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Notes on Contributors
Ali Anooshahr : is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis with a focus on comparative Islamic empires during the medieval and early modern periods. He is the author of Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), and is co-editor with Ebba Koch of The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, 2019). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.
Blain Auer : is professor and historian of Islam in South Asia at the Université de Lausanne. He is author of Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion and Muslim Legitimacy in the Dethi Sultanate (1.B.Tauris, 2012), The Origins of Perso-Islamic Courts and Empires in India: In the Mirror of Kings (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of Encountering Buddhism and Islam in Medieval Central and South Asia (DeGruyter, 2019). He is an editor for the journals Marginalia and Etudes asiatiques, as well as the Brill series Perspectives on Islamicate South Asia. He has also written numerous articles, chapters and encyclopaedia entries.
Shailendra Bhandare
is Assistant Keeper, South Asian and Far-eastern Numismatics and Paper Money Collections, at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Cross College and a member of Faculty of Oriental Studies. He started his career as a numismatist with a visiting fellowship at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. He was then appointed as a post-doctoral fellow of the Society for South Asian Studies, and worked as a curator in the British Museum on the coins of the later Mughals and the Indian princely states. He was appointed as Curator of Coins in the Ashmolean Museum in 2002. He holds a Masters degree in History and a PhD in Ancient Indian Culture awarded by the University of Mumbai.
Stephen Frederic Dale is an Emeritus Professor of South Asian and Islamic History and Distinguished University Scholar at The Ohio State University, Columbus. His recent publications include: The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483-1530) (Brill, 2004); The Muslim Empire of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (Cambridge, 2010) and The Orange Trees of Marrakesh: Ibn Khaldun and the Science of Man (Harvard, 2015).
Pinar Emiralioglu is Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville. She completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in 2006 and her first book, Geographical Knowledge and Imperial Culture in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, was published by Ashgate in 2014. In it she explores the reasons for the flurry of geographical works in the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century. Currently, she is working on her second book project, which investigates the close relationship between geographical knowledge and imperial politics in the Ottoman empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She has published numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes. Pinar teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on World History, History of the Middle East, and the Ottoman empire. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction.
Suraiya Faroghi
is a Professor of History at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul. After studying at the University of Hamburg (Dr Phil.) and in Istanbul, as well as at Indiana University in Bloomington, she had a lengthy career at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, from 1971 to 1987, where she started as an instructor and ended up as a full professor. She then became a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, where she stayed until 2007. She then taught at Istanbul Bilgi University from 2007 until 2017. Her focus is on Ottoman social history, especially artisan production, the use of objects as historical sources and urban life, as well as cross-cultural linkages. Her most recent books are The Ottoman and Mughal Empires: Social History in the Early Modern World (2019) and A Cultural History of the Ottomans: The Imperial Elite and its Artefacts (2016), both published by 1.B.Tauris.
George Malagaris is an historian of medieval Eurasia. He has been Research Fellow and Dean of Scholars at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Global History. He has recently completed a book on the medieval polymath Biruni and is preparing a study of Mahmud of Ghazna (d. 1030) in the context of Central Asian, Iranian and Indian history.
Richard Piran McClary
is a lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of York. He received his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2015. He has lectured extensively on the topic of medieval Islamic architecture around the world and has conducted fieldwork in India, Turkey, Central Asia and the Middle East. He held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh from 2015 to 2018, examining the surviving corpus of Qarakhanid architecture in Central Asia, and the resulting monograph was published in 2020. His monograph entitled Rum Seljug Architecture, 1170-1220. The Patronage of Sultans was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2017, and he has published numerous articles and book chapters on the topic of medieval Islamic architecture and ceramics.
Sara Mondini
is a historian of Islamic and South Asian Art. She has been an Adjunct Professor of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art and South Asian Visual Culture at the Venice Ca’ Foscari University since 2009, and Adjunct Professor of Art and Civilization of the Islamic World at the New York Fashion Institute of Technology at the Polytechnic University of Milan since 2016. She holds a PhD in Oriental Studies from Venice Ca’ Foscari University and has conducted extensive research on the artistic and architectural productions from South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. She has published several articles and chapters, and has presented her research at numerous international conferences. Her main field of research covers the Islamicate societies of South Asia and of other areas bounded by the Indian Ocean.
A.C.S. Peacock is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. He was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His research focuses on the medieval and early modern history of the eastern Islamic world, and Islamic manuscripts. Major publications include The Great Seljuk Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and, as editor, Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
Benedek Péri is the Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Head of the Department of Turkic Studies at Eétvés Lorand University, Budapest. His research interests include various aspects of the history of Persianate literary traditions (Chaghatay, Persian, Ottoman, Tiirki-yi ‘Ajam1) with a special focus on the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, and the history of drug consumption in Persianate societies. His latest book, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was published in 2018. He is currently working on a critical edition of Yavuz Sultan Selim’s (1. 1512-1520) Persian divan.
