The Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (1608-11): Dialogue and Asiatic Otherness at the Mughal Court

Corinne Lefèvre*

Abstract

Building on the literary traditions of munāẓara (disputation) and malfūẓāt (teachings of a Sufi master), the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (Assemblies of Jahāngīr) constitute a fundamentally dialogical work, in form as well as function. An account of the night-time sessions presided over by Emperor Jahāngīr from 1608 to 1611, this source highlights the Mughals’ will to assert their power on a Eurasian scale and the central role played by Iran, Central Asia, and Hindustan in the elaboration of imperial ideology and identity. It thus opens a new window into the mental representations and hierarchies that underlay the much celebrated Mughal cosmopolitanism.

S’ancrant dans la double tradition littéraire des munāẓara (disputation) et des malfūẓāt (conversations d’un maître soufi), les Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (Assemblées de Jahāngīr) constitu ent une œuvre fondamentalement dialogique, tant dans sa forme que dans son fonction nement. Récit des séances nocturnes présidées par l’empereur Jahāngīr entre 1608 et 1611, ce texte donne à voir la volonté des Moghols d’affirmer leur pouvoir à une échelle eurasia tique et le rôle central joué par l’Iran, l’Asie centrale et l’Hindustan dans l’élaboration de l’idéologie et de l’identité impériale. Il permet, ce faisant, de mettre à jour les représenta tions mentales et les hiérarchies sous-tendant le cosmopolitisme tant célébré des Moghols.

Keywords

dialogue, xenology, cosmopolitanism, Mughal empire, Asia

It has been established that whoever—be he an Iranian, Tūrānī, Westerner ( gharbī), or Easterner (sharqī), a merchant, soldier, poet, man of letters, musician, or craftsman— enters the capital and is a master of his profession must pass under the most sacred gaze [of the emperor], enjoy the universal benevolence and generous disposition of His Majesty according to his skill and knowledge, and carry the good name (nām-i nik) [of the emperor] to the corners of the world.1

hese few lines of the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī2 indirectly echo the reflection the emperor Jahāngīr (r. 1605-27) shared with the readers of his memoirs not long after his accession to the throne:

When I became emperor it occurred to me that I should change my name [Salīm] lest it be confused with the caesars of Rūm (qayāṣirat-i rūm). An inspiration from the beyond suggested to me that the labour of the emperor is world domination ( jahāngīrī), so I named myself Jahāngīr.3

