Objects of translation: material culture and medieval "Hindu-Muslim" encounter 9781400833245, 9780691125947, 9780691180748

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page xi)
A Note on Translations and Transliterations (page xv)
Introduction (page 1)
Roots or Routes? (page 1)
Networks, Translation, and Transculturation (page 5)
Things and Texts (page 9)
1 The Mercantile Cosmopolis (page 15)
Polyglot Frontiers and Permeable Boundaries (page 15)
Gifts, Idolatry, and the Political Economy (page 26)
Heteropraxy, Taxonomy, and Traveling Orthography (page 37)
2 Cultural Cross-dressing (page 61)
Prestigious Imitation (page 61)
Fractal Kingship and Royal Castoffs (page 75)
The Raja's Finger and the Sultan's Belt (page 84)
3 Accomodating the Infidel
Sunni Internationalism and the Ghurid Interlude (page 89)
From King of the Mountains to the Second Alexander (page 93)
Homology, Ambiguity, and the Rule of Śrī Hammīra (page 107)
4 Looking at Loot (page 121)
Signs of Sovereignty (page 121)
Looting and Difference (page 123)
Trophies and Transculturation (page 126)
5 Remaking Monuments (page 137)
Taxonomies, Anomalies, and Visual Pidgin (page 137)
Rupture and Reinscription (page 152)
Noble Chambers and Translated Stones (page 160)
Patrons and Masons (page 184)
Markets, Mobility, and Intentional Hybridity (page 189)
6 Palimpsest Pasts and Fictive Genealogies (page 227)
A World within a World (page 227)
Monuments and Memory (page 247)
The Fate of Hammīra (page 255)
Conclusion: In and Out of Place (page 261)
Appendix: Principal Dynasties and Rulers Mentioned (page 269)
Notes (page 271)
Bibliography (page 311)
Index (page 353)

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| Objects of Translation

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OBJECTS OF TRANSLATION Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter

FINBARR B. FLOOD

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 ITW

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Flood, Finbarr Barry.

Objects of translation: material culture and medieval “Hindu-Muslim” encounter/Finbarr B. Flood p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-12594-7 (hardcover: alk.paper)

1. Material culture—South Asia—History. 2. Ethnic relations—South Asia—History. | 3. Cultural geography—South Asia—History. 1. Title. GN635.S57F56 2009

306.40954—dc22 2008051474 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Printed on acid-free paper. co press. princeton.edu

109876543 , Printed in the United States of America

Virtually everywhere one looks, the processes of human movement and

encounter are long-established and complex. Cultural centers, discrete regions

and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things.

—James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), 3

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| For Josh and Alex

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| Contents

Acknowledgments xi A Note on Translations and Transliterations xv

Introduction 1 Roots or Routes? 1 Networks, Translation, and Transculturation 5 Things and Texts 9

1 The Mercantile Cosmopolis 15 Polyglot Frontiers and Permeable Boundaries 15

Gifts, Idolatry, and the Political Economy 26 Heteropraxy, Taxonomy, and Traveling Orthography 37

2 Cultural Cross-dressing 61 Prestigious Imitation 61 Fractal Kingship and Royal Castoffs 75

The Rajas Finger and the Sultans Belt 84

3 Accommodating the Infidel 8 Sunni Internationalism and the Ghurid Interlude 89 From King of the Mountains to the Second Alexander 93

Homology, Ambiguity, and the Rule of Sri Hammira 107

4 Looking at Loot saz Signs of Sovereignty 121

Looting and Difference 123 Trophies and Transculturation 126

ix

5 Remaking Monuments 137 Taxonomies, Anomalies, and Visual Pidgin 137

Rupture and Reinscription 152 Noble Chambers and Translated Stones 160

Patrons and Masons 184 Markets, Mobility, and Intentional Hybridity 189

6 Palimpsest Pasts and Fictive Genealogies 227 A World within a World 227

Monuments and Memory 247 The Fate of Hammira 255

Conclusion: In and Out of Place 267 Appendix: Principal Dynasties and Rulers Mentioned 269

Notes 271 Bibliography 3zz 1. Primary Sources 311 2. Secondary Sources

(a) History and Material Culture 327 (b) Conceptual and Theoretical 347

Index 353

X CONTENTS

| Acknowledgments

More than any other project that I have undertaken, this has been a collaborative endeavor, and my debt to colleagues and friends who gave . freely and generously of their opinions, time, research materials, and photographs during the decade that it was under way is immense. In addition to the individuals named below, I would like to thank all those whose numerous small kindnesses helped smooth my path, especially during my travels in India, Iran, and Pakistan. The project would have been impossible without a series of fellowships and grants that allowed me to research and write various sections of the book and to share ideas with colleagues across a range of continents and fields. At various times, the research has benefited from travel grants awarded by the Barakat Trust and the Fondation Max van Berchem, and I am grateful to them both for enabling the fieldwork on which much of the book depends. The intellectual framework of the book was shaped by my experiences as an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 20002001. Between 2001 and 2002 the research was facilitated by a Smithsonian Institution Fellowship held at the Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Gal-

lery, Washington, D.C. The support of both institutions enabled me to develop my ideas in an atmosphere of true fellowship, and I am enormously grateful to them for indulging my shifting enthusiasms and exasperations. I would like to offer a special thanks to the curators, fellows, and staff at both institutions, especially Zoé Strother, Stella Nair, Faya Causey, Debra Diamond, Massumeh Farhad, and Ann Gunter. The final stages of writing were undertaken in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007, when I was fortunate enough to be a residential fellow of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

XI

I would also like to thank New York University for providing both the means and the opportunity to work on the book during two years of leave in 2004-2005 and 2006-2007, and my colleagues for shouldering the pleasures and pains of my absence. Among the friends and colleagues at NYU who offered advice, conversation, and support of various kinds during the final stages of writing, I would like to offer a special thanks to Priscilla Soucek and Kathryn Smith, and to Everett Rowson for his generosity in sharing with me his as yet unpublished work on the historian al-“Utbi.

This book would not have been possible without the assistance of a remarkable group of librarians scattered across several continents. I] am particularly grateful to the librarians at Cornell University for their help at various points between 1998 and 2000, even though I held no formal affiliation there. In London, I profited from the astounding resources, efficiency, and bonhomie of the staff of the Oriental Reading Rooms in the British Library. In Washington, the remarkable librarians of the Library of Congress, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Freer & Sackler Galleries showed patience and tenacity with my various requests for obscure publications. The last stages of the project benefited from the help of the librarians of New York University—Tom McNulty and the Interlibrary Loan staff deserve particular mention. My observations on the numismatic material have benefited greatly from discussions with several distinguished colleagues, who have patiently endured my amateurish queries and theories. In particular, I would like to thank Stan Goron, Dr. Michael Bates of the American Numismatic Society, Prof. Lutz Ilisch of Tubingen University, Dr. Joe Cribb of the British Museum, and Dr. Shailendra Bhandare of the Ashmolean Museum. I would also like to offer my warm thanks to Dr. Mohammad Reza Kargar, director of the Iran Bastan Museum, and Mrs. Zohreh Rouhfar, curator of Islamic material, for permitting me to study the Ghurid Qur’an discussed in chap-

ter 4. Elizabeth Lambourn kindly shared her work on the Indian Ocean trade with me and brought the relevant Sri Lankan material to my notice. Por help with obtaining images and information, it is a pleasure to thank Dr. Anette Kramer, Mr. Manfred Eder, Dr. Raffael Gadebusch, Mr. David Thomas, Prof. Tom Mathews, Dr. Lev Avdoyan, Mr. James Willaman, Dr. Stefano Carboni, Prof. Bernt Glatzer, Dr. Navina Haidar, Dr. Lynn Jones, Dr. Sue Kaukji, Dr. Monik Kervran, and Mr. Derek J. Content. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr. Roberta Giunta and Prof. Gherardo Gnoli for their generosity in supplying images of the reliefs from Ghazni and permitting their reproduction. Heartfelt thanks are due to Jaroslav Poncar and Dr. Christian Luczanits for their kindness in supplying and permitting the reproduction of the Alchi images that they will soon publish in all their colorful glory. Particular thanks are also due to Dr. Vandana Sinha at the American Institute of Indian Studies, Gurgaon, for her help with obtaining photographic material from the institute’s archives. I would like to offer a special thanks to Max Schneider for his patience and perseverance with the drawings for the book.

xl ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Roberta Giunta, Scott Redford, Bernard O’Kane, and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst all commented on various chapters of the book while they were being drafted in ways that helped me clarify the presentation and avoid errors. I owe a particular debt to Oleg Grabar and to two anonymous reviewers for their very careful reading and critiques of the draft manuscript, and to my editor at Princeton University Press, Hanne Winarsky, for her insights and suggestions, to Terri O’Prey and Tracy Baldwin, and to Will Hively for the care with which he copyedited the manuscript. These critical interventions have greatly improved the finished product. Over the years, the development of my thought on the subjects of this book has derived particular benefit from informal discussions with Phillip Wagoner of Wesleyan University and Sunil Kumar of Delhi University, two colleagues and friends who are major innovators in the field of medieval South Asian history. Whether or not it faithfully reflects the content and tenor of those conversations, without them this project would never have assumed some of the forms that it has. | am truly grateful to them both for their encouragement, support, and comments on the manuscript. Last but by no means least, for keeping me sane during the interminable process of writing, and for tolerating my occasional inabilities to disengage from premodernity, especially warm thanks is due to Nebahat Avcioglu, Zahid Chaudhary, Kryzstof Czuba, Kalleen Flood, Irene Leung,

Stella Nair, Avinoam Shalem, Vijayanthi Rao, and Satya Pemmaraju. Srinivasan Padmanabhan has, as always, shown patience above and beyond the call of duty and offered unstinting support for this project throughout its history. Without that support this book would never have seen the light of day. In claiming this project as a kind of collective endeavor, I should end by emphasizing the limits of collectivity—any glitches, quirks, or outright errors are entirely mine.

Xiil

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|.A Note on Translations and Transliterations

For the sake of simplicity, diacriticals have been kept to a minimum. Where a foreign word has entered English usage (for example, mihrab, sufi, etc.), it is neither italicized nor provided with diacriticals. However, where a term is transliterated from Arabic, Persian, or Sanskrit, appropriate diacritical marks have been used following the systems used in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Epigraphia Indica. For convenience, the plurals of these terms have been formed following the English convention of adding s. Hijri Islamic lunar) dates have been given where dealing with Arabic and Persian coins, inscriptions, or texts, and Indic dating systems cited where they are found in texts or inscriptions. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

XV

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| Objects of Translation

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| Introduction Contact is never pure, always about something.