Maya Petrovich specialises in the history of the Islamic world. She holds degrees from Hamburg, Columbia and Princeton, and works with a large number of languages. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Oxford. Maya has published two books of poetry in Bosnian and is preparing a monograph on mercenaries in the Indian Ocean.
Introduction
A.C.S. Peacock and Richard Piran McClary
For most of the second millennium, India was dominated politically by dynasties of Turkish origin — the Ghaznavids, the Delhi sultans, the Mughals, and in the Deccan, the Bahmanis, Qutbshahis and Adilshahis, to name but a few.! They were supported by a Turkish military elite, comprised, at various times, of slave soldiers, émigré mercenaries from Anatolia and Central Asia, and steppe nomads. Yet detailed studies of Turks are strangely absent from the historiography of South Asia. Although a good number of books and articles allude in their titles to the “Turks” of India,? they generally reflect the usage of many Indian languages that employ “Turk” (or its Sanskrit form, Turushka) mainly as a synonym for Muslim.’ Until recently, scholarship has widely assumed that any Turkish identity and language was lost with residence in India, and has depicted the Muslim ruling class as “Perso-Islamic”. A case in point are the Mughals (x. 1526-1857), who, despite their indisputable descent from the Central Asian conqueror Temiir (d. 1405), and the well-attested use of Turkish at least among early generations of the dynasty, are much more usually considered either in isolation as a uniquely Indian phenomenon, or as a “Persianate dynasty”.* Indeed, even Turkish-language scholarship, usually voracious in its appetite for detecting “Turkishness” in sometimes questionable places, has evinced relatively little interest in Turkish dynasties in India.5
Recent research, however, has pointed to the importance of the Turkish and Central Asian origins of these dynasties in an Indian context. The Mughals, for instance, propagated a memory of their Timurid ancestors (1. c. 1370-1507) which contributed to their efforts to establish the legitimacy of the dynasty,® and their enduring links with Central Asia have been stressed.’ Even the Turkish language and literature was considerably more vital in the Mughal period than has been previously recognised.° This new scholarly interest is welcome, but many aspects of the Turkish experience of India, and the Indian experience of Turks, remain barely studied, especially for the Mughals’ predecessors and their contemporaries in South India. This book fills a gap by bringing together studies of the historical role of Turks in India, but it differs from the few previous studies in one major respect. Here the focus is less on connections with Central Asia (although given their importance these are not ignored), but rather with the Turkish world to the west, Anatolia and the Ottoman empire, an aspect that has previously largely been neglected in scholarship beyond some studies of diplomatic relations between the Mughals and Ottomans.
Nonetheless, from the outset it must be recognised that such a conceptualisation of a “Turkish world” is far from unproblematic. If various dialects of Turkish were the first spoken language of rulers from Istanbul to Agra, what did this mean for their identity, especially given that in most cases, outside the Ottoman empire, Persian remained the major literary and administrative language? The Safavids, for instance, spoke Turkish but, despite their reliance on a Turkish military elite, were not themselves ethnically Turkish, and Persian remained the prime written language of their state. Pre-modern ethnic identities are not set in stone, and even the term Turk or Turkish itself is somewhat nebulous, for it could be used to refer to any steppe people, including nonTurkic-speaking ones such as Mongols.? On occasion, the Turkish origins ascribed to Indian Muslim rulers may have been invented or at least emphasised in order to anchor a given dynasty in the broader Turko-Islamic world and thus reinforce its legitimacy.!° This world largely coheres with the cultural sphere known as Turko-Persia." Stretching across India, Central Asia and Iran to Anatolia (or Rum as the latter region was known in the languages of the Islamic world), it represents a realm where if ruling elites were (or claimed to be) Turkish or Turkophone, the dominant culture was Persianate.
