Lecture (11): The Many Lifes of Mahabat Khan and the Importance of Military Kingship

The Center for South Asia at Stanford University recently hosted a lecture by Munis D. Faruqui, Associate Professor at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley entitled "Effrontery, Erasure, and Exaltation: An Episode in the Life of the Mughal Empire". Luckily for us, they graciously put it online. Dr. Faruqui is one of those rare historians whose every publication has become an instant classic in the field of Mughal studies. They include “The Forgotten Prince: Mirza Hakim and the Formation of the Mughal Empire,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 48 no. 4 (2005): 487-523; “At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad, and 18th Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 5-43; and The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504-1719. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Effrontery, Erasure, and Exaltation: An Episode in the Life of the Mughal Empire from Center for South Asia on Vimeo.

Offering Counsel to the Great Mughal

It has been a busy semester so far. I am always surprised how fast this semester goes by; between the good weather lasting late, an early Thanksgiving, and the non-stop administrative tasks associated with the new year, before you know it you're headed into November pondering what will late night television shows do without an American presidential election and the sudden dread of writing papers while trying to figure whether its worth risking going by PIA to the motherland (though I suspect I won't be headed there anytime soon). At least grant writing is over. Few tasks are as brutal. I am sure some people enjoy it, but I suspect those are the people who get a high from folding laundry and going for morning jogs. I am neither. In fact forms are themselves a source of great dread. I wonder if I could have survived working in Mughal administration with their love of record keeping (of which dreadful few survive or rather dreadful few are documented--this being neither the time nor place for me to bemoan how no one is trying to preserve the archive or do editorial/translation work in North America vis-a-vis the Mughal archive; Wheeler M. Thackston, John F. Richards and Sajida S. Alvi, we salute thee). 

Anyway, grants almost done, I feel odd about not having to apply for school. The last four years of undergraduate and masters were one big smorgasbord of anxiety about further grad school applications! On the bright side, coursework is coming through to make sure one doesn't feel too much at leisure. This is a heavy Persian semester for me, which thankfully is whipping me into better shape. We navigated our way through Rudaki and Shahnamah in Classical Persian Literature and today we finished some sections of Nasihat al-Muluk, which, it turns out, was written by al-Ghazali (d. 1111) [the easiest date in the books!]

I think what is becoming clearer for me is what a big part the study of different Mughal advice texts are going to play in my dissertation, from the lovely Mirza-namahs, to the various akhlaq texts, to the more straight to the point ones on governance in both prose and poetry. There is something about advice texts which I have always enjoyed. They are at that intersection of cultural, social, and political history that I find fascinating. The thing about them is, you can never work on just one or two. Piecemeal discourse analysis of the text can leave you with skewed and at times comical interpretations of what Mughal cultural practices actually were (The same can be said about Mughal chronicles and biographies, which for some reason, despite the considerable attention they have received from cultural historians, focus less on literary practices and more on theories of the self. How images, motifs, myths, etc are linked to their constellation of texts, a term to borrow from an old professor of mine, yet remains to be done; which, I suspect, is in part because it requires a large intellectual warehouse that we as modern historians we don't easily have at hand; from hadith, to the tales of the prophets, to popular legends, to anecdotes from much older tarikhs, adab texts, and poetry, to books of maxims, esoterica, and advice. The list goes on).

But back to advice texts. I think one has to pile them up like a stack of cards and start noticing the variations and individual contours. I think one of the more successful studies for South Asian advice literature is that of Sajida Alvi's on Mazhar-i Shah-Jahani, the Persian text of which sadly yet to be published.  The risk of having a myopic perspective on advice texts is compounded by the fact that so few are edited and translated. Needless to say, at some point I will have to put my money where my mouth is and actually edit one of them and translate it or another one. My old supervisor said that doing a critical edition and a translation was considered firstly, part of one's scholastic duty, and secondly, a test of your actual knowledge. I think thirdly it was a very real way of ensuring the preservation of the archive and the expansion of the easily available one for the next generation. Believe me, after sitting through an assignment where we had to translate a section from the Qabus-nama, despite it having a translation already, teaches you humility about doing accurate, scientific translations. I am currently working on a project that looks at the various advice texts under Jahangir, and hopefully it will end up somewhere, somehow. If there is one thing I have learnt so far, is that like transliteration or card catalogues, when it comes engaging in scholarship that won't leave you with an egg on your face, patience is key.

Parental Guidance and Universal Truths

Sorry for having fallen under the stupor of negligence, but it has been a busy last month, what with eid, coming back from Pakistan, starting up school, and nervously typing away grant proposals. I was reading the Qabus-namah for my Persian advice literature course and in the very beginning of the introduction Kay-Ka'us b. Iskandar b. Qabus b. Washmgir states a truth as universal as one mentioned by Jane Austen or Leo Tolstoy and one which I think transcends any cultural relativism: 

It is the nature of the time that no son desires the advice of his father because of the burning desire inside the young, which, due to their imprudent assumptions, [makes] them see their own knowledge as superior to that of their fathers. 