—Per Otnes, Other-Wise: Alterity, Materiality, Mediation (1997), 38

| Roots or Routes? By contrast, the material presented in this book suggests that people and things have been mixed up for

In the spring of 2006, an article appeared in the avery long time, rarely conforming to the boundaries Guardian, a liberal British newspaper, in which an imposed on them by modern anthropologists and Oxford historian considered the intercultural ten- historians. Rejecting any notion of a prelapsarian sions afflicting contemporary Europe. The problem, time when people knew their place, the book emphathe writer concluded, was not cultural difference per sizes the remarkable mobility of premodern subjects se but rather the effect of global mobility, a peculiarly | and objects, and considers the nature and effects of modern inability of human subjects to stay in place this mobility on the identities of both. or at least to abandon their cultural baggage as they Shaped by colonial and postcolonial displace-

migrate: ments, global capital, and technological innovation,

the patterns and scale of modern mobility are quite For centuries, there has been a good rule for the uP wy aresocietqu Late 4 different from those that marked premodern

coexistence of: civilizations. It said:were “When in . mobility . “ys ar ies, in which populations smaller and Rome, do generally as the Romans do.” Globalisation has ; . ; ; . . was associated with specific socioeconomic undermined that rule. Because of mass migration, ; ye: rae to . . groups. Ihe idea of mobility is, however, intrinsic peoples and their cultures physically ,ii . > , the history and are prescriptions of mixed Islam, aup religion together. Rome no zero longer Rome; it’s Tunis, . i . Tirana. . whoseis year is measured not also from the birth, of the Cairo and Birmingham is also Kashmir ar ; Prophet but from the migration of the nascent Musand the Punjab, while London is all the world. ; ; lim community from Mecca to Medina. Moreover,

In both content and spirit, these sentiments resonate the duty to make the pilgrimage to Mecca at least with Samuel P. Huntington's idea of a contemporary once in a lifetime imbues Islam with an institution “clash of civilizations,” central to which is a marked that is global in its extent and impact, not least on the contrast between mobile modern populations and circulation of artistic concepts and forms. Without their sedentary predecessors.? Both writers presup- entailing a deterritorialized concept of identity, the pose a universe in which people and things once had __ need to negotiate between the local and the translotheir proper places. Geographic displacement and cal, the lived experience of the quotidian and the ideal the cultural complications arising from it are seen as_ _—_ of the umma, an imagined community with a global defining characteristics of modernity, a condition in __ reach, has been a distinguishing feature of Islamic culwhich people and things are increasingly out of place.* _ tures from their inception.‘

I

This “double movement” is especially evident in global trade networks fostered by the Pax Mongolica the regions that form the subject of this book: the has to some extent obscured the existence of much frontier territories between what are usually described _ earlier but no less complex circuits of exchange linkas the Hindu and Muslim polities of South Asia. The — ing the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Central and

rough contours of this amorphous region are delin- | South Asia in the preceding centuries that form the eated in the west by the important eastern Iranian chronological focus of this book.® province of Khurasan, in the east by the Ganges River, The chronological scope of the book stretches in the north by the river Oxus, and in the south by the —_ from the conquest of Sind by Arab armies in the early

province of Sind, which abuts the Indian Ocean. It — eighth century to the establishment of the Delhi sulthus includes all the territories of the modern states of _ tanate in the early thirteenth. In terms of scholarship, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and parts of those now inte- the period is enigmatic and obscure.’ This lacuna regrated into the republics of Iran, Turkmenistan, and __flects not only the paucity of materials that might be India. For the sake of convenience, I will make anach- __used to craft the cultural history of these centuries, or ronistic use of these terms, as geographic rather than __ the difficulties entailed in the fact that such a project narrowly political descriptors. Similarly, although in its | would cut across national and disciplinary boundaries literal sense—an interlude between high classicism and that have traditionally set the limits of scholarship, its revival during the European Renaissance—the term but also a more insistent focus on the glories of the medieval has little relation to South Asian history, | Mughal period in South Asian historiography. Long since it has entered general usage there I have deployed seen as the epitome of Indo-Islamic cultural producit alongside the no less problematic “premodern.” tion, Mughal art and architecture has been consisStraddling regions with different topographies but __ tently celebrated for its synthetic aesthetic qualities, in

entangled histories, the book that follows argues the contrast to the more “hybrid” and less immediately need for a reconfiguration of premodern cultural geog- appealing remains from other periods. As one nineraphy, moving beyond the linear borders of the mod- _ teenth-century antiquarian put it: “It is only after the ern nation-state and the static taxonomies of modern Mughal conquest that the Mahomedan architecture scholarship. To this extent, it is in agreement with calls begins to be beautiful.”’® Consequently, there has for the writing of histories that displace “civilisation- | been a tendency when dealing with the period behistory” and its vertical emphasis on narratives of rise tween 800 and 1250 in South Asia either to ignore it or and fall with alternative models emphasizing horizon- see it as an undifferentiated monolith within which tal dimensions of mobility.’ As David Ludden put itin fragmentary monuments (and even fewer objects) a recent article that called for a shift from the stasis of — subsist at random.

“civilisational” histories, with their boundaries, bound- Despite the dearth of dedicated studies, the cenedness, and closures, to a more dynamic emphasis on __turies covered by this book have occupied center stage

networks of encounter and exchange, “the idea of in colonial and nationalist constructions of a past that civilisation necessarily (if not intentionally) indices a has been cast as a perpetual confrontation between reading back of ‘present-national-sentiments’ into a Muslim invaders and Hindu resisters, a Manichaean timeless past; it thereby prevents history from working dyad that has structured and constrained the history against cultural hegemonies in the present by stultify- of the region for almost a millennium. Within the ing our analysis of mobility, context, agency, contin- master narratives of South Asian historiography, the

gency and change.” pre-Mughal period unfolds as a series of iconic moAnalyses of the interlocking and overlapping ments within the “Muslim” conquest of South Asia, a economic zones and trade networks that emerged in cultural and historical rupture that prefigures the the wake of the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth bloody Partition of India in 1947.'! The notion ascentury (what is now often referred to as the thir- | sumesa unity of identity and purpose among the Arab teenth-century world system) have demonstrated the amirs of Sind in the eighth through tenth centuries, productive potential of these sorts of approaches.’ their Arabized Persian contemporaries in Afghanistan, However, this burgeoning of interest in premodern the Ghaznavid Turks who expanded their domains as

2 INTRODUCTION

far east as the Indus Valley in the eleventh and twelfth, — of these very identities. My approach is close in spirit

and the Persianized Ghurids who succeeded them. to that of Clifford, who questions the dichotomy beActing in concert across more than five centuries, tween “absorption by the other or resistance to the these disparate agents—differentiated not only by _ other” that structures many accounts of culture conethnicity and language but also by intra-Muslim sec- tact, posing a question that is central to my own untarian afhliations—effected a “slow progress of Islamic _— dertaking: “Yet what if identity is conceived not as [a] power’ in India, as D. R. Bhandarkar wrote in 1930.'* _ boundary to be maintained but as a nexus of relations Conversely, in a retrojection of the values of the na- _ and transactions actively engaging a subject? The story tion-state, the denizens of premodern South Asia have __ or stories of interaction must then be more complex,

been figured as the noble citizens of “Hindu India” _ less linear and teleological.”””

valiantly resisting the Muslim onslaught. In fact, despite the conventional rhetoric that The military conquests undertaken by the sultans —_ they employ, medieval Indic inscriptions and texts are

of Ghur from their heartlands in central and eastern more sensitive to ethnic, historical, and regional difAfghanistan in the 1190s (the subject of chapter 3) are ferences among the Muslims than is modern historiusually seen as the definitive “Muslim” conquest of ography, generally preferring ethnic or regional appelIndia, with later expansion and mopping-up opera- _ lations to religious categories; it is only in the thirteenth tions left to the Delhi sultanate, which emerged after century that one begins to find references to Persians the collapse of the Ghurid sultanate in 602/1206.'% In — or Turks as Musalamana."*

this teleological view of history, the exploits of the Earlier terms range from those based on caste staGhurid sultan Mu‘izz or Shihab al-Din Shansabani tus and ritual impurity (the ubiquitous Mleccha, for(d. 602/1206, often referred to as Muhammad Ghori) — eigner) to ethnic labels such as Yavana (Greek), continue and culminate a project of “Muslim” expan- Parasika (Persian or Parsi), and 7ajika (Arab or Persion begun by Muhammad ibn Qasim (d. 95/714), the sian), a term first applied to the Arabs of Sind in the Arab general who conquered Sind several hundred eighth century.'? However reductive, the terminology years earlier. As the historian A.B.L. Awasthi put it, of alterity was not undifferentiated; on the contrary, it “The Turkish conquest of India began with the Arab _ was sensitive to shifts in the constitution of military conquest of Sind.”!* The notion would be farcical had and political authority. From the tenth century, Tuit not proven so tenacious in scholarship and its rami- — ruska (Turk) became more common, reflecting the fications in the politics of the present so deadly.” ascendancy of Turkic dynasties in the central Islamic Like most teleologies, these scenarios operate lands and eastern Islamic world.”? More specific terms through a collapse of all possible identities into a sin- | found in the eleventh and twelfth centuries include gle monolithic identification, producing as singular, | Garjana (and variants such as garjanaka and garjanestatic, and undifferentiated what was often multiple, sha) or Garjanikadhiraja, and Hammira, generic terms protean, and highly contested.'° In an attempt to de- _—_ for Muslim kings derived from Ghazni and the Arabic construct these monoliths, the book traces dynamic amir (commander) respectively.”

patterns of engagement between Hindus and Muslims That ethnicity was constructed (at least in part) over several centuries, emphasizing relations rather on the basis of contingencies such as custom is sugthan essences, “routes rather than roots” to borrow an __ gested by the use of Turuska to designate those who

evocative phrase from the anthropologist James Clif- | were neither Turks nor Muslims but who adopted ford. Focusing on practices of circulation, displace- some of their ways. The Rajatarangini, a twelfth-cenment, and translation, it aims to demonstrate the con- _ tury Kashmiri royal chronicle, refers to King Harsha tingent and unstable nature of premodern identity. (1. 1089-1111) as a rajaturuska (Turk king) on account The “Hindu-Muslim” of my subtitle is therefore of his fondness for Turkic dress and women and ocframed within quotation marks, not only to suggest casional bouts of violent image destruction.*” Once that sectarian categories of identity are inadequate to again this suggests that while categories of identity the task of representing the phenomena that form my __ were by definition relational and often oppositional; subject, but to call into question the inherent stability | they were not necessarily immutable. As we shall see

3

in the final chapter, Hammira, a Sanskritized Arabic cosmopolitanism undermine, however, any suggesterm that denoted the Turko-Persian sultans who bat- _ tion that medieval encounters along the shifting frontled with the Rajput dynasties of north India could, in tier between what the Arabic and Persian sources refer time, be transformed into a proper name born by the _ to as the dar al-Islam (house of Islam, the lands under

last scions of those same “Hindu” dynasties. the control of Muslim rulers) and the dar al-harb Even the textual sources in which the most radical (house of war) led to the embrace or emergence of a assertions of alterity are inscribed provide occasional medieval “multiculturalism.” With its assumption of glimpses of human agents who seem curiously imper- __reified (and frequently singular) identities, the convious to the absolute boundaries between “Hindu” cept of multiculturalism fails to do justice to the comand “Muslim” identities and polities that are axiom- _ plex and fluid notions of identity that characterize the atic to modern frontier historiography. Among those highly mobile artisans, merchants, and political elites that we will encounter in chapters1 and 2are Muham- who form the subjects of this book. Equally, however mad ibn Shahriyar from Siraf, a mercantile city in the attractive they may be, romanticizing models such as Persian Gulf, who administered a port city on the | Convivencia (cohabitation, a term that has emerged to Konkan coast of western India in the name of the describe the coexistence of Christians, Jews, and MusRashtrakuta rajas, granting permission in hisname for __ lims in medieval Spain) have a tendency to flatten the the construction of Hindu temples and monasteries, | contours in what were evidently complex, dynamic, and Tilak, a free Hindu from Kashmir who sought his and often rapidly changing landscapes, casting prefortune as a translator at the court of the Ghaznavid modern societies as the inverse of our own anticosmosultan Mas‘ud I (1. 422—32/1031-41) and rose to be- __ politan dystopias.*

come a celebrated commander of the Ghaznavid In his observations on this period, the historian armies, infamous in South Asian historiography for Shahid Amin has rightly emphasized the dangers of

pillaging northern India. emphasizing either “Turkiana (the Sword of Islam)”