However, Indian rulers were not unique in seeking to associate themselves with specifically Turkish ancestors or antecedents. Even in distant Southeast Asia, Muslim rulers claimed Rumi descent and what has been described as aTurkic-Turkish theme’ plays a prominent role in traditional Malay court literature.!2 On the other side of the Indian Ocean, on the east coast of Africa, local rulers claimed both Turkish origins as well as “Shirazi” ones — doubtless in both cases representing the invention of legitimatory origins, but also showing the pull of a broader Turko-Persian world even in areas that are more conventionally linked to the Arab Middle East.!3 Thus, both Rum and “Turkishness” (whether real or invented) had a certain prestige that has often been underrated in scholarship on “Turko-Persia’, which has generally emphasised the cultural achievements of Iran and the military ones of the Turks.!4
The task of this book, however, is not simply to reduce the linguistic and cultural identities under consideration to an ethnically based “Turkishness” divorced from its broader context. The use of the Turkish language in its various spoken and written dialects, and the self-identification of elites as “Turkish’, comprised part of a complex of Islamic, Turkish and Persianate identities.! Within this broader Perso-Islamic culture, Turkishness — or “Rumi’”-ness, to formulate it in another way — had a fluctuating significance. Let us take two contrasting examples illustrated by chapters in this book. In the thirteenthcentury Delhi sultanate, despite being branded in modern historiography a period of Turkish rule, in fact as members of the military elite were promoted to sultan they generally shed the trappings of their Turkish identity.!® On the other hand, in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Deccan, newly emerged dynasties such as the Qutbshahis strenuously sought to claim for themselves (rather questionable) origins in the great Turkish empires of fifteenth-century eastern Anatolia and Iran.!” To attempt to tease out some of the nuances and fluidity in this “Turkish” identity and its differing, and uneven, significance in different times and places in India over the eleventh to nineteenth century is part of the purpose of this book. To do so, however, we must also undertake a cognate but distinct task, which is to assess the historical nature of connections between India and the broader Turkish-speaking world, in particular its relatively neglected links to Anatolia and the Ottomans.
1 Turkish History and Culture between Anatolia and India
Notwithstanding the caveat above concerning the mutability and fluidity of ethnicities, it does seems that a sense of Turkishness, as distinct from being Muslim, did persist among certain groups in India into the early modern period, even if this could be swapped or complemented with other identities. Further, this Turkish identity was not uniform from either a linguistic or a social point of view. Turks from a wide range of different origins and groups lived in India, as is reflected not just by a close reading of the sources,!® but also by the lexicographical evidence of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Indian dictionaries, which list numerous Turkish terms including those from different Turkish social or tribal groups, reflecting the vibrancy of the oral language and the diversity of its speakers.!9 Indeed, scholars have noted the development of a distinctive “Indian Turki” with its own lexical features.2° This identity was sometimes articulated in Turkish-language literary production in India, of which the most famous example is the Vaqa’i‘ (memoirs) of Babur (1483-1530), founder of the Mughal dynasty. This masterpiece of Eastern Turkish literature repeatedly expresses the author’s alienation from the India in which he had founded his empire, and his longing for his Central Asian homeland in Ferghana, the land of his birth, and Kabul, where he had been prince.” It is telling that the most important surviving manuscript of this work, made in the early seventeenth century, is held in the Salar Jung Library in Hyderabad.?? While this is by far the best known such work in Turkish to have been written in India, it was not the only one. Bayram Khan (d. 1561), commander of the Mughal army, was also a noted poet in Turkish.?? As Benedek Péri has shown, Turkish retained a certain cachet in court circles, where knowledge of the language could be considered one of the attributes of a gentleman into the seventeenth century and beyond.?*
Yet there was more than merely language” and ethnic origins (real or imagined) that Indian rulers shared with the Turkish world to their north and west. Early Turkish rule in both India and Anatolia exhibits some remarkable common features. Both regions were conquered by Turkish Muslim dynasties, albeit partially, in roughly the same period, the eleventh century. Northern India came under the sway of the Ghaznavids (r. 977-1186), while Anatolia was seized by the Seljuqs (1 1071-1308) and other Turkish rulers. Both Seljugs and Ghaznavids originated from Central Asia, and their invasions, if in neither case representing the first Muslim presence in each region,?® are widely taken to mark the beginnings of Muslim rule that would last in one form or another for nearly a millennium. Turkish rulers and their military supporters found themselves a tiny elite dominating a land in which the overwhelming preponderance of the population was non-Muslim — Hindu in India, Christian in Anatolia. It is perhaps telling that we find distinctive lexical items emerging apparently independently in Anatolia and India. The term ékdish or igdis, which had originally denoted “an animal bred domestically” and then a cross-bred horse,?” now came in both regions to mean a person of mixed descent, half Turkish and half-Greek/Christian or Hindu.28
The early history of Turkish rule in both India and Anatolia is reliant on sources written by Persophone bureaucrats who evidently rarely understood, or even deliberately sought to mask, the ethnic origins of the elites.29 In both cases, Turkish doubtless long remained the main spoken language of these elites, but was not until much later developed as a literary language. To such bureaucrats, the complexities of the relationships between men of steppe origin were unsavoury topics, and given that such bureaucrat-litterateurs largely wrote for each other, there was little interest in discussing them. Yet in both Anatolia and India, subsequent waves of invasion and state formation reinforced this Turkish component through migration from Central Asia, as well as bringing further such Persian bureaucrats, especially in the Khwarazmian and Mongol periods.°° Further, even by the thirteenth century we can see an interchange of people and culture between these two peripheral extremities of the Turkish world: Safi al-Din Hindi, a Delhi-born scholar, came to Anatolia to study Sufism,*! while one of the major hadith commentaries used in medieval Anatolia was that by a Lahore author of Central Asian extraction, al-Saghani.>* Conversely, men like the fourteenth-century Anatolian Sufi Anmad-i Rami travelled as far as Awadh to spread Mevlevism in India,3* while the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) were vastly influential in India, even in local literatures like that of Sindhi.34