Taken together, these passages reveal two important characteristics of Mughal domination: first, the assumption (at least on a metaphorical level) of the idea of world empire that had underlain the achievements of the dynasty’s most prestigious ancestors—Chingis Khan (d. 1227) and Timur (d. 1405)—and second, the highly cosmopolitan profile that the Mughal court and state apparatus acquired in the second half of the sixteenth century. Both aspects were intimately linked, as the court, and by extension the realm, were considered a microcosm representing the macrocosm over which the imperial will prevailed. While the universalist bent of Mughal ideology has long been recognized and commented upon (particularly by art historians),4 imperial cosmopolitanism has, until recently, been the object of less sophisticated analysis. True, almost every general history of the Mughals treats their successful incorporation of a wide range of reli gious and ethnic groups from all over the subcontinent and the rest of the Asian-Islamic world. Such inclusiveness is generally connected to the lib eral views held by the dynasty in religious matters, in particular, the famous ṣulḥ-i kull (universal peace), which has often been deemed a remarkable, even unique, achievement by pre-modern and modern-day standards. Yet, few historians have attempted to overcome the mesmerizing effect of the Mughals’ relentlessly self-proclaimed cosmopolitanism and ecumenism, in order to scrutinize the pair more closely.5 What, for instance, are the impli cations for the Mughal world view and xenology (a term which I use here to mean the discourse on the foreign)? What do they tell us about the political and cultural geography of the dynasty and about the mental rep resentations that underlay the relations of the empire with those parts of the world over which it claimed effective rule or symbolic dominance? hese complex questions are addressed from different perspectives in two other essays in the present volume: Ali Anooshahr’s analysis of the Taʙrīkh-i alfī allows us to peer into Mughal metageography6 before the formulation of the ṣulḥ-i kull policy and Ebba Koch shows how the universal ambitions of the dynasty were astutely translated into painting, with the help of ele ments taken from European cartography. In this contribution, I call atten tion to the new lines of inquiry made possible by the recently discovered Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (1608-11), a text that offers a far more vivid picture of Mughal cosmopolitanism than do most contemporary chronicles. his richness stems from two main factors. One is the role of cultural broker that the author of the text—ʚAbd al-Sattār b. Qāsim Lāhawrī (d. after 1619)—seems to have assumed at the Mughal court during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Best known in this respect are his association (c. 1595-1607) with Jerónimo Xavier (d. 1617), the head of the third Jesuit mission to the court (1595-1615), and the two men’s joint production of a series of Persian works that purported to famil iarize the imperial elite with the Greco-Roman and Christian foundations of contemporary European culture.7ʚAbd al-Sattār’s abilities as a cultural go-between were not, however, channeled entirely into fostering a dialogue between West and East. he scholar also participated in at least the initial stages of the composition of the Jāwidān khirad (Eternal Wisdom)—the first translation into Persian of Ibn Miskawayh’s celebrated al-Hikmat ̣ al-khālida (986-92), itself an Arabic rendition of a Middle Persian collec tion of Greek, Iranian, Indian, and Arabic maxims that had previously been attributed to Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad Shūshtarī alone.8ʚAbd al-Sattār is also known to have written an abridgment of Sharaf al-Dīn ʚAlī Yazdī’s Zafarnāma ̣ (Book of Victory), a Persian biography of Timur completed in 1427-8. Entitled Guzīda-yi ẓafarnāma (1615), the new version was purged of Qurʙanic verses, Hadith, and anything written in Arabic, in order to make the text easier to read.9 he Jāwidān khirad and the Guzīda-yi ẓafarnāma were commissioned by Jahāngīr himself, and the fact that they were entrusted to a man who had so far been known for his deep involve ment in Western culture may point to a slackening of imperial curiosity about the latter, at least in the textual domain.10 Another (by no means exclusive) explanation may be ʚAbd al-Sattār’s gradual estrangement from the Jesuits from the mid-1600s on.11 Obviously then, the cultural dialogue promoted by the Mughals with the West—and, as we shall see in the course of the present article, with much closer neighbors—was not carried on without tensions, particularly for those who, like ʚAbd al-Sattār, were on the front lines of the encounter, as mediators.

Whatever the importance of ʚAbd al-Sattār’s role as a cultural broker, it does not alone explain the abundance of xenological references in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī. Such a profusion was also due, in large part, to the dialogic quality of the text—which may be described, on one level, as a record of the night sessions held at Jahāngīr’s court between 1608 and 1611. Here we find written down—in indirect speech or, most often, in dialogues reported in direct speech12—contemporary imperial discussions on a vast variety of topics, to the almost complete exclusion of the major political events of the reign. It is thus a highly oral work, which gives pride of place to literary (especially poetic), religious, historical, and scientific subjects, in accordance with the emperor’s well-known multifaceted curi osity. Jahāngīr’s interlocutors, for their part, reflect the cosmopolitanism of the Mughal court: besides members of the composite imperial elite, the sessions included ambassadors, poets, and dignitaries who had recently arrived from Iran and Central Asia, as well as a range of religious special ists, from Brahmins and Muslim ʚulamāʙ to Jesuit and Jewish scholars.

Moreover, two other factors must be taken into account in order to make sense of the fundamentally dialogic character of the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī—an attribute not often met with in Mughal historical literature.

In the first place, ʚAbd al-Sattār opens for his readers the doors of one of the key institutions of intellectual life in pre-modern Islamic societies, that is, the majlis—a place of meeting and the sessions held there, under the patronage of members of the elite, first among them the sultan.13 In Islamic court culture, these majālis were conceived of as an essential attribute of sovereignty and functioned simultaneously as a channel and stage for royal patronage, as an instrument for the acquisition of knowledge, and as enter tainment. More specifically, ʚAbd al-Sattār presents us with some selections from the favorite “pastime” of the participants in these exclusive salons— debates (sing., jadal ) and disputations (sing., munāẓara) in a wide range of fields. As shown by the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī and by treatises written from the eighth century on, detailing the rules according to which debates should be conducted (adab al-jadal ), these discussions were highly codified dialogues: the audience was not supposed to intervene, except when requested to do so by the monarch, who acted as the ultimate arbiter of the majlis.14 Such a rigid codification should not, however, obscure the enter tainment aspect of these sessions: appearing frequently in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, the shikuftagī (smile) of the Mughal is evidence of the majlis as a source of amusement, at least for those who were not the target of the sovereign’s wittiness. Even though the courtly tradition of the majlis and the literary genre of the munāẓara explain, to a large extent, the essentially dialogical architecture of ʚAbd al-Sattār’s text, they are not the only factors to be taken into account.15

