Mughals, Mongols, and Mongrels: The Challenge of Aristocracy and the Rise of the Mughal State in the Tarikh-i Rashidi

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 559-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
Military Elite ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Asian History

The present article seeks to re-evaluate the problem of the Central Asian military elite that emigrated to Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century during the foundation of the Mughal Empire. By reading the Tarikh-i Rashidi, the historical composition of Mirza Haydar Dughlat (d. 1551) and the main literary source for the period, modern scholars have developed two distinct historiographical strands of scholarship. Those mainly focused on Mughal India have used the text to argue for the absence of a meaningful political culture among the Central Asian elite. Others, mostly focused on Inner Asian history, have used the text for the opposite purpose of describing a fairly static “tribal” structure of Mirza Haydar’s world. I, on the other hand, will abandon the imprecise and essentially meaningless concept of “tribe” and will rather argue that Mirza Haydar instead chronicles the perspective of “aristocratic lineages” whose world was collapsing in the sixteenth century and who had to adjust themselves to changing conditions that saw the alliance of monarchs and servants through “meritocracy” both in their homeland as well as the new regions to which they moved.

The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
MUZAFFAR ALAM
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Central Asian

AbstractThis essay places Mughal–Sufi relationship within a larger sixteenth century context, focusing on the strategies the early Mughals adopted to build their power in India. It reviews the positions of the two important sufi groups, the Indian Chishtis and the Central Asian Naqshbandis, juxtaposing the political benefits or the loss that the Mughals saw in their associations with them. While the Naqshbandi worldview and the legacy of the legendary Ubaid Allah Ahrar clashed with their vision of power, in the Chishti ideology, on the other hand, they found a strong support for themselves. The Chishtis then had an edge at the time of Akbar. But the Naqshbandis under Khwaja Baqi Billah (d. 1603) continued in their endeavour to reinstate their place in Mughal India. The paper thus provides a backdrop and makes a plea for re-evaluating the debate on the ideology and politics of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624).

scholarly journals Johann Damgaards Alithia (1597). Genrehistorie, teksthistorie og idehistorie: Omkring et dansk fyrstespejl til Christian 4.

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
The Other ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Interesting Point ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bull's Eye

The history of Danish political thought is a neglected field of study. This is due to scholarly traditions as well as to the lack of “great texts.” The present article presents a Danish manuscript mirror of princes, Alithia, written in 1597 by Johann Damgaard and presented to King Christian 4. The text itself is neither original nor of exceptional literary merit, but the King liked it and discussed it chapter by chapter with the author. In other words: Damgaard’s Alithia seems to have hit the bull’s eye of political correctness and royal taste. This makes it an interesting source for Danish political culture in the decades around 1600. It represents a synthesis of humanist and reformation ideology where humanism has determined the form while the contents is mostly traditional Christian kingship in the protestant tradition. An exploration of Damgaard’s sources reveals that Damgaard’s text represents a sofisticated writing up of material found in two earlier manuscript mirror of princes by Jens Skafbo from 1590 and 1592 respectively. Skafbo, on the other hand, compiled his mirror of princes on the basis of Paulus Helie’s Danish adaption (printed 1534) of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Institutio principis christiani and diverse other texts mainly from the 1580’s. This plagiarism, as modern eyes would see it, was typical of the age. The interesting point is the thorough stylistic and ideological twist towards humanism that Damgaard gave his text. A last interesting point is that these mirrors of princes were not destined for the King alone. In more modest and shortened manuscript editions they circulated among the higher nobility. In one such edition of Damgaard’s Alithia one finds a paragraph with no parallel in the King’s version. It describes the relation between King and realm by means of a parable about a lion (the king) and a unicorn (the realm). If the lion behaves peace is assured, but if the lion offends the unicorn it will throw him out by means of its sharp and strong horn (the nobility). The paragraph ends with some barbed verses about the expulsion of King Chrsitian 2. in 1523. This is precious evidence for a radical aristocratic ideology which only occasionally, if at all, surfaces in the sources.

MUNDANE MIRACLES IN AWADH. ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REVEALED AND THE HIDDEN

2020 ◽  
pp. 130-140
Author(s):  
Maxim B. Demchenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Local People ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
The Public ◽  
British Raj ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Other World ◽  
Better Than