The common experiences of conquest, domination and the spread of Islam may explain some of the interchanges between India and Anatolia. Striking in this regard is the enthusiasm that an Ottoman reading public evinced for the ornate early thirteenth-century chronicle of the Ghurid conquests in India, the Taj al-Ma‘asir (“Crown of Deeds”) by Hasan Nizami, of which several copies survive in Istanbul, and one in Vienna that originally formed part of the library of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid 11 (1. 1481-1512). Indeed, according to that library’s inventory, Bayezid originally possessed no fewer than seven copies of the Taj al-Maasir.*> Christopher Markiewicz has explained the work’s appeal in the following terms: Although separated by time and space, the geo-political landscape that Hasan Nizami described in reference to the Gangetic Plain in the early seventh/thirteenth century mirrored in many ways the Ottoman geopolitical landscape of the Balkans in the late ninth/fifteenth century. Both regions were newly conquered and scarcely Islamicized. In this sense the language and rhetorical technique that Nizami used to describe and laud the conquests of his patrons likely resonated for ninth/fifteenth century Ottoman readers of Crown of Deeds almost three centuries later, when they were themselves engaged in projects of describing and celebrating Ottoman expansion into Christian kingdoms in the Balkans.?®
Until the late fifteenth century, however, these connections remained limited to the cultural field and the activities of individuals. From this point on, a political and economic relationship between the Ottoman empire and Indian states began to develop, in particular with the sultanate of Gujarat and subsequently with the Mughals.?” At the same time, numerous westerners, known as Rumis (or Anatolians),3° were employed as mercenaries in India, where they were especially prized for their prowess with firearms. The Ottomans’ own emergence as a major power and the activities of the Portuguese in trying to shut down Indian Ocean trade routes impelled the Ottomans to seek a closer relationship with India, even sending an expeditionary force to Diu in Gujarat in 1509 and 1538. Ottoman military intervention in India may have been an abysmal failure, but it did at least leave us a major literary monument in the form of the travelogue, the Mir‘atii’l-Memalik, by the Ottoman commander of the Indian Ocean fleet, Seydi Ali Reis (d. 1563). This described how Seydi ‘Ali, having lost much of his fleet to the Portuguese, washed up in Gujarat and his subsequent travels back to Constantinople through India and Central Asia.
While doubtless written with a view to exculpating its author, it also served to introduce India to an Ottoman courtly audience.
Ottoman-Indian ties also had a commercial aspect, for India was one of the main channels through which spices were exported to the Ottoman empire, while Indian textiles were widely sold on the Ottoman market, even to the extent of compromising local industry.39 Indeed, it was through these cheap, mass-produced textiles that most Ottoman subjects encountered India.?° While Ottomans and Mughals did occasionally exchange embassies, after the late sixteenth century and the Ottoman retreat from political and military engagement in the broader Indian Ocean world, these commercial links probably became the most important facet of the relationship. Yet the political relevance of the Ottomans to rulers in India was felt long after the high imperial age of the sixteenth century. In 1786 Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore in South India, sent an embassy to the Ottomans to seek help against the British,*! while after the mutiny of 1857, nineteenth-century Indian intellectuals increasingly participated in and were influenced by Islamic networks of the Ottoman empire.*? In the twentieth century, India proved to be the last redoubt of support for the Khilafat movement that aimed to preserve the Ottomans’ caliphate.*%
Despite the fact that, to degree, a Turko-Persian culture was shared by the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals, as well as the Central Asian khanates, it would be wrong to assume that the Ottoman—Mughal relationship was mediated by Iran in view of the geographical realities. On the contrary, there were many cultural facets that were shared only by the Mughals and Ottomans, not by the Safavids. This may come down to not just the shared experience of conquest exemplified by the works of Hasan Nizami, discussed above, but also to religious factors. While the Safavids were Shi‘ite, the Ottomans and Mughals were both Sunni (although Akbar’s embrace of the din-i ilahi does mark a temporary break with this). It is not surprising, then, that Turkish libraries yield up numerous copies of the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, the compilation of Hanafi law made by command of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), as such a text was doubtless of practical use in the Ottoman lands where the Hanafi madhhab was officially supreme. Yet other shared tastes can be less readily reduced to simple practical arguments. The Indian Persian poet Fayzi (15471594), for instance, was extremely popular in the Ottoman lands, and exercised a major influence on the development of Ottoman poetry, but was largely unread in Iran.*4 Meanwhile, the Adilshahi dynasty of the Deccan, notwithstanding their occasional Shi‘ite inclinations and alliance with the Safavids, themselves claimed Ottoman descent, despite the latter dynasty’s fame as defenders of Sunnism and arch-opponents of the Safavids.*°
2 Material Culture and Transregional Connections
The parallels between the historical circumstances of medieval India and Anatolia under Turkish rule have long attracted scholarly interest from art historians, even if, as Finbarr Barry Flood has shown, much of this interest derived from nineteenth-century ideas of “an inherent flair for form and design rooted in the racial heritage of the Turks.’*6 From such assumptions derived the efforts of earlier scholars to explain the emergence of, for example, parallel traditions of lithic architecture in medieval Anatolia and India, in contrast to Iran, where brick remained the predominant architectural idiom. Naturally, few scholars today will be satisfied by such racially determined assumptions; rather, the examination of encounter and exchange is embedded within the study of the material culture of the wider Muslim world. Nonetheless, much remains to be done to elucidate the parallels between the artistic traditions of both regions, including the question of possible exchange between the two.
