Selfhood and Subjectivity in Sufi Thought: Image of a Mole on Emperor Akbar’s Nose

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-239
Author(s):  
Dipanwita Donde
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Literary Thought ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Individual Features ◽  
The Individual

This paper addresses the making of portrait-images of Mughal emperors, in which distinctness and particularity in individual features distinguished portraits of emperor Akbar from his ancestors and successors. Scholars have argued that the technique of ‘accurate’ portraits or mimesis was introduced to Mughal artists with the arrival of renaissance paintings and prints from Europe, brought by Jesuit priests to the Mughal court. However, the question of why Mughal emperors saw a need to arrive at portraiture in the likeness of individuals remains to be addressed. This paper argues that the desire to portray a ruler, in all his individual particularity, can arise only within a literary and intellectual matrix in which the individual is valued and where ideas about selfhood and subjectivity have already permeated the philosophical, political, and literary thought. Tracing the transhistorical and transcultural migration of ideas and motifs from Timurid Central Asia to Mughal India, this paper examines the transference of Sufi thought on image-making practices, particularly portraiture, in the imperial court of the Mughals in early seventeenth century. Keywords: Portrait-images of Akbar, subjectivity, Sufi thought, poetics between text and image.

Commercial Linkages with Central Asia and Iran

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott C. Levi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Family Firms ◽  
Indian Region ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Commercial System ◽  
Northern India

While it may seem counterintuitive, the increase in Mughal India’s maritime trade contributed to a tightening of overland commercial connections with its Asian neighbors. The primary agents in this process were “Multanis,” members of any number of heavily capitalized, caste-based family firms centered in the northwest Indian region of Multan. The Multani firms had earlier developed an integrated commercial system that extended across the Punjab, Sind, and much of northern India. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Multanis first appear in historical sources as having established their own communities in Central Asia and Iran. By the middle of the seventeenth century, at any given point in time, a rotating population of some 35,000 Indian merchants orchestrated a network of communities that extended across dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and villages in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran, stretching up the Caucasus and into Russia.

scholarly journals Zemskii Sobor: Historiographies and Mythologies of a Russian “Parliament”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Russian

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.

scholarly journals When Hell is Other People. Interiority and Skepticism in António Lopes da Veiga

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 012
Author(s):  
Fernando Rodríguez Mediano ◽  
Carlos Cañete
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
International Scale ◽  
Close Study ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

The study of the process of construction of modern subjectivity offers an image of constant tensions between universality and particularity, which could be considered a manifestation of the conflictual nature of Modernity itself. As a way to solve the problems derived of the separation between universal and particular dimensions of this process -that has resulted in opposing interpretations regarding its confesional nature- a close study of the particular experience of the seventeenth-century thinker António Lopes da Veiga is presented here. This study is intended to provide some insight of the way in which similar intelectual concerns -of an international scale- over interiority and exteriority in epistemology, political thought, philology, theology and history, resulted in the constitution of a particular perspective regarding the individual.

Coal-Mining in the Seventeenth Century

1925 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 79-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asta Moller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Coal Mining ◽  
Considerable Importance ◽  
Individual Consumer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Forest Lands

The history of coal-mining in the seventeenth century covers what may be termed the first chapter in the great story of English coal. In less than a century a seemingly insignificant and experimental industry developed into one of considerable importance. Coal had been used locally before this period; but an industry, as such, did not arise till a decline in the country's supply of wood stimulated new activities. It is possible that the introduction of coal might have been indefinitely postponed, had not years of ruthless felling of timber and neglect of forest lands, coincident with an increasing demand for wood for other than domestic purposes, caused a shortage of fuel. To the Elizabethan the decay of woods had an even wider significance. The demands of the Navy, the extension of the Empire and the discovery of new countries all laid a claim on timber. Its preservation became a matter of national concern. That the individual consumer should have possessed this degree of circumspection, and acted accordingly, was hardly to be expected; but the national needs were brought home to him through an increase in the price of wood. The use of coal became a matter of necessity rather than of choice.

scholarly journals Early Medieval Central Asian Population Estimates

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 788-817
Author(s):  
Étienne de la Vaissière
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Asian Population ◽  
Population Estimates ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The North ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Census data from 8th-century Eastern Central Asian oases, combined with the measurements of the oases and data from archives discovered there, allow us to calculate estimates both of the individual oases’ populations and of their respective feeding capacities, which is to say the number of people who could be fed from the output of one hectare of agricultural land. These numbers in turn have parallels in Western Central Asia, where oasis sizes can also be calculated by examination of preserved archaeological landscapes and oasis walls. It is therefore possible to reach a rough idea of the populations dwelling in the main oases and valleys of sedentary Central Asia. As regards nomadic regions, the data are far more hypothetical, but references in certain sources to the sizes of nomad armies and rates of nomadic military levying can allow us to calculate at least the possible scales of magnitude for populations living to the north of the Tianshan.