As this suggests, even the armies through which _ over “Sufiana (the gentle ways of the Islamic mystics),” “Muslim” or “Hindu” victories were achieved were _ or “syncretism sans conflict.”” Iam not therefore seekoften heterogeneous congeries of different ethnicities ing to reconstitute a “Convivencia on the Ganges.” and faiths. War is not, therefore, always inimical to Neither do | intend to romanticize syncretism (itself a

the promotion of cosmopolitan identities. On the problematic model) or to replace a dystopian narracontrary, it can unite men of different ethnicities and tive with a more upbeat utopian alternative. Rather, faiths (often against their coreligionists) and engender my aim is to explore and historicize the dialectic benew patterns of circulation. It follows that to empha- tween alterity and identity, continuity and change, size the historical importance of transregional circula- confrontation and co-option that shaped transcultural tion and transcultural communication is to deny nei- encounters and the ways in which these conditioned ther the existence nor the perceptionand representation and were conditioned in their turn by diplomatic, of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious difference. martial, and mercantile exchange. Past studies of this Recent research has in fact highlighted the importance _ period have focused on the displacements that accomof frontier contacts for the formation or consolidation panied these phenomena as forms of cultural violence. of ethnic identities in premodern South Asia, a re- | Here I want to emphasize the violence imposed on the minder that rather than being opposed to identity, past by our own attempts to purify and stratify it in difference may in fact be central to its construction.’ _ reproduction, while foregrounding the acts of comThe historical formation and transformation of iden- | munication and cooperation that accompanied the tity through such encounters also underlines that dif- | movement of premodern subjects and objects, and the ference was not a constant (except perhaps in the rar- _ transformations that they wrought in their turn.

efied world of normative rhetoric) but rather was Of course, at one level to highlight the abundant dynamic in its emphases, contingent in its expression, if scattered evidence for the sorts of communicative

and variable in its meaning. practices and social mobility that undermine the abThe entangled histories of contact, conquest, and _solutism of “Indic” and “Islamic” as oppositional cat-

4 INTRODUCTION

egories is to make a rather banal claim, anomalous the significant differences between these two languages only within the highly politicized and polarized dis- (which belong to different linguistic families) and the courses of modern historiography. As Sheldon Pollock consequent need for translation to mediate between reminds us, “there exist no cultural agents who are not _ them in specific historical situations. In the words of always-already transcultured”; consequently, “the cul- one translation theorist, “the mongrelization of lantural materials being transferred are already hybrid guages occurs because their ‘interiors’ and ‘exteriors’ themselves; and like the transmitter the receiver culture are separated by porous, elastic membranes and not by too is something always in process and not a thing rigid walls; [but] despite such a permeability of boundwith an essence. “Transculturation, accordingly, turns aries, each language heuristically retains its ‘identity’ out to be a misnomer, since it is the real and perma- __ in relation to other languages.”’® The metaphor of per-

nent condition of all cultural life.” This is indeed meability or porosity employed here has sometimes true of the longue durée, and goes a long way toward __ been used in analyses of Indo-Islamic cultural forms.”

explaining why aspects of premodern culture that Its mechanistic and deterministic overtones occlude, seem remarkable to a modern observer often went un- —_ however, questions of agency that are central to un-

remarked by medieval observers, to whom they may derstanding the sorts of negotiations that produced not have been manifest in the same way, if at all. these forms both materially and ontologically. However, while acknowledging the danger of rei- There are similar problems with the biological fying dynamic and heterogeneous cultural systems, metaphor of hybridity, although this too has freone needs to consider not just process but event. In | quently been used to explain the anomalous aggregaparticular, one needs to be cognizant of the way in tion of apparently discrete “Hindu” and “Muslim” which sudden shifts in established sociopolitical or- cultural forms. Metaphors of hybridity presuppose (if ders can produce new patterns of circulation and con- _ not produce) “pure” original or parent cultures, betact or the preconditions for established patterns of — traying with their roots in nineteenth-century scienencounter and exchange to undergo radical transfor- _ tific discourses on race, within which culture was a mations of intensity or scale. As James Clifford notes sign or symptom and cultural mixing (like racial misin Routes, his recent book dealing with issues of travel cegenation) was generally frowned on as an uneasy, and translation in our own era of globalization and unnatural, and unstable state of affairs.°? The alternatransnationalism: “Contact approaches presuppose _ tive model of syncretism is no less redolent of an esnot sociocultural wholes subsequently brought into sential purity to which the syncretic acts as foil, alrelationship, but rather systems already constituted though its genealogy is closely tied to questions of relationally, entering new situations through historical _ religious practice, shifting the emphasis more deciprocesses of displacement.””’ Despite its focus on the sively from race to culture.*’ In addition, we have to longue durée, much of this book is concerned with pe- _ recognize the inevitable privileging of hybridity in riods of cultural shift and historical displacement, product (a tangible index) rather than facture or promoments when the rise of powerful regional dynasties cess, which is less immediately accessible to modern or the eastward expansion of ambitious amirs, gover- _historians.*” Nevertheless, as we shall see in chapter 5, nors, and sultans reconfigured the political landscape _ there may be specific circumstances in which hybridof eastern Iran and South Asia, providing increased _ ity is a useful category of analysis, but they raise com-

opportunities for transregional mobility. plex questions about artistic style and premodern viTo highlight the heterogeneous nature of all cul- sual cognition.” tural forms and practices is, moreover, to say little about their potential commensurability. While medi-

eval Persian is (like its modern counterpart) marked | Networks, Translation, and Transculturation by the ubiquitous presence of Arabic loanwords, reflecting a long history of engagement between differ- | Some twenty years ago, the historian Peter Hardy de-

ent ethnic and linguistic groups within the Islamic scribed the refraction of northern Indian culture world, the existence of such loanwords does not erase _ through the lens of medieval Arabic and Persian histo-

5

ries as offering “an account of how two people from determine meaning precluded intercultural dialogue. different worlds of experience were struggling to find On the contrary, whether in the Mediterranean, a mutually intelligible language.” He began his re- Iran, or South Asia, they were often central to it. In marks with an inspired choice of quotation from a plea for enhanced contacts between Byzantium and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which — the Muslim Arab rulers of Crete, for example, Nichneatly encapsulates the relationship between agency, olas I, the Christian patriarch of Constantinople power, and the construction of meaning in any inter- (912-25), acknowledges differences “in lives, habits

subjective dialogue: and religion,” even as al-Biruni insists that the India word,” ans “differ from usDumpty in every said, respect, subject “When I use: accs Humpty in many aewould iona ane y appearing intricate and obscure which be perrather a scornful tone, “it means just what [ .

. 3 fectly if there were more connection between choose toclear mean—neither northis less. 338 . ;is « ey A. « itus.”°> However, the textmore in which sentiment

The question is,”, lysaid Alice, “whether you to can eerie per . of inscribed is itself a testimony the construction make words meanacross so many different things. i «The Serer “ys meaning ethnic, linguistic, and _Serre religious question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which i, _ ; ; > 1] 934 boundaries: in writing what is perhaps the most em-

is to be master—that’s all. ; _ .

pathetic and sophisticated premodern evaluation of The topsy-turvy quality that Hardy evokes isexempli- Indian cultural and religious practices ever written fied in the Arabic writings of al-Biruni (d. 439/1048), by a Muslim, al-Biruni was himself dependent on who lived much of his life in what today is Afghani- translated Sanskrit texts and Indian scholars for his stan, and whose substantial work on Indian culture information. and religion, the Kitab fi tahgiq ma li'l-Hind (Book of Translation is in fact central to the content and Inquiry into India), is among the earliest and most context of one of the most popular story cycles of meremarkable testimonies to the encounter between dieval Islam, Kalila wa Dimna, a series of animal fables premodern Indic and Persianate elites. Although al- — whose origins lie in the Panchatantra, a Sanskrit work Biruni’s stated intention in writing is to enable an on statecraft believed to have been first committed to intercultural dialogue, his text oscillates between the writing by a Kashmiri scribe sometime around AD assertion and disavowal of alterity.°> On the onehand, 300. The fables reached Iran in the sixth century the Pandavas, the protagonists of the Mahabharata, through the medium of Pahlavi or Middle Persian, are compared to the heroes of the Shahndma (Book of — and were translated into Arabic by the eighth. From Kings), the Persian “national” epic.°° On the other, _ the thirteenth century onward, numerous illustrated the cultural codes governing the conduct of Indians copies survive from Egypt, Iran, and Syria, attesting are presented as the inverse of those with which his to their popularity; some of the illustrations in these readers were familiar. Referring, for example, to an texts are based on those created in India more than a Indian penchant for using turbans as trousers (arefer- millennium earlier.”

ence to the wound Indian loincloth or dhoti), al- The tales begin with a self-conscious celebration

Biruni writes: of the role of translation in their own dissemination ; through thediffer agency ofthose the court In Many;Hindu customs from of our physician one BBYtoneBurzuya. Bey med . the opening story, Burzuya is sent India by the country; and of ourruler timeKhusrau to suchAnushirvan a degree as(r.to531-79) to seek ; Sasanian appear to us simply monstrous. One . ; out and had bring back to Iran worksmight ofchanged Indianalwisdom most think; that that they intentionally . are hidden in the library of an unnamed Indian them into theWith opposite, for customs do an notIndian .a ; . king. the help of aour native informant, resemble theirs, but are the very reverse; and if . sage, Burzuya ever a custom of .theirs resembles one gains of ours,access it fo, to the desired texts and, laa 39 boring night and day, translates the Panchatantra has certainly just the opposite meaning. , - and

other manuscripts from Sanskrit into Pahlavi, the lanThis was not the whole story, however. Neither the — guage of the Iranian world at this time.

assertion of difference nor the struggle to control or Foregrounding translation as a mode of facilitat-