The most detailed work to date that deals with the interaction of Turkish Muslims and India is Flood’s Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, published in 2009.4” Flood concentrates on the Ghurid period in northern India, but sometimes adduces interesting parallels with medieval Anatolia. He notes, for instance, the fluidity of religious patronage and practice in tenth-century Sindh, which he compares with the situation in medieval Anatolia, characterised by Cemal Kafadar as “the absence of a state that was interested in rigorously defining and strictly enforcing orthodoxy.’*8 Elsewhere, Flood notes the existence of knot motifs, which appear on various Muslim north Indian monuments of the thirteenth century such as the Qutb Minar in Delhi, the Friday mosque of Bada’un and the tomb of Iltutmish, and which resemble motifs that appear on coinage from as far west as the Turkmen polities of Anatolia and as far east as Mongolia. The exact interpretation of such motifs is problematic — they may simply be a design element, but it has also been proposed that they are to be understood as a tamgha, a tribal or personal sign widely used among steppe peoples. Flood interprets them as belonging to “a constellation of symbols of power — figural, abstract and textual — that were widely dispersed in Central Asian and Turkic cultures”.49 Similarly, the use of red as a symbol of royalty was common to Indian and Anatolian sultans of the same period.5°
It was thus not merely the parallel historical circumstances of Anatolia and India that resulted in close similarities in the expression of aspects of material culture, but the existence of a common vocabulary of power shared by each region’s political elites. Yet despite the important contribution of Flood in drawing attention to such parallels in a much more theoretically sophisisticated form than previous scholars, much remains to be done. While there is a great deal of, sometimes rather nationalistic, literature on Turkish art and architecture, often in the context of the modern Turkish republic, less attention has been focused on the wider artistic and cultural interactions between people of Turkish decent and the resulting material output. A recent volume edited by Ismail Poonawalla®! examines the wider Turkish presence in the Islamic world, including in western and central Asia, as well as India. The book touches on material culture in the context of Anatolia,>? but there is still a major need for greater scholarly focus on the rich variety of artistic and architectural evidence of the encounter and interaction of Turks with the wider Islamic world, and India in particular.
In the context of the earliest Turko-Persian Islamic architecture built in the Indian subcontinent, there has been a steady increase in scholarly attention. A volume edited by Finbarr Barry Flood features eleven chapters by a number of leading scholars that examines some of the key Ghurid monuments,*? while the earliest period of Indian Islamic architecture more broadly has become far better known through, among others,** the publications of Mehrdad and Natalie Shokoohy.5> More recently, the earliest phase of building by Turkish and Persian Muslims in the Indus Valley has received monographic treatment by Holly Edwards.5®
However, a great deal of material, as well as the nature and extent over time of the connections between the Turkish world and India in its widest sense, awaits detailed study. It is towards this goal that the attention of the final six chapters of this book are focused. Some major questions are raised by the study of the material culture which emerged as a result of the interaction of people who can be broadly understood as being Turks with the Indian subcontinent from the twelfth century onwards. Unlike Turkish history, in which there are clearly people with (or who assumed) a Turkish identity, or texts written in Turkic languages,>’? when it comes to assessing the artistic output which results from such situations it is far harder to pin any specifically “Turkish” characteristics onto any given item or building. The syncretic fusing of different traditions and the attempts to create existing forms and decorations in different materials, often by indigenous craftsmen attempting to supply an unseen but requested idiom for a Turkish or Perso-Turkish patron, makes it very hard to identify any single characteristic as Turkish. Relationships can be posited, and seemingly parallel developments can be observed post facto. However, clear evidence of a distinctive and mobile Turkish aesthetic remains something of a chimera which is hard to pin down.
