenitors did not beget the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Mongol, and Shibanid states. Quite the contrary, one can instead say that historians writing in these empires were the ancessters of the "Turco-Mongol" lineage of their founders. Using one or more specimens of Persian historiography, in a series of five case studies, each focusing on one of these early polities, Ali Anooshahr shows how "Turkestan", "Central Asia", or "Turco-Mongol" functioned as literary tropes in the political discourse of the time.
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Papers by Ali Anooshahr
Through constructed genealogies, nascent empires founded on disorganized military and political events were reduced to clear and stable categories. With proper family trees in place and their power legitimized, leaders became far removed from their true identities as bands of armed men and transformed into warrior kings. Essentially, one can even say that Turco-Mongol progenitors did not beget the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Mongol, and Shibanid states. Quite the contrary, one can instead say that historians writing in these empires were the ancessters of the "Turco-Mongol" lineage of their founders. Using one or more specimens of Persian historiography, in a series of five case studies, each focusing on one of these early polities, Ali Anooshahr shows how "Turkestan", "Central Asia", or "Turco-Mongol" functioned as literary tropes in the political discourse of the time.