After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India
- Submitting institution
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School of Oriental and African Studies
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics
- Output identifier
- 19885
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199450664.001.0001
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780199450664
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 400+ page book is the first output of my AHRC project North Indian Literary Culture and History, which sought to develop a new, multilingual approach to the literary and cultural history of early modern India to question and replace outdated mono-lingual narratives based on religious identity. This is also the first book dedicated to the neglected fifteenth century, i.e. the fertile period at the tail-end of the north Indian Sultanates and before the coming of the Mughals. It includes 13 essays by the most respected literary scholars, historians, and art historians in the field, writing on Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, and Apabhramsha literary production by Sufis, scribes, courtly poets across a whole range of genres, from dictionaries to verse narratives, from inscriptions and colophons to retellings of the epics. The book shows how a multilingual and interdisciplinary approach can reveal an unexpected wealth of historical actors, with their worldviews and their entangled trajectories. Unlike most cultural histories of the period, its perspective is resolutely not courtly-centric. I asked historian Samira Sheikh to help me write the substantial 40+ page introduction, which lays out the foundations of the multilingual approach, and in my essay I focused on bilingual Persian-Hindi Sufi texts as indicative of widespread bilingualism. All essays were doubly peer-reviewed externally by OUP, and in our own rounds of editing we pressed contributors to speak to each other across faultlines of language and archive.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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