There is perhaps a stronger case to be made for the existence of a Perso-Islamic style that was introduced into India by Turks who had become acculturated to the Persianate milieu in which many of them lived. The clear Persification of the Seljuq Turks following the establishment of their rule of Greater Iran, prior to an offshoot of the family ruling over large portions of Anatolia as the Rum Seljugs, suggests that there is nothing inherently Turkish about the art and architecture which was created under their rule. This is despite the retention of Turkish names such as Alp Arslan and Qilij, alongside use of both Persian names, such as Kaykawius, and Arabic ones, including ‘Izz alDin.58 What can be seen is in the final six chapters of this book is that a broad array of sources came together under the patronage of Turks in India and their dealings with India, the result of which was the emergence of a complicated, and at times confusing, but ultimately successful series of new aesthetics.
3 The Present Volume
The present volume is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Turkish Origins, Identity and History in India, comprises historical, largely textually based studies that often draw on comparative and transregional approaches to explore conquest and identity. The first chapter, by George Malagaris, compares three major Turkish victories of the eleventh century that have subsequently come to be seen as decisive moments in the Turkish expansion from Central Asia. These are the Ghaznavid campaign against the Indian temple of Somnath in 1025; the Seljuq victory over the Ghaznavids at Dandanqan in Central Asia in 1040, after which the Ghaznavids were forced out of Khurasan and established themselves in Lahore as a North Indian dynasty; and the Seljuq defeat of the Byzantines at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia in 1071. The early expansion by the Turks has often been attributed to climate change and environmental factors, obliging them both to abandon their original pasturelands. Yet as Malagaris notes, despite their common Central Asian Turkish origins, the Ghaznavids and Seljugs differed fundamentally in their military organisation (at least at this point), with the Seljuqs being predominantly a nomadic force while the Ghaznavids relied on slave soldiers, albeit supplemented on occasion by steppe nomads. Through a detailed analysis of these three campaigns, Malagaris argues that invoking climate change as an explanatory device is unsatisfactory, and that more weight should be given to the political and personal motivations of the participants.
Stephen Frederic Dale takes a broad chronological and geographical approach comparing Turkish experiences of India, Anatolia and Iran over the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. As Dale argues, the appearance of the Turks in western Eurasia at the turn of the second millennium represents one of the great turning points in world history, yet the consequences were very different in each area. In Iran and India, the Turkish language was never adopted as a medium of government by its rulers, despite its important place at court and especially in the military. In both instances, its use in the literary field remained limited, in contrast to Central Asia and the Ottoman lands where Chaghatay (Central Asian Turkish, or Turki) and Ottoman Turkish had emerged as major and prestigious literary media by the fifteenth century. Dale argues that the “Turkishness” of these states varied greatly from one another, with Turks in India usually becoming assimilated to a broader Perso-Muslim culture, in contrast with their experience in Iran, where they retained a distinct identity but were never able to compete with the prestige of Iranian culture and the Persian language. Even for the Ottomans, their principal points in common with both Safavids and Indians were probably felt to be Perso-Islamic culture rather than any specifically Turkish elements, and the term tiirk could be used as a term of denigration, implying “rusticity”.
The question of the nature of Turkish identity in medieval India is taken up in more depth by Blain Auer, who examines the period of the Delhi sultanate in the thirteenth century. The Delhi sultanate comprised four successive dynasties — the Shamsis, Ghiyathis, Khaljis and Tughlugs — who are generally termed in modern scholarship, as much as in medieval sources, Turks, and the sultanate is sometimes characterised as a Turkish state based on a Turkish slave military. Auer investigates what Turkishness meant to medieval authors and what role it played in the make-up of the Delhi sultanate. He notes that the sultanate’s military forces came from diverse origins, including Indian ones, but Turkishness seems to have been especially associated with martial valour and it can be hard to distinguish between slave, soldier and Turk. Yet when manumitted slaves themselves rose to become sultans, they and their descendants appear to have been divested of any Turkish identity, and rather to have assimilated to the Perso-Islamic one, losing distinctive features such as Turkish names in place of Persianate ones (a custom also found among their non-slave contemporaries, the Seljugs of Rum). This mutability of identities doubtless reflects the fact that the sultanate was essentially a coalition of different ethnic groups.
The following three chapters deal with the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Maya Petrovich examines the famed vizier of one of the “Turkish” successor states to the Delhi sultanate, the Bahmanis of the Deccan, Mahmiid Gawan (1411-1481). Gawan, originally from Gilan in Iran, functioned as an intermediary between the Deccani world and the Islamic west, in particular the Ottoman empire, where he gained a great reputation as a man of letters and a stylist. He also played a crucial role in the diplomatic and commercial connections of the Bahmani sultanate, while his writings shed light on the political idiom of the day. His career, and his relations with the various “foreign” groups who dominated (and destabilised) the Bahmani sultanate — such as Rumis, Abyssinians and others — offer valuable insights into the complex networks of politics in the Deccan on the eve of modernity. Indeed, these conflicts, and the frequent recourse of the sources to such ethnic terms to delineate the main competing groups in the Bahmani realm (and in the Deccan more broadly, where similar disputes also occurred), remind us that this preoccupation with ethnically named groups is not simply restricted to modern historians, but inflects our sources for the period.
