Exploring the elite world in the <i>Siyar al-Awliyā</i>’: Urban elites, their lineages and social networks

Balachandran, Jyoti Gulati

doi:10.1177/0019464615588429

The Indian Economic & Social History Review

2015

DOI: 10.1177/0019464615588429

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Exploring the elite world in the Siyar al-Awliyā’: Urban elites, their lineages and social networks

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

Abstract: Composed by Amīr Khwurd around the middle of the fourteenth century, the Siyar al-Awliyā' presents a coherent history of the Chishti spiritual order (silsilah) in the Indian subcontinent from the early thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. Historians have mined the text for information on Sufis and Sufism while ignoring its special attributes. This article makes a historiographical and methodological intervention by showing how a Sufi biographical compendium (tazkira) can be used to write a history of the … Show more

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Pashtun homelands in an Indo-Afghan hagiographical collection

Pelevin

2022

Mod. Asian Stud.

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The article explores the ethnocultural aspects and ideological implications of a hagiographical collection from the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī wa Makhzan-i Afghānī (1613), a book on the general history of the Pashtuns compiled in the Indo-Afghan diaspora. This article primarily focuses on the stories that either presumably originate from or directly relate in content to Pashtun tribal areas to the west of the Indus. Being foremost a supplement to the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s genealogical section, the hagiographical anthology was included in this book to highlight and illustrate the idea of the Pashtuns’ continuous adherence to Islam throughout many centuries. However, its narratives suggest that Islamic traditions in the Pashtuns’ collective memory can be traced back as far as the turn of the thirteenth century. While the genealogies maintained the principle of patrilineal descent as the basic attribute of Pashtun identity, the hagiographies affirmed the profession of Islamic faith as another integral component of this identity and also brought to light its linguistic criterion. One of the article’s sections offers a survey of the cases where the Pashto language as well as Pashto lexemes and phrases are mentioned in the Persian text of the hagiographies. The article also attempts to locate the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s hagiographical collection among similar works in Indo-Persian literature; it also considers such still-understudied issues as the emergence of spiritual lineages in Pashtun tribes and the entwining of folklore and conventional Islamic elements in the stories about Pashtun religious leaders.

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Pashtun homelands in an Indo-Afghan hagiographical collection

Pelevin

2022

Mod. Asian Stud.

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Arabic Philology at the Seventeenth-Century Mughal Court. Saʿd Allāh Khān’s and Shāh Jahān’s Enactments of the Sharḥ al-Radī

Bahl

2020

Philol. Encount.

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Persian narrative sources provide a colorful picture of Mughal courtly life, but in order to zoom in on cultural practices one has to turn to the artefacts of cultural pursuits. This article studies one specimen of the empirical treasure trove of Arabic manuscripts in South Asia in order to approach a lacuna in Mughal scholarship: the role of Arabic at the Mughal court. In the following, I will analyze the different paratextual layers of a manuscript of the thirteenth century Arabic grammar commentary Sharḥ al-Radī by Radī al-Dīn al-Astarābādhī to study its reading and transmission. The manuscript version represents a written artefact, which emerged out of a series of intellectual engagements. On the one hand, these textual engagements offer a perspective on the manuscript’s initial owner, Saʿd Allāh Khān (d. 1656), and his intellectual pursuits, as well as the scholarly framework in which he was brought up and worked in. On the other hand, the history of this manuscript’s circulation highlights the treatment of Arabic written artefacts at Shāh Jahān’s court. In an exemplary manner, the manuscript’s history of circulation demonstrates how courtly elites engaged with Arabic during the seventeenth century.

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Conceptualising the past of the Muslim community in the sixteenth century: A prosopographical study of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār

Banerjee

2017

The Indian Economic & Social History Review

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This article studies a sixteenth-century sufi taz̠kirāt (biographical dictionary), Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār written by ‘Abd al-Haqq Muhaddis Dehlawi (1551–1642), an ‘ālim (scholar), who was also a sufi. The text is frequently cited as the earliest, most comprehensive and reliable biographical compilation of South Asian sufis and ‘ulamā’ (learned men in religious sciences) from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Indeed ‘Abd al-Haqq is best remembered for his scholasticism as a mūḥaddis̤ (a person well-versed in Prophetic traditions) which is also supposed to have made him into a rather staid scholar of Sufism. But what of him in his own society of elite Muslim intellectuals in the early seventeenth century? ‘Abd al-Haqq was networked into the elite circles of the Mughal court, but he stayed away from Mughal patronage, communicating his ambivalence regarding its political experiments by espousing alternative paradigms. My article studies the structure of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār to comprehend how a Muslim intellectual constructed a history of his peer group at a critical juncture in the making of Mughal authority. My article follows a prosopographical methodology to explore the innovative structure of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār and its complex projection of the past of the piety-minded in Hindustan. As I argue, the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār is a carefully structured, remarkable history of sufis and their networks, providing them with contexts and significance that questioned both, inherited paradigms of moral authority present in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sufi texts as well as those emerging in the statist renditions of the past from the courts of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir.

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Exploring the elite world in the Siyar al-Awliyā’: Urban elites, their lineages and social networks

Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

Pashtun homelands in an Indo-Afghan hagiographical collection

Pashtun homelands in an Indo-Afghan hagiographical collection

Arabic Philology at the Seventeenth-Century Mughal Court. Saʿd Allāh Khān’s and Shāh Jahān’s Enactments of the Sharḥ al-Radī

Conceptualising the past of the Muslim community in the sixteenth century: A prosopographical study of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār

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