Opportunism in Foreign Affairs in First Century BCE China: Chen Tang, His Fellows, and Their Patrons

T oung Pao ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 107 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 233-261
Author(s):  
Wicky W.K. Tse
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Han Dynasty ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
First Century ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
Front Line ◽  
Imperial Court

Abstract By examining the career of a contingent of action-prone mid-level military officers and diplomats, this article aims to explore how opportunism functioned in foreign affairs during the last decades of the Former Han dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE). To safeguard and advance the empire’s interests, especially in Central Asia, these characters would carry out their missions with expediency, usually by the means of assassination and surprise attacks, and sometimes without formal authorization. Yet their successful operations always earned, if retrospectively, the endorsement of the imperial court, which in turn encouraged further ventures. The investigation of the front-line opportunists and their patrons presents a lively picture of the politics and political culture of the time.

Institutional memory and contemporary history in the House of Commons, 1547–1640

2018 ◽  
pp. 211-228
Author(s):  
Paul Seaward
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Institutional Memory ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

Parliament in the course of a century after 1547 became almost certainly the best-recorded institution in Britain. This essay considers the nature of institutional memory in the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century House of Commons. It concerns firstly the nature and quality of institutional memory, and how, while it relied considerably on non-inscribed memory, it changed with the growth of the written record. It discusses the importance of precedent to parliamentarians, and how precedents were identified and selectively used. But more broadly it considers how written records, both of a formal and official nature and a private and unofficial kind, were developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to generate a narrative about parliament that helps to consolidate its landmark status. As a result, parliament came to be recognised and revered as the key institution in the relationship between the state and the individual.

From Liberties to Liberty

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-130
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
House Church ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

This chapter studies how liberty in the law evolved from being attached to a collective, metaphorical body—the medieval corporation—to being rooted instead in the individual body across a range of practices in seventeenth century Europe. It analyses the early modern forms of toleration that developed from the ground-up in Protestant Europe (Holland and Germany in particular), including the practices of ‘walking out’ (auslauf) to worship one’s God, and the house church (schuilkerk). These practices were key to delinking liberty from place, and thus to paving the way to attaching it instead to territory and the state. The chapter also considers the first common law of naturalisation, known as Calvin’s Case (1608), which wrote into the law the process of becoming an English subject—of subjection. This law decisively rooted the state-subject relation in the bodies of monarch and subject coextensively. Both of these bodies were deeply implicated in the process of territorialisation that begat the modern state in seventeenth-century England, and in shifting the political bond from local authorities to the sovereign. The chapter then examines the corporeal processes underwriting the centralisation of authority, and shows how the subject’s body also became—via an increasingly important habeas corpus—the centre point of the legal revolution that yielded the natural rights of the modern political subject. Edward Coke plays a central role in the chapter.

Beg, Empire, and Agrarian Developments in Central Asia, 1500–1750

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwangmin Kim
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Family Background ◽  
Direct Connection ◽  
Commercial Agriculture ◽  
Qing Empire ◽  
Changing Environment ◽  
China Market ◽  
Eastern Turkestan

Offering an examination of a prominent pro-Qing beg Emin Khwaja’s career and his family background, this chapter explores how the begs’ interests in securing resources, labor, and silver set them on the path of a profitable partnership with the Qing Empire. At the center of this story was the presence of the Sufi migrants and their families, the mainstay of the pro-Qing begs. Sufi migrants’ interests in developing commercial agriculture in the oasis under the changing environment of trade in Eurasia spurred their settlement into Eastern Turkestan and into an alliance with the Qing also. They had experienced a crisis in the local political economy in the seventeenth century caused by a sudden, if temporary, decline in the Chinese tribute trade. In their view, an alliance with the Qing, especially one that provided a direct connection to the China market would be a solution to this problem.

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