Comparing the Persian and Sanskrit worlds, 1000-1800: a framework for historical writing

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Filmed by University of Arizona's Center for Middle Eastern Studies on 9/23/2016.

MENAS Colloquium Series
cmes.arizona.edu/colloquium

Richard M. Eaton, Professor, History, UA


The writing of India's late medieval early modern history has been bedeviled by an excessive focus on religion, in particular, Hindu-Muslim conflict. It is as though the past thousand years of South Asian history has been written backwards, with the whole of it a serving merely as a prolonged and bloody prelude to the bitter Partition of 1947, which divided the subcontinent into an explicitly Muslim Pakistan and predominantly Hindu Republic of India. This talk proposes a new way of viewing the period 1000-1800, commonly mis-labled the subcontinent’s “Muslim era.” In particular, it proposes to analyze, compare, and contrast the socio-cultural worlds produced by two trans-regional literary traditions, Persian and Sanskrit, suggesting that the idea of the “cosmopolis” is a far more useful category precolonial history than is the threadbare, flawed and more limiting one of religion.