Objects, Images, Stories

Description

What histories do objects like coins or gems help us to trace? How can we read photographs and paintings? How do fictional tales, imaginative biographies, basic lexicons, or accounts of Sufi masters code intellectual worlds and reveal cultural and religious shifts? What range of sources is available to the historian of medieval and early modern India? How can textual sources illuminate material objects, sites, and practices, and vice versa? What historical
methods do the different sources and material objects require?

Drawing on the rich scholarship of Simon E. Digby (1932-2010) on South Asian medieval history and culture, the essays in this volume offer method lessons in a wide range of historical fields.

About the author: Francesca Orsini is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London. Her research spans modern and contemporary Hindi literature, cultural history, popular literature and the history of the book, and multi-lingual literary history. She is the author of Print and Pleasure (2009), and The Hindi Public Sphere (1920-1940) (2002).

Table of contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Richard Harris, Dominic Omissi and Colin Perchard
Introduction: Simon Digby's Method and Legacy
Francesca Orsini
MATERIAL TRACES AND RECONSTRUCTIONS
Qunduz and Bamiyan Token Coins and the Horse Trade between Central Asia and Delhi
John S. Deyell
Two Versions of a Book of Jewels in Persian
Bruce Wannell
Nath Yogis and their 'Amazing Apparel' in Early Material and Textual Sources
James Mallinson
The Bagh- i Safa alias Jharoka Bagh in Kashmir: Princess Jahanara's Garden on Manasbal Lake
Ebba Koch
A Reconstructed Mughal Khamsa of Nizami
John Seyller
Two New Kinds of Fire: Syphilis and Capsicum in Early Hindavi Vocabularies
Walter N. Hakala
PAINTINGS AND HISTORY
Travel, Companionship, and Erudition
Robert Skelton
Painting in Kashmir in the Eighteenth Century
Barbara Schmitz
Photography and Imagination: White Socks and Mughal Costumes in Nineteenth- Century Bhopal
Barbara D. Metcalf
Simon Digby as Collector: Paintings and Illustrated Manuscripts
Andrew Topsfield
III. TEXTS AND HISTORY
Time and Its Didactic Possibilities: Sijzi's Fawaid al- fuad and the Fourteenth- Century Chishtiyya
Sunil Kumar
Deviation or Tradition? Shah Madar, Sufi Religion, and the Islamic Past in a Mughal Tazkira
Muzaffar Alam
From Venice to Goa and Back
Anthony Welch
IV. WORKING WITH TALES
Zia Nakhshabi: A Sufi's View of Gender and Simon Digby's Attachment to Him
Scott Kugle
Translation, Circulation, Inflection: A Hindavi Tale in Persian Garb
Francesca Orsini
Beauty on the Brink of Death: The Story of Sohni Revisited
Christopher Shackle
In the Wake of Mirat- i- masudi, Chhote Lal's Sayyad salar lila
Shahid Amin
Select Glossary
Editor and Contributors
Index

5. Contributors (give full details of major contributors, especially if overseas)

Muzaffar Alam
Shahid Amin
John Deyell
Walter N. Hakala
Ebba Koch
Scott Kugle
Sunil Kumar
James Mallinson
Barbara D. Metcalf
Barbara Schmitz
John Seyller
Christopher Shackle
Robert Skelton
Andrew Topsfield
Bruce Wannell
Anthony Welch