Another possible influence is that of the catechistical dialogues with which ʚAbd al-Sattār had become familiar through his association with the Jesuits and their missionary literature. Attractive as this hypothesis may appear to the proponents of transcultural encounters, it is not one that ʚAbd al-Sattār would willingly have endorsed. At several points in his Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, the author makes clear that his text was to be read as the malfūẓāt of Jahāngīr.16 Meaning literally “utterances,” the word refers more specifically to a genre of Sufi literature that recorded the teachings of pīrs (spiritual masters). Although malfūẓāt were already popular in thir teenth-century North India, it was Amīr Hasan Sijzī who really established ̣ a reputation for the genre, with the composition in 1322 of his Fawāʙid al-fuʙād (Morals for the Heart), an account of the conversations of his own pīr, the renowned Chishtī shaykh Niẓām al-Dīn Auliyāʙ (d. 1325). he key to the book’s success lay principally in the new literary dynamics intro duced by its author: whereas spiritual teachings had heretofore been written down as lengthy and off-putting monologues, Sijzī chose to record them as lively dialogues between master and disciples (sing., murīd ).17 Interest ingly enough, it is precisely the same Fawāʙid al-fuʙād that ʚAbd al-Sattār explicitly acknowledges as a model for his own Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, which he considered a spiritual handbook (dastūr al-ʚamal ) for the newly enrolled disciples of the emperor.18 Although a parallel reading of the Majālis and the Fawāʙid does not reveal any significant concordance between the texts, the affiliation between the Majālis and the genre of malfūẓāt is crucial in at least three respects: at the level of literary form, it lies at the root of the dialogical structure and modus operandi of the text; ideologically, it propels Jahāngīr to the forefront of spirituality as the ultimate pīr; lastly, it also means that the audience of the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, a work that had been designed by ʚAbd al-Sattār specifically for the use of the emperor’s disciples, must have been restricted to a very small circle, as otherwise revealed by the one extant manuscript. From this perspective, the text’s very openness to the wider world appears all the more striking and shows the importance of that world in the elaboration of Mughal ideology.

Both the munāẓara and malfūẓāt literary traditions were remarkably well suited to the expression of the hegemonic cosmopolitanism pro pounded by the dynasty. What better form than dialogue was there to convey the atmosphere of vibrant inter-cultural exchange that had become the hallmark of the Mughal court and in which ʚAbd al-Sattār himself had been so deeply enmeshed? Because the dialogical structure of munāẓara and malfūẓāt literature was generally used to assert the eminence of the convener of the encounter (be he sultan or shaykh), ʚAbd al-Sattār’s point in deploying these genres in favour of Jahāngīr would hardly have been missed by the readers: in the hands of the emperor, dialogue was a power ful didactic tool that aimed to convince his interlocutors of his superiority, both temporal and spiritual. his stands out particularly clearly from the numerous discussions evoking the three poles around which Mughal men tal geography has long been known to revolve: Iran, Central Asia, and India.19 For if, by the middle of the sixteenth century, “Īrān, Tūrān,20 va Hindūstān” were still commonly referred to, respectively, as the head, the breast, and the feet of the world,21 a close analysis of ʚAbd al-Sattār’s xeno logical references is evidence of a significant shift in these representations.

Iran

he countless amirs, scholars, and poets of Iranian origin who populate the ranks of the imperial elite appear, in the Majālis-i Jahāngīr, as the most tangible manifestation of the importance of Iran in the Mughal world. More fundamentally, however, Iran emerges as a constant point of cultural, political, and religious reference. he cultural competition between India and Iran largely predated the Mughal and Safavid dynasties and affected the relations between the two polities. Akbar’s promotion of Persian as an imperial lingua franca is evidence of the dynasty’s eagerness to establish Mughal India as the new leading pole of the Persianate ecumene, at the expense of the ancient Iranian centre.22ʚAbd al-Sattār’s work allows us to scrutinize the concrete expressions of such an assertion of supremacy and the way that that assertion permeated the daily life of the court and the mentalities of its participants.

