From the Interstices of History: Rethinking Regional Polity in North India and the Deccan, 14th–16th Centuries

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ayesha Sheth, who helped conceptualize and realize the conference leading to this publication, and who was instrumental at every stage in moving our collective labours to press. Thanks also go to the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for generous support necessary for our meeting in 2022.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, in Orsini and Sheikh, eds. After Timur Left; Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 1.

2. This is manifestly clear in the almost total neglect of these regional polities, despite their persistence everywhere across the landscape and culture, in the public and officially sponsored ‘memory’ and heritage practices of the modern linguistic states in north and central India as embodied in hero statuary, road and airport naming, etc.

3. Vincent Smith, The Early History of India from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest Including the Invasion of Alexander the Great (Oxford: Clarendon, 1914) pp. 356-57.

4. C. V. Vaidya, History of Mediaeval Hindu India (Being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) 3 vols. (Poona: Oriental Book Agency, 1921), vol. 1, p. iii.

5. Key here is the volume edited by Robert Crane, Regions and Regionalism in South Asian Studies: An Exploratory Study, Duke Southern Asian Studies Monograph and Occasional Paper Series, no. 5 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967), see esp. Introduction.

6. Bernard Cohn, ‘Regions Subjective and Objective: Their Relation to the Study of Modern Indian History and Society,’ in Regions and Regionalism, p. 6 et passim.

7. Cohn, ‘Regions Subjective and Objective’, p. 12.

8. For the role of ‘regional’ change in the formation of segmentary states, see Burton Stein, ‘Circulation and the Historical Geography of South India,’ Journal of Asian Studies 37,1 (1977): 7-26; idem. Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (London: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Richard Fox, ed., Realm and Region in Traditional India, Duke Southern Asian Studies Monograph and Occasional Paper Series, no. 14 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977). For theories of processural polity, see Herman Kulke, ‘Royal Temple Policy and the Structure of Medieval Hindu Kingdoms’ in A. Eschemann, H. Kulke and G. C. Tripathi, eds. The Cult of Jagannatha and the Regional Tradition of Orissa (Delhi, Manohar, 1978), pp.; idem. ‘The Early and Imperial Kingdom: A Processural Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India,’ in Kulke, ed., The State in India, 1000-1700 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 233-252; B. D. Chattopadhyaya, Political Processes and the Structure of Polity in Early Medieval India’ in B. D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 190-232.

9. See Romila Thapar, The Mauryas Revisited (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1987), pp. 1-31.

10. Two exemplary works treating religion are A. Eschemann, H. Kulke and G. C. Tripathi, eds. The Cult of Jagannatha and the Regional Tradition of Orissa (Delhi, Manohar, 1978) and Kunal Chakrabarti, Religious Process: The Purāṇas and the Making of a Regional Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

11. See Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra (New York: Oxford University Press).

12. On pan-regional political institutions and practices, see Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) and on literary culture, see Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit Culture and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

13. See Manu Devadevan, The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

14. See Karine Schomer, Joan Erdman, Deryck Lordrick and Lloyd Rudolph, eds., The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity, 2 vols. (Delhi: Manohar and American Institute of Indian Studies, 1994) and Edward Simpson and Aparna Kapadia, eds., The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2010). For an important yet neglected monograph on a region that crosses the boundary of the thirteenth century, see Nandini Sinha Kapur, State Formation in Rajasthan: Mewar during the Seventh-Fifteenth Centuries (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002).

15. See Sunil Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate 1192-1286 (Delhi: Permanent Black 2007), and Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval Hindu-Muslim Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

16. Simon Digby, ‘Before Timur Came: Provincialization of the Delhi Sultanate through the Fourteenth Century,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, 3 (2004): 298-356.

17. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993); Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gujarat 1200-1500 (Delhi: Oxford University Press 2010); Aparna Kapadia, In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-century Gujarat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Narrative Pasts: the Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020); Philip Wagoner, ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,’ Journal of Asian Studies 55, 4 (1996): 851-880; Philip Wagoner and Richard Eaton, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites in India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014); Emma Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Pushkar Sohoni, The Architecture of a Deccan Sultanate: Courtly Practice and Royal Authority in Late Medieval India (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018).

18. See Sheldon Pollock, ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500,’ Daedalus 127.3 (1998): 41–74; Pollock, Language of the Gods, pp. 283-436.

19. Seen Orisini and Sheikh, After Timur Left, pp. 12-15.

20. Orsini and Sheikh, After Timur Left, p. 15ff.

21. Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).