Read more
What histories do objects like coins or gems help us to trace? How can we read photographs and paintings? How do fictional tales, imaginative biographies, basic lexicons, or accounts of Sufi masters code intellectual worlds and reveal cultural and religious shifts? What range of sources is available to the historian of medieval and early modern India? How can textual sources illuminate material objects, sites, and practices, and vice versa? What historical
methods do the different sources and material objects require?
Drawing on the rich scholarship of Simon E. Digby (1932-2010) on South Asian medieval history and culture, the essays in this volume offer method lessons in a wide range of historical fields.
List of contents
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Foreword
- Richard Harris, Dominic Omissi and Colin Perchard
- Introduction: Simon Digby's Method and Legacy
- Francesca Orsini
- MATERIAL TRACES AND RECONSTRUCTIONS
- Qunduz and Bamiyan Token Coins and the Horse Trade between Central Asia and Delhi
- John S. Deyell
- Two Versions of a Book of Jewels in Persian
- Bruce Wannell
- Nath Yogis and their 'Amazing Apparel' in Early Material and Textual Sources
- James Mallinson
- The Bagh- i Safa alias Jharoka Bagh in Kashmir: Princess Jahanara's Garden on Manasbal Lake
- Ebba Koch
- A Reconstructed Mughal Khamsa of Nizami
- John Seyller
- Two New Kinds of Fire: Syphilis and Capsicum in Early Hindavi Vocabularies
- Walter N. Hakala
- PAINTINGS AND HISTORY
- Travel, Companionship, and Erudition
- Robert Skelton
- Painting in Kashmir in the Eighteenth Century
- Barbara Schmitz
- Photography and Imagination: White Socks and Mughal Costumes in Nineteenth- Century Bhopal
- Barbara D. Metcalf
- Simon Digby as Collector: Paintings and Illustrated Manuscripts
- Andrew Topsfield
- III. TEXTS AND HISTORY
- Time and Its Didactic Possibilities: Sijzi's Fawaid al- fuad and the Fourteenth- Century Chishtiyya
- Sunil Kumar
- Deviation or Tradition? Shah Madar, Sufi Religion, and the Islamic Past in a Mughal Tazkira
- Muzaffar Alam
- From Venice to Goa and Back
- Anthony Welch
- IV. WORKING WITH TALES
- Zia Nakhshabi: A Sufi's View of Gender and Simon Digby's Attachment to Him
- Scott Kugle
- Translation, Circulation, Inflection: A Hindavi Tale in Persian Garb
- Francesca Orsini
- Beauty on the Brink of Death: The Story of Sohni Revisited
- Christopher Shackle
- In the Wake of Mirat- i- masudi, Chhote Lal's Sayyad salar lila
- Shahid Amin
- Select Glossary
- Editor and Contributors
- Index
About the author
Francesca Orsini is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London. Her research spans modern and contemporary Hindi literature, cultural history, popular literature and the history of the book, and multi-lingual literary history. She is the author of Print and Pleasure (2009), and The Hindi Public Sphere (1920-1940) (2002).
Summary
What histories do objects like coins or gems help us to trace? How can we read photographs and paintings? How do fictional tales, imaginative biographies, basic lexicons, or accounts of Sufi masters code intellectual worlds and reveal cultural and religious shifts? What range of sources is available to the historian of medieval and early modern India? How can textual sources illuminate material objects, sites, and practices, and vice versa? What historical
methods do the different sources and material objects require?
Drawing on the rich scholarship of Simon E. Digby (1932-2010) on South Asian medieval history and culture, the essays in this volume offer method lessons in a wide range of historical fields.