6 INTRODUCTION

ing communication between premodern elites, the | commissioned by the founder of Baghdad, the ‘Abtale of the Persian physician and the Indian text can __basid caliph al-Mansur (d. 158/775), one of a number be considered paradigmatic of the encounters that _ of translations from Greek, Pahlavi, and (more rarely) form the subject of this book. The deceptively simple Sanskrit undertaken at the ‘Abbasid court.® Truth tale of Burzuya entails a number of paradoxes, high- _ being stranger than fiction, around 800 the vizier of lighting the ambivalences and ambiguities that often the ‘Abbasid caliph, Yahya ibn Khalid al-Barmaki characterized transcultural exchanges. In the first (whose family were Buddhist converts from northplace, the value of the desired texts is related not only eastern Iran), sent a scholar from Baghdad to India to to their content but also to their foreignness, to the gather medicinal herbs and knowledge about Indian long and dangerous voyage that their acquisition ne- _ religions. Translated and transcribed, this information cessitated. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the _ served (directly or indirectly) as a source for numerous texts acquired from India and other lands by the Sasa-__later writers on India.“°

nian kings of Iran were reportedly deposited in the The ‘Abbasid caliphs modeled much of their Royal Treasury along with more material riches.“° court culture on that of the Sasanian kings whose terThe value ascribed to the texts was equally a prod- _ritories they had inherited, and the ‘Abbasid mission uct of the chain of transmission through which they _ to India may have been undertaken in imitation of circulated westward. Writing in Spain, at the opposite | Burzuya’s voyage, reenacting Anushirvan's appropria-

end of the known world, around 1050, the Arab tion of Indian texts through translation.*” The comscholar Sa‘id al-Andalusi lists the work (one of “noble —_ mission of translations reiterated the original patron-

purpose and great practical worth”) among the many age of the Indian king, creating a common bond great legacies of Indian learning, explaining the circu- _ rooted in the etiquette and rituals of kingship. Indeed,

itous chain of translation by which it circulated from _ the preface to the greatest Persian royal epic, the pre-Islamic India to medieval al-Andalus.*’ Many of | Shahnama or Book of Kings (written in 346/957), exthose who worked or wrote on the text explicitly ad- _ plicitly invokes Anushirvan’s acquisition of the Pancha-

dressed the problem of translation, taking different tantra, citing the commissioning of this and other approaches to the transformations that it inevitably texts (including the Indian epic the Ramayana) by an wrought. In his Book of Inquiry into India, for exam- _ Indian king and their later translation at the Sasanian ple, al-Biruni laments his lack of linguistic access to and ‘Abbasid courts as appropriate ways for royal pathe Panchatantra, the Sanskrit original of Kalila wa trons to perpetuate their memories.** Further associaDimna, noting that “it is far spread in various lan- _ tions between India, translation, and the self-fashioning guages, in Persian, Hindi, and Arabic—in translations _ of Persian elites are suggested by the fact that the bestof people who are not free from the suspicion of hav- known Persian translation of Kalila wa Dimna was ing altered the text.”*? A more expansive notion of — undertaken at the court of the Ghaznavid sultan Bahtranslation is found in the Nuh Sipihr of Amir Khus- ram Shah (d. 546/1152), whose territories included parts rau (718/1318), where the excellence of the Panchatan- — of western India. Nasr Allah Munshi, the Ghaznavid tra is said to be reflected in its translation into Arabic, translator, emphasizes both the Indian origins of the Persian, Turkish, and other languages, which have _ text and the Indian victories of his patron, whose ter-

manifest it in alternative forms.” ritories are said to have extended from Isfahan in cen-

Premodern linguistic and textual translations tral Iran to the Ganges.” were generally multistage endeavors often mediated The production of a Persian translation reflects by a third language and involving not two but three or _ internal developments that were reshaping the cultural

more agents. Thus, as Amir Khusrau suggests, the and political geography of the eastern Islamic lands translations that facilitated the transmission of Ka/ila during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and which wa Dimna were themselves complex and multiple, the were to have significant implications for South Asia. passage from Sanskrit to English (and other European ‘These include the rise of regional courts, who sponlanguages) being mediated by Pahlavi, Arabic, He- sored the production of vernacular literatures written brew, and Latin.“* The first Arabic translation was in New Persian (rather than the lingua franca of Arabic)

7

and the concomitant appearance of local (rather than _ but within cultures (“a mediation between two already universal) histories. The rise of Persian asa courtlan- _ constituting worlds”), postcolonial theorists have, for guage offers interesting parallels for contemporaneous example, sought to theorize the limits and nature of shifts in linguistic usage in South Asia, where, around cultural translation and the way in which it facilitates the beginning of the second millennium CE, vernacu- _ the emergence of new cultural forms.” In his work on lar literary codes and forms began to replace the more __ postcolonial diasporas, for example, Homi Bhabha translocal Sanskritic forms, which South Asian elites writes of a “third space” emerging from the interface had favored from the first few centuries of the Chris- | between hegemonic and subordinate or marginalized tian era.°! The simultaneous production of vernacular cultural forms, the dialectical tensions between altertranslations of Kalila wa Dimna and Panchatantra in _ ity and assimilation. This is an arena within which dif-

both Spain and southern India in the period between ference is negotiated, through the appropriation, 1000 and 1250 has been noted, but the more relevant translation, and rehistoricization of cultural signs and appearance of the first Persian translation of the text their associated meanings, a process that contributes in northwestern India around 1150 has gone largely to the emergence of new hybrid identities.”

unremarked.”* These theoretical approaches have been developed

With their ability to move through and beyond _ in relation to modern colonial and postcolonial culthe limits of political dominion or physical topogra- tures, with the result that historians of premodernity phy, the peregrinations of Kalila wa Dimna and the _ have been slow to appreciate and exploit their implicahuman agents who effected its transmission exemplify tions. Nevertheless, studies of premodern South Asia the mobility of routes and networks in contrast to the have not been immune to the “translation turn” that fixities of roots and territories. First applied to the his- underlies their development. The historian Richard tory of South Asia fifty years ago, the notion of net- _ Eaton discusses, for example, the “translation” of Islam works has gained currency in our own era of global into India, a process that necessitated “a broader conmobility.’ The sociologist Bruno Latour explains its ception of translation” than word-for-word rendering

utility in the following way: “More supple than the of Arabic sacred texts into Indian vernacular lannotion of system, more historical than the notion of — guages.’® Extending the idea to material culture, Shelstructure, more empirical than the notion of complex- _—_ don Pollock has noted that South Asian coins, monuity, the idea of network is the Ariadne’s thread of these ments, and texts of the eleventh to fourteenth century interwoven stories.” Such a thread “would allow us to “demonstrate a sustained and largely successful effort pass with continuity from the local to the global, from _at intercultural translation.””’ Working in the Deccan the human to the nonhuman. It is the thread of net- _ region of south-central India, Phillip Wagoner has adworks of practices and instruments, of documents and — umbrated the dynamics of these processes, demonstrattranslations.” As this suggests, for Latour, networks ing the operation of a “cultural hermeneutic” not conare closely related to practices of translation and hy- fined to the realm of spoken communication and its bridization and opposed to strategies of disaggrega- _ textual traces, but which also pervaded material, per-

tion or purification that correspond to what he calls formative, and visual aspects of cultural production,

“the modern critical stance.” 4 and the various “languages” that they employed.” Latour’s interest in translation as a cultural prob- If Bhabha’s concept of the intercultural (emblemlematic reflects a “translation turn” in the social sci- —_atized in his neologism the “third space,” which oscilences over the past decades, which has extended the lates between process and place) has been criticized purview of translation from the strictly linguistic to _ for its nominalism, for its reduction of complex social other fields of cultural production, embracing transla- _ practices to textual representations,°! these studies retion as both an explanatory metaphor anda dynamic mind us of Jonathan Hay’s observation that “contact practice through which the circulation, mediation, re- between cultures always brings us back to the geoception, and transformation of distinct cultural forms graphical transfer of makers, objects or images.”® In and practices is effected.” While acknowledging that —_an essay on objects as signs, John Dixon Hunt sees the

translation is an activity that occurs not only between hermeneutical or interpretive strategies associated

8 INTRODUCTION

with such transfers as a series of translations, which opening image in a fourteenth-century manuscript of include the work of the historian him- or herself: Kalila wa Dimna probably produced in Syria (fig. 1). A rather conventional inscription of difference on the Is it not more useful to think of teapots and other _—_ bodies of the chief protagonists, Burzuya and the objects as signs? . . . The study of objects, like dis- | anonymous Indian sage—the latter darker of skin, course, would then focus on a series of transla- longer of hair, and scantier of clothing than his Per-

tions. And the questions would concern, first, sian interlocutor—is subverted by the content and how speakers . . . encode their messages, with cer- context of the text itself, exemplifying the ability of tain goals, within given linguistic and other cul- translation to bridge the gap between them, to do-

tural contexts . . . and, second, how hearers de- mesticate the foreign. Appreciating this depends, code (in the case of objects this could bea user or however, on a willingness to engage both media sia later historian) within different schemas, in multaneously, to read between and beyond text and fresh contexts that involve both pragmatic and image rather than privileging one over and above the intellectual control. In both encoding and decod- other.” If, therefore, “routes not roots” and “networks

ing there is an act of translation, finding in one not territories” are two fundamental themes of this “language” adequate terms to give a reliable ac- book, a third, related concern might be characterized

count of something in another.” as “things not texts.” Most previous approaches to the period have re-

Adopting such a framework, the book that follows lied almost entirely on premodern inscriptions and also draws attention to the relationship between strat- _ texts for their narrative reconstructions of the past.°° egies of translation associated with the circulation of | Over the past decades, increasingly sophisticated modes objects and processes of transculturation. Coined by of analyzing such documents have been developed, the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, whose work on — which mitigate the dangers of taking the oppositional the sugar and tobacco cultures of postcolonial Cuba is categories and rhetorical claims that proliferate within of particular significance for its insistence on the cen- _ them at face value. Nevertheless, the dominance of a trality of objects and the practices associated with textual paradigm has obscured the semiotic potential them, the term transculturation denotes a complex of materials and materiality even as they relate to texprocess of transformation unfolding through extended __ tual sources. For example, the premodern inscriptions contact between cultures. Although Ortiz clearly saw that have been central to modern histories of South this as a unidirectional process that entailed an initial Asia are rarely read from the monuments on which loss (a “deculturation” that prepares the ground for they were placed but, instead, from modern printed “neoculturation”), t¢ransculturation has gained cur- compendia that reduce their communicative potential rency as a term that emphasizes the multidirectional to semantic content, ignoring haptic and optic dimennature of exchange.“ Like the medieval French ¢vas- sions of inscription: the media in which they were tornée, with its connotations of a simultaneous move- _ carved, their scale and placement, and their precise re-

ment across and within, this notion of transcultura- lationship to the architectural forms on which they tion acknowledges that cultural formations are always __ were inscribed.°’ This abstraction of semantic content

already hybrid and in process, so that translation isa from the material means of its articulation and reprodynamic activity that takes place both between and duction illustrates the role traditionally ascribed to ar-

within cultural codes, forms, and practices. tifacts in the writing of medieval South Asian histories: that of props or supplements, wheeled onstage in a supporting role to bolster textualized mediations of the

| Things and Texts past.While acknowledging the value of texts as hisThis dynamic aspect of translation confounds any at- torical documents, by placing an equal emphasis on tempt to draw hard-and-fast boundaries between cul- _ material culture I seek to challenge their centrality to tural formations. The point is eloquently made by the the writing of South Asian histories. The material

9d

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ie OMe / "waets Noe a a} F 4 : i? ff o e" ie . a 4 : , ye e aes \ ~ Fi ; ‘ a 4 j

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t * J he a eae. * fe : : * he cP ae : x etl ‘ ¢ :

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3 r : te yt he J 3 4 ee

‘ 7 Ss Pee ACen ef / Ms) i? , te | iz f Jer “7 ]

.; ;2i!ey “ neora ‘FR; _ Piafiring i , “ ‘ .ys : a ‘A ‘ © allge c. ae Ma ;.“‘é. af ji% zuya PAS rane? ao on)amet Ow Ree ay ge:6< | P ffand rn,the » aIndian : ae os i AN : : (Er _ tnoefae Lou,

Nuri . ee a ,§ ae ol y ria(‘),ns I 43§4 (Bodleian : ; ‘¢ om-i * a ;a . . oe ‘y e*oP f > wee : ary, rereiry im . ' é ee ee Ce 3 “g fae! ’ ‘ .3 ;|

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ne y, University of 2 te a :, : tie mamas 6 ele ale } | | ae ai als