---  Qabus-namah, ed. Ruben Levy (London: Luzac & Co., 1951), p. 5.

Babur receives a courtier (often thought to be Babur advising his son Humayun) c. 1589

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian 

Scholarship (2)

Happy new year to one and all! I thought I'd begin 2012 with a positive note, this time from a rather touching preface to a book: Muhammad Saleem Akhtar's Sind Under the Mughals: An Introduction to, Translation of and Commentary on the Maẓhar-i Shāhjahānī. I refer to it as a book and not simply a translation because there is an impressive 133 page introduction. The translation is of the second part of Maẓhar-i Shāhjahānī which is history of Sind.* I pulled out my copy to glance though it after I saw one of the panels in AHA next month will cover partly this work. The part I felt was particularly touching was at the end of preface--touching because it differs so much from the self-aggrandizing tone of many introductions now. I'll just quote the portion in extenso to let it speak for itself:

 

"In the execution of this enterprise, the writer has not infrequently disagreed with his precursors. In criticizing their works, to which he owes so much, he was inspired by the same lofty ideals which prompted Hodivala to undertake the writing of the Studies in Indo-Muslim History, and the idea of discrediting or disparaging them never crossed his mind because he was more than anybody else conscious of the fact that hamah chīz hamagān dānad wa hamagān hanūz az mādar nazādah and ('It is the whole of mankind that knows everything, and the whole of mankind has not yet been born'). Nevertheless, the pursuit of truth has transcended all other considerations, and every effort has been made to uncover the facts."

M. Saleem Akhtar

Islamabad, 30 October 1989

 

Scholars of Indo-Islamic history owe much to Muhammad Saleem Akhtar for his critical editions and translation work. Perhaps there is something about doing the intensive labour of editing and translating that humbles people and makes them appreciate other's work. I am aware that not too long ago I myself complained about a certain lack of quality of scholarship, therefore the present post is more about self-reflection than preaching. Perhaps there shall be a new year's resolution to that effect.           

 

*The first portion was a tract on political ethics, a good old fashioned mirror for princes. It has not been translated. It has been examined in Sajida S. Alvi, "Maẓhar-i Shāhjahānī and the Mughal Province of Sind: A Discourse on Political Ethics," in Islam and Indian Regions, Texts, [Beitrage zur Sudasienforschung Sudasien-Institut Universitat Heidelberg, band. 145] eds. Anna L. Dallapiccola and Stephanie Z. Lallemant (Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 1993), vol. 1: pp. 239-258.

 

Research (1): Ghaznavids

I am currently in the midst of writing a term paper on the Ghaznavid ruler Sebüktegin (d. 387/997) and the epistle of counsel or pand-nāmah attributed to him. Compared to his son, Maḥmūd of Ghazna (d. 421/1030), Sebüktegin has never received much attention. As of now (2-Dec-11), he is yet to receive an entry in Encyclopaedia Iranica, as well as Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. Such is often the case with more famous sons, something Humāyūn* could probably attest to. Here is a working bibliography of some useful works for the Ghaznavids:

Bartol’d, V. V. Turkestan down to the Mongol invasion. 3rd ed. Translated by T. Minorsky and edited by C. E. Bosworth. London: Luzac, 1968.

Bayhaqī, Abū al-Faz̤l. The History of Beyhaqi (The History of Sultan Mas‘ud of Ghazna, 1030-1041) by Abu’l-Fażl Beyhaqi [Mujalladāt]. Translated by C. E. Bosworth and revised by Mohsen Ashtiany. Ilex Foundation Series no. 6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 3 vols.

Bosworth C. E. “Early sources for the History of the first four Ghaznavid sultans (977-1041).” The Islamic Quarterly 7 no. 1-2 (1963): 3-22.

--------. “Mahmud of Ghazna in Contemporary Eyes and in Later Persian Literature.” Iran 4 (1966): 85-92.

--------. The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994-1040. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963. 

--------. The Later Ghaznavids: Splendour and Decay: The Dynasty in Afghanistan and Northern India, 1040-1186. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977.

Gardīzī, Abū Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Ḥayy. The Ornament of Histories: A History of the Eastern Islamic Lands AD 650-1041 [Zayn al-akhbār]. BIPS Persian Studies Series no. 4. London: I. B. Taurus, 2011. 

Jūzjānī, Minhāj al-Dīn b. Sirāj al-Dīn. Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī. 2nd ed. Edited by ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī. 2 vols. Kabul: Kābul Puhani maṭbaʿah 1342/1963. English translation by H. G. Raverty. T̤abaḳāt-i Nāṣiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia. 2 vols. New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp., 1970. 

Nāẓim, Muḥammad. The Life and Times of Sulṭān Maḥmūd of G̲h̲azna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931. 

--------. “The Pand-Nāmah of Subuktigīn.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1933): 605-628.

 

*The second Mughal dynast Naṣīr al-Dīn Humāyūn, son of Bābur, father of Akbar. 

Maḥmūd receiving Abbasid robes of investiture, Illustration from Jāmiʻ al-tawārīkh c. 1315,
Edinburgh University Library, Or. Ms. 20, fol. 121r.