A different experience of a newcomer in India is delineated in Ali Anooshahr’s study of the career of the Timurid prince Muhammad Zaman Mirza, who carved out an ephemeral - and constantly moving — principality in North India at the beginning of the sixteenth century that has hitherto been largely ignored by scholarship. Anooshahr’s chapter speaks to the question of the role of Timurid legitimacy as a factor in the success of contenders for power establishing themselves in this period, and in fact suggests that practical competence and military prowess trumped Turko-Mongol descent when push came to shove. In light of this, the Mughals’ repeated appeals to their own Timurid heritage take on a new significance. It was not simply political necessity that made the Timurids emphasise their lineage, for such appeals in and of themselves would have had limited purchase. At the same time, Anooshahr provides a valuable service in reminding us of the danger of reading the involvement of Mughals and others in India through teleologically tinted spectacles, as a path to power and domination. There were doubtless quite a few transient enterprises like that of the Timurid adventurer Muhammad Zaman, which petered out leaving little concrete to show. Scarcely more durable, as Anooshahr notes, was the polity established by Babur’s cousin Muhammad Haydar Dughlat in Kashmir, which is, however, better attested owing to Haydar Dughlat’s memoirs.
Questions of dynastic descent and legitimacy are examined in the final chapter in this part, by Peacock, which looks at the connection of the Qutbshahi rulers of the Deccan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to their putative ancestors, the Turkmen Qaragoyunlu dynasty that dominated eastern Anatolia and Iran in the first half of the fifteenth century. Drawing on hitherto neglected manuscript histories of the Qutbshahis, Peacock shows how the story of the dynasty’s Qaraqoyunlu ancestry was constantly reshaped in response to external threats and the need to formulate a version of dynastic ancestry compatible with the Qaraqoyunlu’s search for an alliance against the Mughals with the Safavids, who had, in their origins, been at odds with the Qaraqoyunlu rulers. For these chroniclers, then, the events of two centuries previously in eastern Anatolia were a matter of great sensitivity. At the same time, if this Qaraqoyunlu connection only became important for the Qutbshahis in the late sixteenth century, it certainly was taken seriously by the sultans themselves, as is indicated by annotations on manuscripts from their personal libraries and indeed the selection of literary works in which they evinced an interest. Even if there is much reason to doubt the veracity of all the Deccani sultans’ claims to Turkish ancestry (which are sometimes in any event contradictory), there was much more at stake here than a mere literary topos or legitimatory device for external consumption.
The second half of this book, consisting of chapters 7 to 12, deals with studies of the art, literature and material culture resulting from some of the myriad instances of Turkish encounters with the Indian subcontinent, and represents a small step forward in the understanding of this long and complex process. Architecture, numismatics and a range of other material-cultural elements are examined, using an array of different methodologies.
In Chapter 7 Shailendra Bhandare takes a reverse chronological approach to the iconographic analysis of the use of the lion-and-sun motif on coins minted in both India and Anatolia across the longue durée. Building on the anthropological approach taken by Flood, he draws a line between the Pahlavi and Qajar usage of the symbol in the modern era, through the Safavids to the Mughals under Jahangir, and examines its long-term associations with kingship. Attention focuses on its use on Ilkhanid coinage before turning to the various Turkish dynasties in Anatolia. The earliest examples were struck under the Rum Seljuqs in the middle of the thirteenth century. The study of the Seljuq usage leads back to the introduction of the motif to India and ideas of transculturation. He concludes by briefly addressing the ‘horseman’ type of coins from both Anatolia and India, and the symbolic significance of such an image in Turkish culture.
In the following chapter Richard McClary examines the resulting structures which emerged when the brick-building tradition of Iran and Central Asia introduced by Turkish invaders encountered the indigenous lithic culture of construction in both India and Anatolia in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The hybrid styles which emerged blended elements of the two traditions together into a new and distinctively Indo-Islamic style on the one hand, and an entirely different one in Anatolia on the other. The focus starts in Erzurum, and the relationship between the Tepsi minaret and comparable structures built by the Turkish Qarakhanids in Central Asia, before moving on to the use of spolia in Islamic monuments in both Anatolia and India. The introduction of twin minarets is followed by a study of some of the less well-known Ghurid monuments, including the one at Khatu, the Ukha Mandir in Bayana and the Chaurasi Khamba in Kaman. The examination of different approaches to spolia usage draws on aspects of Flood’s research, before looking at the phenomenon of stone into brick, whereby Indian craftsmen trained in stone carving worked in brick on monuments in the Punjab. He concludes with a study of the Sultan Ghari complex south of Delhi, where not only Hindu and Jain but also much earlier Gupta-era Buddhist spolia was used.