IO

i < )ODUCTION ' _— INTROL

culture of my book's title is a deliberately expansive milieu. It ignores, for example, conceptions of the efterm that includes coins, frescoes, modes of dress, fect and meaning of Sanskrit words as substantive texts, manuscripts, monumental architecture, and the _ rather than representational, imbued with the ability more abstract but no less revealing realm of onomas- to alter physical substance and thus produce radical tics, royal titulature, and ritual practice. In my narra- spatial effects.’° This conception of language adumtive there is a loose progression in chronology and _ brates more complex relationships between subjects, scale, from objects and modes of dress to monumental objects, words and spaces than those imagined in the architecture. Although my primary focus is on ob- _ post-Enlightenment ontologies that Summers takes jects, at various points agricultural technology, taxa- _ for granted. tion, and military tactics are also relevant to questions This observation is directly relevant to Burzuya’s

of material culture and cultural flows. Casting the own tale, and to his subsequent reception when he net broadly, I aim to highlight the ability of artifacts returned to Iran with his translated treasures. As one to provide fresh insights and novel perspectives when might expect, Anushirvan’s envoy received suitable treated as potentially complementary (rather than recompense for his efforts in India on behalf of his supplementary) sources of historical information. I royal patron, being offered all the riches of the kinghave avoided referring to these artifacts as “art ob- dom by his king. What happened next is, from the jects,” less from any imagined aesthetic inadequacy perspective of a modern reader at least, rather surpristhan from the (perhaps conservative) assumption that ing: “Burzuya knelt before Nushirvan and praised his art objects are generally ends rather than means. Some __ king. He said that since it was the wish of his sovereign

of the objects that will be discussed here—among _ that he choose something, he would obey. The physithem frescoes, textiles, and temples—would no doubt cian went to the royal wardrobe and took one of the gain admittance to the exclusive club of objets d’art; —_ king’s robes.””’ Within the context of a commodity others intended to mediate more quotidian interac- culture, Burzuya’s modest choice of reward is almost tions would undoubtedly not. Both are, however, incomprehensible. In the medieval Islamic world in equally informative for histories of circulation and — which this tale was written and read, however, the gift-

consumption. ing of robes constituted a metalanguage of power. BeI am aware of the paradox inherent in adopting yond material value, the robe incorporates Burzuya linguistic models for a book that champions the value __ into the political structures of the Sasanian court, funcof material culture. I am also aware that, in doing so, _ tioning as a “transactional symbol,” a device through I am to some extent swimming against the tide. The — which the ruler constituted a chosen subject as a boon dominance of a linguistic model in the social sciences | companion who shared in his sovereignty. Adopted,

has sustained recent criticism from a number of schol- adapted, and appropriated by medieval elites, these ars, among them the art historian David Summers, _ kinds of artifacts produced networks of affinity not who has argued that whereas language is conventional, — bounded by religious, ethnic, or linguistic identity but works of art “are embodied under certain conditions, by possession, consumption, and display.”

and these are only secondarily conventional.” Summers The artifacts’ ability to function in this way was argues that when it comes to works of art (and by ex- directly related to their possession of a physical relatension any artifact), “what parallels ‘grammar and tionship (ranging from full body contact to a passing syntax is the construction of real and virtual space glance) with the body of the donor. Donning the consequent to patterns of human use.”® That is, un- _ transvalued apparel (often as part of a ceremonial relike the words and sentences of conventional lan- clothing), the recipient not only came to act on the guages, created artifacts have concrete material pres- _king’s authority but functioned as a notional extension

ence and real spatial relations. of his body, part of what a modern anthropologist Curiously, however, since it is embedded in what —_ would call his “distributed personhood.””? Burzuya’s is in effect a universal history of art, Summers’ critique _ desire for his patron’s castoff above all the riches of Iran

of the inadequacy of linguistic models to account for thus serves as a reminder that the post-Enlightenment material things is firmly rooted in a Euro-American view of subjects as ontologically distinct from (and

II

prior to) the objects that they create, circulate, and _ that the existence of commonalities and homologies consume is the product of a specific cultural attitude between the cultures of elites was often central to the and is neither universal nor natural.”* This recognition operation of a “cultural hermeneutic,” in which the brings us back to Bruno Latour’s definition of moder- _— material world was deeply implicated, and which this nity as a perpetual tussle between practices of transla- | hermeneutic implicated in its turn.”* They have, howtion that create hybrids (of culture and nature as much _ ever, focused primarily on architecture, on Gujarat, the

as culture and culture) and strategies of purification Deccan, and South India, and the fourteenth through designed to articulate and enforce the ontological dis- sixteenth centuries, when the Delhi sultanate expanded tinction between humans and nonhumans that has into these regions. Despite a heavy debt to these piobeen naturalized in many post-Enlightenment societ- _ neering studies, this book is the first to deal with the ies. By drawing attention to the mutual imbrications crucial formative period of Indo-Islamic culture, with of animate subjects and inanimate objects, a subsid- _ the northern Indian context of this formation, to coniary aim of this book is to explore the constitutive re- sider material culture in all its manifestations, and to lationships between subjects, objects, and political take a transregional approach to premodern transculformations, and the ways in which these relationships tural encounters.

were implicated in processes of transculturation.” The chapters that follow explore the mechanisms Investigation of these phenomena has been frus- of circulation (among them looting, gifting, and trated by sectarian taxonomies institutionalized as an _ trade) through which specific classes of artifacts con-

academic division of labor within which Indic art, | structed and mediated cultural boundaries, and the history, and languages are specializations considered — ways in which meaning and value were translated and distinct from their “Islamic” counterparts. Essential- _ transfigured through the mobility of both people and ist categories of “Hindu” and “Muslim” identity have things. Ranging across dynastic, geographic, regional,

been projected onto all aspects of premodern cultural and temporal categories, the emphasis is on histories production, so that in the representation of the pre- of circulation, reception, and translation rather than modern past, Indic modes of architecture, dress, epig- on strictly dynastic or political history. Histories of raphy, language, and literary production are neces- this kind invariably risk dehistoricizing and unifying sarily opposed to their Islamic counterparts. As the the very protean phenomena that they seek to emphahistorian Barbara Metcalf noted recently, should a _ size. Responding to this danger, Patrick Manning inmember of the transcultural elites that moved be- _ dicates three criteria of analysis that will minimize or tween the “Hindu” and “Muslim” courts of premod- —_ obviate its impact, and these criteria have informed ern South Asia visit a modern museum, he would find = my own approach: consideration of a wide range of his possessions displayed in different rooms, divided interactions across a variety of cultural forms and on the basis of a sectarian taxonomy that parses and _ practices (architecture, dress, music, etc.); specificity stratifies the complex products of heterogeneous cul- __ regarding the agents and criteria of cross-cultural contural milieus.”° The impulse is equally manifest in the tact; the need to be alive to both continuities and dispractice of splitting coin hoards from South Asia into —_ continuities, to shifts in the nature of cross-cultural tokens bearing Arabic or Sanskrit inscriptions, which interaction even in the same regions through time.”

are then parted to enter different patterns of modern. Situating “thick” synchronic analyses of a wide circulation and publication. This frustrates under- array of cultural artifacts, encounters, and practices standing of the heterogeneous cultural milieus in within a “thin” diachronic matrix that ranges over which these tokens circulated but “corrects” perceived four centuries, the discussion that follows can make anomalies according to modern taxonomic logic.’”” no claims to be comprehensive. Nevertheless, any atThe past decade has in fact seen significant at- tempt to represent complex social realities through tempts to combine textual and material evidence in the linear medium of text invariably entails a selective order to develop more complex paradigms for under- approach, unless like Borges’ infamous map it aims standing the interrelationships between Muslims and for a one-to-one relationship between the representanon-Muslims in South Asia. These have demonstrated tion and the represented. In this sense, the fragmen-

12 INTRODUCTION

tary nature of the material evidence is both a blessing Turkic sultans of Ghazni to Hindu rulers that they and a curse, limiting the information available but constituted as vassals during the same period. These also frustrating the totalizing approach to the past to —_ exchanges involved both objects and acts, raising inwhich the fixities of “Hindu” and “Muslim” identity teresting questions about the translatability of sarto-

are integral. rial codes and ritual practices, questions that will be

Chapter 1 begins on the eastern frontier of the addressed in varying ways throughout the course of ‘Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad during the ninth and this book. tenth centuries. It focuses on two of the dynasties Chapter 3 deals with the decades after 1150, when whose emergence on the eastern frontier marked ade- the rule of the Ghaznavid sultans was eclipsed by an cline in the centralized authority of the caliphate: the obscure Persianate dynasty based in the remote mounSaffarids of Sistan (now southern Afghanistan) and _ tainous region of Ghur in central Afghanistan. Previthe Arab amirs of Sind (now southern Pakistan). The — ously vassals of the Ghaznavids, in the last decades of Saffarids originally governed in the name of the ‘Ab- the twelfth century the Ghurids established a major basid caliph in Baghdad, but between 873 and 900 the _ transregional sultanate that conjoined the former terbrothers Ya‘qub ibn Layth (d. 265/879) and ‘Amr ibn __ritories of various Rajput kingdoms in northern India Layth (d. 289/902) extended their control over much _—_ with some of the most important cultural centers in of Iran and the lands of the Indo-Afghan frontier, the eastern Iranian world for the first time. Although eventually going so far as to march on Baghdad itself the Ghurid polity endured only for a few short dein 262/876.*° During the same period, two quasi- _ cades, its transregional character was marked by new independent Arab amirates emerged in Sind, a region _ patterns of mobility between northern India, Afghanpeppered with major mercantile emporia connected __istan, and eastern Iran. In spite of the Ghurids’ role as by sea and land to both the central Islamic lands and the “national” dynasty of Afghanistan, analysis of the India. The Saffarids and Sindi amirs used gifts of In- material culture of the sultanate and its ability to ildian exotica, including looted Buddhist and Hindu —_luminate the cultural flows that marked the period icons, to negotiate their often fractious relationships has been precluded by the remoteness of the Afghan with Baghdad. Conversely, the surviving material evi- | monuments on the one hand and the negative role dence from Sind highlights that region’s roleasanexus ascribed to “Muhammad Ghori” (sultan Mu‘izz albetween the central lands of the Baghdad caliphate © Din Muhammad of Ghur) as the Muslim conqueror and the neighboring “Hindu” polities of India. Arti- of India in South Asian historiography on the other. factual and textual evidence suggest that ‘Abbasid Sind Attempting to remedy this neglect, chapters 3 through was a major center of ivory and metalworking, whose _ 5 (that is, the greater part of this book) are concerned importance has been overlooked until now. One rea-__—- with the architecture, coinage, ceremonial practices, son for this neglect is that the “hybrid” products of and political structures of the Ghurid sultanate, and Sindi artisans resist categorization as Indic or Islamic, their often complex relationships with their northern posing a significant challenge to the categorical struc- Indian counterparts. tures on which modern understandings of the past are The final chapter (6) focuses on the Delhi sultan-

invariably based. ate that emerged in the three decades following the Chapter 2 focuses on the circulation of items and collapse of the Ghurid sultanate around 1206. In the

modes of dress, and its implications for differing con- — wake of this event, India was riven by competition beceptions of the body. It builds on the discussion of — tween the Turkic military slaves of the Ghurid sultan, Sind in chapter 1, considering the ways in which the — with Delhi finally emerging as the major cultural and

construction of the royal body among the Arab elites _ political center under the patronage of sultan Iltutof Sind was informed by contacts with their Indian mish (d. 633/1236). Although Iltutmish built on the neighbors. It goes on to consider the adoption of | Ghurid legacy, demographic shifts caused by developTurko-Persian modes of dress by Buddhist elites rul- ments in the wider Islamic world between roughly ing the western Himalayas in the eleventh and twelfth 1200 and 1230 are reflected in significant changes in centuries, and the gifting of robes of honor by the _ the content and form of the extensions that he made