The sphere of the unknown, supernatural and miraculous is one of the most popular subjects for everyday discussions in Ayodhya – the last of the provinces of the Mughal Empire, which entered the British Raj in 1859, and in the distant past – the space of many legendary and mythological events. Mostly they concern encounters with inhabitants of the “other world” – spirits, ghosts, jinns as well as miraculous healings following magic rituals or meetings with the so-called saints of different religions (Hindu sadhus, Sufi dervishes),with incomprehensible and frightening natural phenomena. According to the author’s observations ideas of the unknown in Avadh are codified and structured in Avadh better than in other parts of India. Local people can clearly define if they witness a bhut or a jinn and whether the disease is caused by some witchcraft or other reasons. Perhaps that is due to the presence in the holy town of a persistent tradition of katha, the public presentation of plots from the Ramayana epic in both the narrative and poetic as well as performative forms. But are the events and phenomena in question a miracle for the Avadhvasis, residents of Ayodhya and its environs, or are they so commonplace that they do not surprise or fascinate? That exactly is the subject of the essay, written on the basis of materials collected by the author in Ayodhya during the period of 2010 – 2019. The author would like to express his appreciation to Mr. Alok Sharma (Faizabad) for his advice and cooperation.

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The World ◽  
Jewish Writers

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

Termin kandaulos/kandylos (κανδαυλοσ/ κανδυλοσ) na podstawie λεχεων συναγωγη Focjusza oraz "Commentari ad Homeri Iliadem" Eustacjusza z Tessaloniki

Vox Patrum ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 361-373
Author(s):  
Maciej Kokoszko ◽  
Katarzyna Gibel-Buszewska
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Present Article ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cooked Meat

The present article focuses on one of the Greek delicacies mentioned by Photius and Eustathius, i.e. a Lydian import called kandaulos/kandylos. The dish was developed before the mid. VI th c. BC and named after a Lydian king, Kandaules, who ruled in the VII th c. BC. The delicacy was (via the Ionians) borrowed by the Helens and established itself in Greece sometime in the V th c. It became popular in Hellenistic times. The information we possess allow us to reconstruct two varieties of kandaulos/ kandylos. The first was savoury and consisted of cooked meat, stock, Phrygian cheese, breadcrumbs and dill (or fennel). The other included milk, lard, cheese and honey. The dish is reported to have been costly, prestigious and indicating the social status of those who would eat it. Though there is much evidence suggesting its popularity in antiquity, we lack solid evidence proving that kaunaudlos/kandylos was eaten in Byzantine times. On the other hand, Byzantine authors preserved the most detailed literary data on the delicacy. If it had not been for the Byzantine interest, our competence in the field of Greek cuisine would be even faultier.

Review of Malahara Kalpana of Rasa Tarangani

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dubey Somil
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mineral Contents ◽  
Basic Constituent

The word Malahara or Malhama is derived from unani system of medicine. Yogaratnakara mentioned this first by the name of Malahara Kalpana. It derives its name as it removes Mala (residue etc.) from Vrana (wounds), Vidradhi (abscess) etc. This is similar to ointments in modern pharmaceutics. Malahara Kalpana is the ointment preparation which has Siktha Taila (bees wax and oil mixture) or Ghrita, as the basic constituent. The other ingredients may include herbal, metal, or mineral contents depending upon the usage. Malahara has a property like Snehana (oelation), cleansing, Ropana (healing), Lekhana (scaraping), and Varnya (beautifying), depending on the drugs used in the preparation. Rasa Tarangani a Rasa Shastra treatise of 20th century by Acharya Sadananda Sharma has enumerated various types of Malahara Kalpana taking mainly Siktha Taila as a base. Though this Kalpana holds firm roots in treating diseases the mention and explanation of this particular topic is scattered in this treatise. Hence the present article is an attempt to elucidate and unfold the Malahara Kalpana of Rasatarangani.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon McSheffrey
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other

Although historians have until now thought that sanctuary in England had become moribund by the early sixteenth century, research in the legal records shows something different: although sanctuary-seeking was indeed infrequent from 1400 to about 1480, it began to increase substantially after that, reaching a peak around 1530 before collapsing, quite suddenly, in the later 1530s. This chapter both introduces the different forms of English sanctuary and explains in broad terms both why resort to sanctuary became more common under the early Tudors, and why it collapsed. This raises a number of themes that weave through the other chapters—mercy and redemption, Christian kingship, jurisdiction, prosecution of felony, and aristocratic honour culture.

Epidemics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.

The Abbatial Election at Citeaux in 1625

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Louis J. Lekai
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The Other ◽  
Total Destruction ◽  
General Decline ◽  
History Of

The sixteenth century was a crucial period in the history of French monasticism. In addition to the causes of a general decline throughout Europe, in France two peculiar developments precipitated a nearly fatal collapse of monastic establishments. One was the commendatory system that spread over the whole country following the Concordat of Bologna in 1516. Royally appointed commendatory abbots, whose only concern was the collection of their share of monastic income, contributed much to the moral and material decline of the institutions supposedly under their care. The other and even more devastating calamity was the series of religious and civil wars during the second half of the century that resulted in the pillage and partial or total destruction of hundreds of monasteries.

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