Moving forward in time, and south to the Deccan, in Chapter 9 Sara Mondini examines the poorly studied and distinctively autonomous Adilshahi architecture of the Deccan. Distinct from the Mughal monuments built to the north, this chapter studies the Iranian and Central Asian characteristics of the architecture of the region through the prism of the mihrab of the vast Bijapur Jami mosque. Added to the late sixteenth-century mosque in 1636, a close study reveals the complex social and religious nature of the society and the syncretic character of the resulting material culture. The astonishing programme of paintings and inscriptions on and around the mihrab is placed in its wider cultural context, and the entire composition is shown to have soon become a symbol for the renewed Sunnism of the dynasty. The latter part of the chapter deals with the specific details of the painted decoration, and highlights the religious significance that the choice of inscriptions signifies.
We move forward in time in the following chapter, where Suraiya Faroghi takes a wide-ranging and comparative approach to the study of the production of courtly goods in both the Ottoman and Mughal worlds. This includes their uses throughout the highly stratified upper tiers of the two societies, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. She takes a quadripartite approach to the topic, first addressing the aims of the patron, then the historiography of minature painting in the two empires, while the third section examines pious foundations and the limited available resources concerning the payment for goods and services. In the final part of the chapter the internal functioning of court ateliers is addressed. It is clear that despite the differences between the two courts, including a greater prevalence of artists signing their work in the Mughal context, the individual interests and desires of any given ruler had a powerful effect on the ateliers during their rule.
The penultimate chapter, by Pinar Emiralioglu, is titled “Mapping the Boundaries of the World: India and the Indian Ocean in the Early Modern Ottoman Geographical Consciousness”. It is a study of the political and economic connections between representatives of the Ottoman empire and the local communities in the wider Indian Ocean region. Emiralioglu primarily focuses on the variety of ways in which the Indian Ocean was depicted in the Ottoman geographical imagination in the early modern period. The Portuguese interests in and approaches to the region are contrasted with those of the Ottomans, with the former found to have had a far more systematic approach. The Ottomans, unsurprisingly, were more focused on the Mediterranean Sea, but did aim to counter Safavid claims to hegemony in the Caucasus, Kurdistan and Iraq. Emiralioglu starts with a study of the Book of Navigation compiled by Piri Reis, before moving on to the expedition of Seydi Ali Reis to Gujarat and his two books, Book of the Ocean and Mirror of Lands. The political aspects of the latter work are examined before a study of the mapping of the region, and the translation by Katib Celebi of European atlases. She concludes with a section addressing the Dimaski translation of Blaeu’s Atlas Maior and its reception. Emiralioglu’s chapter is suggestive of some of the means of transmission of knowledge between India and the Ottoman lands, and closer study of such textual traditions can shed further light on broader patterns of transregional exchange.
This volume concludes with a detailed study by Benedek Péri of a series of late-Mughal texts written in Turkish. Little attention has been paid to the use of the Turkic language in India, and it appears to have largely been the preserve of soldiers in the early period. This changed with the advent of the Mughals, and the connection to the Turkic literary heritage of the Timurids. The chapter addresses a manuscript in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Perzsa O. 87), which contains a number of different texts compiled over the course of many years. The longest Turkish text is Fuzuli’s Devan, and his life and work are examined prior to a study of the text itself. The work is shown to be a mixed Iranian Turkic/Azeri-Ottoman variant, yet written in India. The following section, dated 1175/61, concerns the poetic works of ‘Ubayd Allah Khan, a Shaybanid ruler of Bukhara. The chapter concludes with a focus on the sections on linguistics in these works: two on Central Asian Turkic as well as two longer Turkic-Persian word lists and vocabularies. This detailed study of the manuscript makes it clear that the copyist did not know Turkish languages very well, but much can be inferred concerning the original compiler of the work, a late-Mughal mirza named Mir Sa‘d Allah.
Together, the chapters in this volume indicate the multifaceted nature of Turkish engagements with India. Clearly, cultural encounters cannot be reduced to simplistic, racially determined patterns, but at the same time there is reason to believe that Turkish or steppe connections may have contributed to transregional patterns of artistic exchange, as is discussed in Bhandare’s study. Moreover, collectively the chapters suggest that the nature of this identity in the Indian environment was subject to numerous ebbs and flows. In the Delhi sultanate, a “Turkish” identity seems to have been discarded by the military elite on assuming rule in favour of a Persianate one. In contrast, in the Deccan a specifically Turkish identity was vigorously espoused by rulers such as the Qutbshahis and the Adilshahis. Such developments can only be understood in both the political and cultural context of the period, and are not susceptible to overarching generalisations. Nonetheless, the chapters in this volume suggest a much more profound engagement between India and not just Central Asia, but also Anatolia, than has often been recognised. It is to be hoped that subsequent studies will further flesh out this picture.
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