13

to the Friday Mosque of Delhi (1192 onward). Under for anachronism. Like the idolatry discussed in chapIltutmish, the mosque became the locus for an ag- ter 1, anachronism is a vice located in the eye of the elomeration of signs that sought to project the author- _ beholder. It is closely related to the critique of politiity of the sultanate while shaping the identity of the cally informed practices of history writing as “interMuslim community of northern India. The endeavor _ ventionist.” The charge of interventionism, like that was intended to construct a genealogy for the sultan- of anachronism, obscures the historicity of history, ate that addressed the dialectical nature of Indian Is- the fact that all narrative (re)constructions of the past

lamic identity (the double movement referred to and the methodologies that they employ are historiabove), asserting a relationship with the wider Islamic cally constituted and thus engage a past that is at once

world while accommodating and appropriating the distant and “dialectically continuous with the pres-

signs of an Indian past. ent,” as the anthropologist Nicholas Dirks puts it.®°

It will be clear by now that my own conceptual This occlusion generally obviates any need to analyze framework is a bricolage of ideas drawn not only from _ the content of such histories, while effectively champischolarship on other premodern frontier regions (no- _—_ oning as History the preexisting or hegemonic narra-

tably Anatolia, Armenia, Spain, and Sicily) but also tives that they challenge.* from a myriad of disparate disciplines, including art Remaining cognizant of emic explanations, our history, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, | own narrative (re)constructions of historical events and linguistics. Despite my championing of material must of necessity be in our (etic) terms, since they are culture and its value as a historical document, implicit being offered not to the participants but to our conin my use of contemporary theoretical work is a rejec- | temporaries and successors.*” Moreover, historical tion of any notion of a “return to the object” as if it narratives are always underdetermined by the evidence were preexistent or self-subsisting.*' A subsidiary aim on which they depend, and therefore potentially mulof the book is, therefore, to contribute to a negotiation __tiple.®° As the central organizing trope of this study, of the (often-marked) boundaries between empirically translation has the advantage of acknowledging this, driven and theoretically informed scholarship on pre- _ recognizing that the task of the historian is an openmodernity, while forging a dialogue between those in- _ ended process of negotiating the unstable relationship terested in the relationships between precolonial, colo- __ between past and present.*’ In its appropriation of apnial, and postcolonial history and historiography.* proaches and concepts from a range of fields and their This engagement with theories of the present ina deployment in contexts far from those in which they study of the past will inevitably attract criticism for may have emerged, and for which they may have been privileging etic categories of explanation (those drawn intended, my own approach enacts the phenomenon from exogenous frameworks of analysis and under- __ that is its subject, acknowledging that the translator is standing) over emic (those that would have been rec- —_ always present in and implicated by the translation. ognized by the actors in a given situation): in short,

14 INTRODUCTION

t | The Mercantile Cosmopolis A marketplace is the epitome of local identity... and the unsettling of that identity by trade and traffic of goods from elsewhere.

—Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), 27

| Polyglot Frontiers and Permeable Boundaries vey of India, writing in the Cambridge History of India in 1928: “With the Arabs, who in the beginning of the In the first decades of the eighth century, the armies _ eighth century possessed themselves of Sind, our conof the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus, the first Islamic cern is small. Like other Semitic peoples they showed

dynasty, defeated the indigenous rulers of the Iberian _ but little natural instinct for architecture or the forPeninsula in the west and the Indus Valley in the east. mative arts.”* This impression of Sind as a cultural The subsequent history of Islamic Spain is well known, void was reinforced by its ecology. Earthquakes and manifest in spectacular monuments such as the Great constant shifts in the course of the river Indus over Mosque of Cordoba, and by the ivories and richly the course of the past millennium have obscured the carved marbles found in European and American material traces of the Arab period, which are known museum collections. By contrast, Arab Sind has been only through recent archaeological excavations and forgotten, ignored in studies of early Islamic material. surveys.° The reasons for this are several. In the first place, there The neglect of the eastern territories in modern is the perception of Sind as geographically remote _ scholarship belies, however, their importance to the fifrom the major cultural and political centers of the nancial, moral, and political economies of the caliphcaliphate. This quality was apparent even to premod- ate. Between the eighth and tenth centuries, a vast ern observers such as the Jerusalem-born al-Mugadd- array of materials, among them coins, natural resources, asi, whose observations on Sind betray tenth-century manufactured goods, and even looted Buddhist and

prejudices: Hindu icons circulated westward from the eastern . . is ; frontier to the central Islamic lands. In addition to Here an elegant metropolis, a noble river, un. booty, taxes,However, and trade, the of flora, fauna, common things. itsimportation non-Muslims are . and agricultural technology from Sind permitted polytheists, scholars there are few; moreover, you oT. , , the

and mental stress.

exploitation of economically marginal regions of Iraq cannot reach it except after the dangers of the ted ; itself.* Although the devastation wrought by the Monland and; gol theconquest terrorsofofIraqthe sea, after hardships in the thirteenth century makes. .it

difficult to trace the impact of these eastern imports on Prejudices of a more modern kind, but no less rele- _ the artistic production of the ‘Abbasid heartlands, the vant to this neglect, are apparent in the comments of — cultural flows of the period were clearly multidirecSir John Marshall, director of the Archaeological Sur- _ tional, suggesting that the relationship between center

TS

and periphery was considerably more complex than _ the three sections into which this chapter is divided

has usually been assumed. address different but interrelated aspects of mobility In this chapter I want to explore the role of the — between Iraq and al-Hind and the circulatory proeastern territories, particularly Sind, within the trade cesses through which diverse subjects and objects, networks that developed in the heyday of the ‘Abbasid men and commodities, were brought into constellacaliphate during the ninth and tenth centuries. Con- tion. The first section considers the scale and nature of necting regions as diverse as the Atlantic coast of Eu- the trade in commodities between India and the Isrope and the Indian Ocean littoral of India, what has —_ lamic world, and the human agents who facilitated it. been dubbed the “Arab Common Market” fostered ‘The second outlines the peregrinations of looted Budthe development of supralocal systems of exchange dhist and Hindu icons from the area of what today is that cut across (while not necessarily transcending) | Afghanistan and Pakistan and draws attention to their ethnic, linguistic, political, and religious boundaries.’ __ role in the political and moral economies of the BaghThese networks and zones of mobility were both mari- _ dad caliphate. The third examines the evidence for the

time and terrestrial. The first connected Sind and material culture of Sind (now in southern Pakistan) western India with an Indian Ocean circuit that linked during this period, and the insights that this evidence the maritime emporia of the Red Sea and Arabia in offers into the complexities of cultural and religious the west with southwestern China in the Far East. An- _ identity on its eastern frontier.

other branch connected Sind and al-Hind with Iraq According to one of the many hadiths (Tradiand the Persian Gulf ports, Basra and Siraf being by _ tions of the Prophet), the Prophet Muhammad both far the most important. From the ports of Sind, both prophesied the conquest of India and exhorted believriverine and terrestrial routes led into the interior of — ers to travel as far as the subcontinent in search of the Indus Valley, to the landlocked urban centers of | knowledge.’ While the first tradition suggests an early Mansura and Multan. From here, merchants, travel- _ aspiration toward the exercise of Arab political hegeers, and goods could connect to the terrestrial corri- mony, the second invokes the renown of India as a dors that led west, to the desert region of Makran and __ reservoir of philosophical and technological knowlon to Iran, or travel by the slower but more hospitable edge, raising the possibility of more profound levels routes that led via mountain passes and valleys to Sis- of cultural engagement. The earliest Arab incursions tan (with its capital of Zarang) or Zamindawar (around into the Kabul Valley occurred by the 650s, and the Kandahar) in southern Afghanistan or to the emporia northern and western regions of what today is Afand political centers of Ghazni and Kabul farther to — ghanistan had come under Arab control by the early the northeast. From here, the journey could be con- _ eighth century. However, the eastern and southern tinued to Khurasan, the wealthy and culturally dy- borderlands of Afghanistan were administered by a namic region of eastern Iran, or north into Transoxi- _ series of enigmatic rulers known only by their titles— ana and Central Asia.° Alternatively, merchants might the Zunbil of Zamindawar, the Lawik of Ghazni, the take southeasterly routes that led along the coast from Shir of Bamiyan—whose dynastic temples seem to Sind toward the coastal emporia in the domains of the have enshrined cults with strong Indic affinities.’ In Rashtrakuta rajas of the Deccan, or more northeast- _ the ninth and tenth centuries the Kabul Valley was in erly trajectories to the Gangetic Plain and the territo- the possession of the powerful Hindu Shahis, until

ries of the Gurjara-Pratihara rajas of Kanauj. the eventual eclipse of the dynasty by the Ghaznavids The maritime and terrestrial routes connecting of Afghanistan. the central lands of the ‘Abbasid caliphate in Iraq and In the course of the ninth, tenth, and early elevits eastern frontier regions in what today are Afghani- __enth centuries, Sistan, Zabul, and Zamindawar (what stan and Pakistan were conduits not only for raw ma- _ today is southern Afghanistan) were gradually brought terials and high-value goods but also for religious and —_ under the political control of those who professed the political dogmas, artistic ideas, and for the human faith of Islam (fig. 2). These developments are closely agents who made and traded the objects in which they _—_ associated with the Saffarids of Sistan, maverick parwere manifest. Considering the heterogeneous consti- | venus who rose to prominence around 860, and the tution of a world to a remarkable degree in motion, | Ghaznavid sultans who succeeded them as the major

16 THE MERCANTILE COSMOPOLIS

power brokers in the east around 1000. The relation- “gateways” to India. Both Ghazni and Bamiyan, ship between the ‘Abbasid caliph in Baghdad (the titu- — which lay along the trade routes to Khurasan, are de-

lar head of the Sunni Muslim community) and the — scribed as the treasure-house of Sind (khazdin alamirs, commanders, and governors who mounted Sind), while Balkh is described as the emporium of raids and campaigns of conquest along the eastern India (bar-kadha-yi Hindistin).'° These frontier towns frontier was often ambiguous, marked by a consistent were polyglot emporia containing ethnically and reliand increasing tendency toward religious heterodoxy _—giously heterogeneous populations; tenth-century

||5 and political dissent. Kabul, then the capital of the Hindu Shahi dynasty,

By the late tenth century, the eastern extremities was typical, populated as it was by Muslims, Jews, and of the ‘Abbasid caliphate were roughly defined by a Indians (Hinddiwan).'' Arab and Persian merchants series of mercantile emporia along a line stretching (among them both Muslims and Jews) also operated from Balkh to Kabul, Gardiz, and Ghazni through _ in the coastal areas of Sind and western India and in the Gomal Pass to the Indus Valley, where access _ the interior as far as the central Indian city of Kanauj, could be had to the more direct sea routes.’ Along — while Indian merchants traded goods in Sind, Sistan, these routes, urban nodes such as Bust, Ghazni, and Zabulistan, and as far west as Kirman in southeastern Kabul are described as metaphorical “ports” of or — Iran. The honesty of these Indian traders is a persistent 2

Map showing the major political formations of South Asia during the ninth and tenth centuries.

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17

topos, as is the extent to which Indian rajas went to Arab historian al-Baladhuri (ninth century) and in the

protect trade and traders in their realms." Chachnama, a thirteenth-century Persian history of Farther to the south, an expedition under Mu- the campaigns in Sind apparently based on a lost Arahammad ibn Qasim had succeeded in bringing the __ bic original.’ major settlements of southern Sind under Arab con- The two most important cities under Arab control by the first decades of the eighth century.'? The trol were the ancient center of Multan in the Panjab possible appearance of the “king of India” (probably — and the city of Mansura in lower Sind, a new Arab Dahir, the ruler of Sind at the time of the contempo- foundation located near the ancient settlement of rary Arab conquest) along with other defeated rulers | Brahmanabad (fig. 2).”? The architecture of Arab Mul-

in a painting executed in a royal bathhouse at Qusayr tan is an unknown quantity, but both Mansura and ‘Amra in the Jordanian desert around AD 740 pro- Daybul (its dependent port, usually identified with vides a reminder of the “global” resonance of these the modern site of Banbhore in the Indus Delta) were campaigns of conquest in the east. Dahir’s engage- _ walled cities, with gates named after the regions toments with the Arabs are described in detail by the | ward which they faced (fig. 3).!° The port of Daybul 3

Plan of Banbhore, Indus Delta (after A. Khan 1990).

GENERAL PLAN OF K BANBHORE SITE INDUSTRIAL AREA |B alee] tdoy.yp |b A KL CE ZZ NORTHERN OUTER CITY 3

BO cA essere) (rece) TEES CmMOR Hf YY \ QT & V7 a pYUNYNVUUEY VERE VU VY Vee CUE Cm perv ay

L vesruin.secr0n Hd (Rls 3 ZY oe a yy es S OR 7 ET | .JieWil Me Y7 NORTH EASTERN SECT F TF «EASTERN é CENTRAL SECTOR |

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a, » seed 0 R FE k atweTY; Kay g area........... = eSYe h Excavated 7 . . 100 0 “Hu -« SOUTHERN SECTOR pol 0

ANCHORAGE © fect Scale |

18 THE MERCANTILE COSMOPOLIS

connected Mansura to the maritime routes of the In- the Prophet, and are consequently known as the Habdian Ocean, linking it with ports in the Red Sea and _ barids. Similarly, the amirs of neighboring Multan Persian Gulf in the west and in the east to the emporia _—_ claimed descent from Usama ibn Lu’ayy ibn Ghalib,

on the western coast of India, and ultimately to those another contemporary of the Prophet.” on the south coast of China. By contrast, Multan was This development reflects a decline in the cena landlocked emporium located along the slower east- _trifugal authority of the Baghdad caliphate, especially west trade routes linking Iraq, eastern Iran, Afghani- _ in its eastern territories. Around 354/965, the amirs of stan, Central Asia, and northern India.'’ Muslims ap- | Multan abandoned the fold of Sunni orthodoxy, pear to have been a minority in all these centers, and aligning themselves with the Fatimids of North AfMultan was the site of a celebrated Sun Temple, which rica, who espoused the Isma‘ili denomination of Shi‘i continued to operate and to attract pilgrims from all Islam, laid claim to the title of caliph, and installed

over the subcontinent after the conquest. "* themselves in Egypt, which seceded from ‘Abbasid The cosmopolitan world of Sind is evoked in the control in 358/969. ‘This was a period of resurgent Shi'i Arabic and Persian accounts of al-Hind left by tenth- _ political activity even in the Iraqi heartlands of the century geographers, sailors, travelers, and by the sed- _ caliphate, which from 344/955 was under the control

entary scholars who derived vicarious benefit from of the Buyids, Iranian Shi‘is based in the Gulf provtheir experiences. The ninth and tenth centuries saw ince of Fars, who retained the caliph as little more the production of more Arabic geographical accounts _ than a figurehead. Around the same time that Multan of India than any subsequent period, and the depen- came under Isma‘ili control, the amirs of Mansura dence of later writers on them attests to Sind’s role as _—_ aligned themselves with the Buyids, bringing the two a transregional nexus before 1000, when the sultans of | Arab polities of Sind within the Shi'i fold.** The hetGhazni reconfigured the cultural and political land- — erodox affinities of the amirs led to their demise; they

scape of the eastern Islamic world. were subject to military chastisement and eventual exIn the accounts, India is depicted as a world of _ tinction at the hands of the Ghaznavid sultan Mahmud wonders (a@ja@ib), much as it had been to western writ- __ in the first decades of the eleventh century.

ers from the time of Herodotus onward. This wonder There can be little doubt that maritime connecfinds expression in works such as the Akhbar al-Sind _ tions between Sind, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf played wal-Hind (News of Sind and al-Hind), compiled in a role in these realignments, facilitating the relatively 237/851, and the Kitab Ajaib al-Hind (The Book of _ rapid transmission of potentially seditious ideas and the the Wonders of al-Hind, ca. 955), compilations of sea- human agents who propagated them. Patronized by faring tales that weave together maritime lore, tales of | merchants from as far afield as Andalusia, the cosmothe fabulous, ethnographic observation, and historical _ politan port cities of Sind were ideally situated to the detail.'? The anecdotalist and geographer al-Mas‘udi promulgation and promotion of intra-Muslim polem(d. 346/957) traveled to India, and his firsthand ac- ics: the Quranic texts inscribed in the congregational count provides invaluable insights into the nature of | mosque at Banbhore (probable site of the celebrated the trade that underwrote the economies of Sind and __ port city of Daybul) seem to have been selected for al-Hind, and the cultures of the territories that this their ability to engage theological debates between ra-

trade encompassed and traversed.” tionalist and antirationalist factions that were raging in These works also provide unique insights into po- = Baghdad during the reign of the caliph al-Mutawakkil litical developments in both regions. Although Sind — (d. 248/861).

was administered in the name of the ‘Abbasid caliph During the ninth and tenth centuries, peninsular in Baghdad, from around 850 the caliph’s writ ob- India was dominated by two major political formatained erratically. After 850, a series of rebellious gov- _ tions: the Rashtrakuta rajas of the Deccan, who claimed ernors gave way to self-styled amirs who enjoyed de —_ overlordship of peninsular India as a whole, and the facto autonomy and struck coins to an Indian rather | Gurjara-Pratiharas of Kanauj, who between circa 836 than an Iraqi standard. The amirs of Mansura claimed and 933 united large areas of northern India, including

descent from Habbar b. Aswad, a contemporary of areas of Gujarat and Rajasthan that abutted the Arab

19

amirates of Sind (see fig. 2). The Arabs refer to the the east (Sistan, Sind, Kabul, Ghazni) and the inchoPratiharas as the Jurz (Gurjara) or Biruza (from biruda, ate world of the dar al-harb that lay beyond. their epithet), and to the Rashtrakuta maharaja as the In addition to the transmission of booty and tribBalhara, an Arabization of Ballaha-riya, the Prakrit ute, several gift exchanges between the ‘Abbasid caform of Vallabha-raja (the beloved king), one of his _ liphs and the “king of India” are documented for the titles.*4 The Balhara is frequently described as the great- ninth and tenth centuries, the result of diplomatic est of the rulers of India, his success attributed to his — contacts with South Asian rulers established as early as favorable disposition toward the Arabs, with whom he the seventh century.”” Among the more intriguing re-

shared common cause against the Gurjara-Pratiharas. ports of such exchanges, Dahmi or Rahmi, described By contrast, the Gurjara-Pratiharas are reported as the great king of India, is said to have sent the ‘Abto have been hostile to Muslims in general and to the __ basid caliph al-Mamun (d. 217/833) a letter describing Arabs of Sind and their Rashtrakuta allies in particu- his palace built of aloes wood, its treasury, and the lar. The Pratiharas maintained strong armies to be de- _ wealth of his court. Accompanying the letter was a ployed against both, and numerous inscriptions re- vast array of Indian riches and a book whose Arabic cord military engagements between the Arabs and the _ title is rendered as Safwat al-Adhhan (The Cream of rajas of Kanauj or their vassals during the course of Intellect). In the written response that accompanied

the ninth and tenth centuries.” the rare gifts with which the caliph reciprocated, the Vagaries in the political relationships between caliph mentions his inclusion of a work titled Diwan Baghdad, Sind, and al-Hind did little to stem the al-Albab wa Bustin Nawadir al-‘Uqul (The Gathering westward flow of agents, artifacts, booty, commodi- of the Cores of Intellect and the Garden of Rare ties, information, and texts during these centuries. | Minds).*° The exchange of texts across linguistic barThe remittance of Indian booty or tribute to the early _ riers may seem unlikely, but the same caliph is recaliphs is documented as early as the late seventh cen- _ ported to have solicited Greek manuscripts from the tury, but it increased exponentially with the conquest Byzantine emperor.*' The letter accompanying the caof Sind in the early eighth. Under the Umayyad caliph __liph’s gifts reportedly referred to the need for its own Mu‘awiya b. Abi Sufyan (d. 60/680), the governor of translation, an activity that was actively pursued at the

the Indian frontier received the submission of the ‘Abbasid court, enhancing knowledge about and from ruler of al-Qigan in Sind, who agreed to pay the poll India through the rendering of Indian astronomical, tax (jizya@) imposed on non-Muslims and forwarded medicinal, and pharmacological texts into Arabic.” the governor a number of rarities including a fragment ‘The association between India and learning was so of a mirror said to have belonged to Adam, which was __ well established at this period that some Arab observ-

selected for dispatch to the caliph.*° The gift of a ers attributed the ultimate sources of Greek learning golden jeweled camel sent by the “king of India” to to that country. Arabic translations of Sanskrit texts al-Junayd b. ‘Abd al-Rahman, the governor of Sind (including the Panchatantral Kalila wa Dimna) were during the reign of the caliph Hisham (d. 125/743), rarely direct, however, but were usually mediated by ended up in the treasury of the Umayyads, from _ earlier Middle Persian (Pahlavi) translations.” whence it passed into the possession of their succes- Occasionally, the process of translation benefited sors, the ‘Abbasids.”’ A later governor of Sind, ‘Imran from the fruits of Arab “scientific expeditions” to b. Musa b. Khalid b. Barmak (d. ca. 226/840), sent the —_ India. In a curious echo of the framing tale from Kalila ‘Abbasid caliph two thousand Indian prisoners of war, —§ wa Dimna with which I began this book, the ‘Abbasid

precious raw materials, worked gold and silver objects vizier Yahya ibn Barmak (d. 187/803), who was deand weapons, and other curiosities and rarities includ- — scended from the custodians of a Buddhist shrine at ing birds and animals.”® Making immanent at the cen- _ Balkh in northwestern Afghanistan, dispatched a mister distant (and sometimes notional) victories at the sion to India to gather information on its medicinal periphery, these gifts of exotic animals, precious raw __ plants and religions. ‘The resulting text continued to

materials, rare commodities, and looted curiosities be an important source for later writers on India. linked the ideal political center of the medieval Sunni The presence of Indian informants in Baghdad world, Baghdad, with regional centers of authority in itself is also well documented. The production of the

20 THE MERCANTILE COSMOPOLIS

Zij al-Sindhind, one of the most important works of Later members of the Indian diaspora may have medieval Arabic astronomy, was facilitated by the provided the inspiration for the representations of Inpresence of an Indian scholar who came to Baghdad dian sailors and princes found in Arabic and Persian bearing scientific tracts (including a siddhdnta or as- —_ manuscripts and on ceramics between the twelfth and tronomical text) as part of delegation sent byarulerof fourteenth centuries (fig. 4). Some of these Iraqi paintSind in 154/771 or 156/773, one of anumber of Indian _ ings make use of stylistic details common to earlier scholars and physicians whose presence is reported at _—_ western Indian painting, hinting at dimensions of culthe ‘Abbasid court.” A perceived relationship between __ ture contact whose significance awaits further investicomplexion, ethnicity, and cultural achievements led _ gation.*? In these images, Indians are depicted accordat least one Arab author, writing in Spain around 1os0, __ ing to fairly consistent visual conventions: darker of

to explain that the ingenuity of Indians, their genius skin than their Arab and Persian contemporaries, by _ for astronomy, medicine, and mathematics, was at comparison with whom they are consistently underodds with their dark complexion.*° Nevertheless, the dressed (often bare chested and clad only in a dhoti or physical beauty of Indians (both male and female) is — /wng?), sporting long hair (often tied in a topknot) and also a consistent topos in Arabic and Persian litera- long beards.

ture, along with their capacity for xenophobia, idola- The corollary of the Indian communities in the try, self-mutilation, and the observation that their rul- Gulf is the existence of sizable communities of Musers generally avoided alcohol (a source of cultural lim traders in the coastal domains of the Rashtrakuta kudos in Arab eyes) but had lax sexual mores (a stock __rajas of southern India. Epigraphic evidence attests to

monotheistic criticism of idolaters).*” the presence of Persian (either Zoroastrian or MusOutside the courtly milieu, Indian slaves acquired lim) merchants on the Konkan coast of western India during military campaigns along the eastern frontier _ as early as the late seventh century.* The geographer are occasionally encountered in Arabic and Persian ge- —_ al-Mas‘udi visited Saymur (modern Chaul south of ographies and histories, where their fortunes vary con- | Mumbai; see fig. 2) in 304/916 and saw there a large siderably. At one end of the spectrum are the Sindi community of Muslims comprising merchants from slaves in Iraq or the Indian slave boy encountered near _ Basra, Baghdad, Oman, Siraf, and Yemen.** During Qazwin in northwestern Iran by the Isma‘ili traveler this period the denizens of Siraf were active in the Nasir-i Khusrau in 438/1046; at the other is the In- —_ maritime trade as far east as China, and the best docudian slave who governed the Syrian city of Aleppo in — mented of the Sirafi merchants, Ramisht (d. 537/1142), the name of the Ayyubid sultan two centuries later.°* is said to have made a fortune in the Indian trade, In addition to pirates from Kachch and Kathiawar — with some of which he endowed and embellished the who raided as far west as southern Iraq as early as the — sanctuary at Mecca.

ninth century, the presence of Indian merchants is re- The Iraqi and Persian Muslims of western India ported in the ports of southern Iraq, where the con- were provided with both neighborhood mosques struction of Hindu shrines suggests that they enjoyed (masdajid) and congregational mosques (jawdmi* or the freedom to worship openly.” As late as the fif- masagqit-i adhina) standing in close proximity to idol teenth century, Hormuz, the successor to Sirafon the temples (but-khdna) endowed with minarets from Persian Gulf, is said to have had a sizable community — which the call to prayer (adhdan), the takbir (the cry of non-Muslims, its inhabitants combining what a “God is great”), and the tahi/il (the statement that there contemporary traveler refers to as “the glibness of Iraqis _ is no god but God) were given.“° The existence of these and the mysteriousness of Indians.”*° These merchants — diasporic communities is confirmed by inscriptions of were involved in the import of raw materials such as _ the Rashtrakuta and Kadamba rajas found on the west

aloe, exotic animals and their pelts, precious stones coast of India. The Chinchani copper-plate inscripand tropical hardwoods, and manufactured goods into tion of Saka 848 (AD 926) mentions that a Tajika, the ‘Abbasid lands from India, including metalwork, | who with the name of Madhumati Sugatipa (Muhamworked leather, textiles, and sandals from Cambay (an mad Lord of the Virtuous) son of Sahiyarahara (Shahinteresting comment on the portability of premodern __riyar) was evidently a Persian Muslim, governed the

fashions).*! region of Sanjan (Samyana) on the Karnataka coast of 21

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NVA eae eH nificant differences in the public culture of Mansura a=ee De | and Multan. The coins still await a detailed study;

ge ec Des ae | many of their inscriptions have yet to be deciphered, ZL aN) ~~ oS ee Nevertheless, even a preliminary analysis indicates

SS 7 \\-a- | their singular importance for understanding the culBs struck to the same denomination standard as the tiny

10 silver coins from Mansura but differ significantly in Habbarid silver damma from Sind compared their epigraphic content. On their reverse, the Mul-

with a modern dime. tani coins all bear a three-dot motif of unknown significance also found on contemporary Indian coins, Sind) is again reminiscent of the coinage issued by and Arabic inscriptions that are only partly legible,

contemporary northern Indian rulers. but include proper names such as Harun (important The dammas issued in the name of the Habbarids evidence for the identity of the Multani amirs, only of Mansura are inscribed in Arabic with the name ofthe | one of whose name is known) and religious phrases

ruling amir (fig. 11), the kalima (profession of faith), such as lilléh muhammad (to God, Muhammad and doxologies invoking God’s help, asserting the amirs —_. . .).'°° There are two basic variants of obverse texts: trust in him, and his ability to bring victory. The legend — Arabic inscriptions similar to those on the reverse and la ilaha illé allah wahdahu la shavik lahu (There is no — Sanskrit texts written in Nagari script (fig. 12).

god but God alone, no partner to Him), which also ap- The Sanskrit inscriptions invoke a wide array of pears on many of these coins, had been used on Islamic — Hindu deities. To date, coins with four different San-

coinage from the late seventh century and appears on _ skrit texts have been published: s77 ddivaraha (the contemporary ‘Abbasid silver coinage.'*’ The presence blessed or fortunate great boar), srimad variha (the of Arabic script did not, however, prevent the circula- _ boar possessed of fortune), s77 laks|mi?] (the fortunate tion of the Habbarid dammas into the adjacent “Hindu” —_laksh[mi?]), and s77 madhumadi (the blessed or fortu-

regions of Marwar, Ajmir, Mewar, and Saurashtra.'*! nate Muhammad). Two of the four types thus invoke

It has been suggested that the appearance of Varaha, the great boar incarnation of Vishnu, while “Indic” motifs such as lotus flowers, stars, and flowers another seems to contain the name of Lakshmi, the on the copper coins issued by the Arab amirs of Sind Hindu goddess of wealth. Other unpublished types indicates the increasing “indigenization” of the ruling — reportedly bear the inscriptions svi jayanta raja and sri elite.'®’ Whether or not this is so, recent finds of pre- — mihira deva, both of which are allusions to Surya, the viously unknown dammas minted in the name of the — sun god whose celebrated temple was located in MulArab rulers of Multan provide more pronounced evi- tan and whose images (along with those of Hindu

39

- ae — ~

; 4 rae PS , x : ; a ; * i * ‘

;‘ Pe ."hal2424: 4CE — 7’™ Bids :| a,vers *_~ % : TE » * i. - / er 2 ™, > i . |

" P *, ss,1 a ‘i a 4®—‘ i “a — a ¥

a bs f : i . 4 a j ;

a a ” Bt | c . ™

ic’ » 4 3 — ‘ q Obverse and reverse of eight bilingual dammas - | ,

! rom N { ul | tan | p rl Vate ct y| lec [ i ym). a. a: . — at Kio, ee

mt ge Poll " ww : ; nm F a 7 “ en}Ler~ ae " a

Adivaraha damma struck by the Pratiharas of t gt ao - ws iG | i, northern India in the ninth century bearing an + a * a snd) ‘ a oe 4

anthropomorphized the boar i , tof ee Ps * . te ,* j ® . ‘ image 4 ye ofante’ 4 ik “~~ _~ao2nf3j incarnation of Vishnu (private collection). : au ny , | , Tae 7 oe ff

. _~ f ail w ~~ be x. ls 4 . ae PP Foo.—— rl a“— v)YY it 0 | Py RycH rr, I J Ry| QU les if : : a5

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16 |

ih

Reconstruction drawing of a nine-bayed — |

mosque, Ihambo Wari, Sind (drawing by Vincent Bernard, architect of the Se)A | /

French Archaeological Mission Sind, wy) oe reproduced courtesy of Monik Kervran).toSS small nine-bayed mosque found throughout the Is- would have originally had a flat roof made of stone lamic world at this date. Its appearance in Sind points _ slabs.

once again to the maritime connections of the region, Despite these formal affinities to the mosques of for contemporary mosques of similar form are found the wider Islamic world, the multisectional pillars and in the coastal emporia of Egypt.*’° Those found else- the carved creeper ornament that frames the entrance where, especially in those regions of the Persianate to the mosque are entirely Indic in form and decoraworld where brick was the dominant structural me- tion. In this respect, the mosque has more in common dium, are usually domed. Here, however, the basic with the stone temples of the region or the twelfthform is executed in the local stone medium and tra- —_ century mosques and tombs constructed for maritime beate (post and lintel) idiom of the Indus Delta, and = communities of Muslims living within the domains of

46 THE MERCANTILE COSMOPOLIS

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consisting of two uprights joined by a horizontal Rather than reflecting their hypothetical Turkic line—recurs as a border on twelfth-century Ghurid ethnicity, the dress of the Alchi rulers is more likely to tiles found in Ghazni (fig. 40) and in the brick orna- indicate the adoption of modes of dress associated ment of a Ghurid tomb near Multan in the Indus Val- with the articulation of authority in the powerful adley, both of which date from the last decades of the _jacent sultanates of Afghanistan. In his study of the twelfth century and are therefore roughly contempo- _Alchi frescoes, Pratapaditya Pal noted that the ruler’s rary with the frescoes.” In fact, by the twelfth century dress “was part of a common regal attire in a wide

this is perhaps the most common form of pseudoin- region (from the Panjab in India to the court of scription found in the medieval Islamic world from | Ghazni and beyond in the north and in Ladakh), the Mediterranean to Central Asia, a popularity that concluding that “the model court at the time (midmay reflect its derivation from the central characters of eleventh century) was perhaps Ghazni.”** Subsequent the Arabic word Allah, even if it had been so abstracted — work on the Dukhang frescoes has suggested a slightly by this date that its origins were no longer apparent.” _ later date for them, and the royal portraits may equally The affinities of the Alchi fresco (fig. 33) with the reflect contemporary court culture in the Ghurid sulroyal iconography of the eastern Islamic world have tanate, the Ghaznavid successor state.°? Ghaznavid

led to suggestions that the Alchi image represents an and Ghurid sultans bestowed gifts of clothing—in“Indo-Aryan” or “Turko-Iranian” ruler who married cluding the gaba’—on both their own followers and into a local Himalayan royal family.*° The argument is

circular, depending on the identification of the royal

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Islamic worl, sometimes depicting individuals whe Ny) oe non, Soucek concluded that the dispersalifofnot Ati.ADs 4/5 70 “We thesePriscilla modes of dress reflects “a kind of implicit, Se have primarily conveyed a sense of power and only sea EEE ented secondarily of Turkish ethnicity.”*’ Like the gabd@’ that a a co 7 ; 7 8 they adorn, the popularity of the inscribed pseudo- 8 a a - — 2

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