Royal patronage of poetry was the principal battlefield of Indo-Iranian cultural rivalry, as exemplified by Jahāngīr’s dealings with the celebrated Iranian poet Shakībī Iṣfahānī:

When, on the preceding night, the aforementioned Mawlānā [Shakībī Iṣfahānī] had asked for the permission to go to Iran, His Majesty answered him jokingly, “shakībī means “patient” (ṣabrī), and you are being impatient. Can’t you wait two or three days before hurrying away from us”? On account of the impropriety of his ill-timed desire [for permission], he today presented a quatrain by way of excuse.23

Poetry could, at times, also become a medium through which the mon archs conveyed their respective claims to superiority, as reflected in ʚAbd al-Sattār’s relation of Jahāngīr’s reaction to the reception of a letter from Shāh ʚAbbās (r. 1587-1629): delivered to the emperor in March 1611 by Yādgār Sulṭān ʚAlī Tālish, the first of a series of ambassadors the Safavid would send to Akbar’s successor,24 the epistle was immediately read in public and thereafter copied in extenso in both the Jahāngīrnāma (the emperor’s memoirs) and the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī.25 In addition to receiving such marks of honour, the letter henceforth became a recurrent subject of discussion between Jahāngīr and his courtiers. Two elements seem to have attracted the emperor’s special attention. he first concerned not the epistle itself but the inscriptions on Shāh ʚAbbās’s seal which, as Jahāngīr pointed out with surprise, did not mention the name of imams Hasan ̣ and Husayn. he second pertained to a couplet on royal friendship dedi- ̣ cated by the Safavid to the Mughal in his missive: “I sit together with your image and my heart is at rest. / his is a union that is not followed by the grief of separation.” Jahāngīr had apparently no respite from the moment he read the couplet until he found the adequate versified answer: according to ʚAbd al-Sattār, no fewer than four majālis were thereafter devoted (partly or entirely) to this perilous quest.26 It was indeed perilous (the monarch’s favour was at stake) for the Iranian poets (Shakībī Iṣfahānī, Naẓīrī Nīshāpūrī, and Saʚidā Gilānī) whom Jahāngīr convened around him in order to help in the enterprise. None of them, however, gave satisfac tion to the emperor, who was especially displeased with Naẓīrī’s verses, the latter being deemed unsuitable to “the nature of the sultanate and to the magnificence of the empire” because they referred to love (ʚishq) and desire (shauq): as Jahāngīr took pains to explain to the poet, an elder brother (barādar-i buzurg, i.e., Jahāngīr himself ) did not write such things to his younger brother (barādar-i khurd, i.e., Shāh ʚAbbās).27 Interestingly enough, the monarch also teased Naẓīrī on his lack of sensitivity for Indian aesthetics.28 Although the latter remark was meant to be taken jokingly, it is significant that the couplet that finally won the approbation of Jahāngīr was written not by an Iranian but by an Indian Muslim, Shaykh Jamīlī, the son of a Shaṭṭārī Sufi from Kalpi.29

The episode is instructive in two respects. First, it points out the unique position held by Shāh ʚAbbās (and Iran) in Jahāngīr’s geopolitical imagi nation. In the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, as in the Jahāngīrnāma, the Safavid is the only contemporary monarch to emerge from the shadows to which his Ottoman and Uzbek counterparts remained confined.30 he shah is also the only one with whom Jahāngīr engages in a real dialogue: directly, through the reading out, discussion, and reproduction of his letters, and indirectly, through the peppering of official chronicles with comments on Shāh ʚAbbās’s kingly decisions or actions (on which, more below). he Safavid is similarly over-represented in the paintings commissioned by the Mughal: contrary to the conspicuously absent Ashtarkhānids of Central Asia and the stereotyped Ottoman sultans, the shah is not only the object of several realistic portraits but is also depicted, on two occasions, in the company of his “elder brother,” Jahāngīr.31 Second, and most importantly, the letter episode—along with the shah’s treatment in the aforementioned sources—signals a turn in the Mughal discourse on the Safavids, who had heretofore been credited, albeit reluctantly, with a certain amount of superiority.

The Mughals’ complex of inferiority did not pertain only to the polit ico-religious sphere but extended also to the cultural domain. As is well known, Bābur’s (r. 1526-30) and Humāyūn’s (r. 1530-40; 1555-6) accep tance of Safavid assistance for the recovery of Samarqand and then of Hin dustan resulted in a humiliating ideological subordination to Iran, both rulers having been forced into the circle of the shah’s disciples, the cele brated Qizilbāshs. As argued almost a century ago by Francis Buckler and, more recently, by Azfar Moin, Bābur’s successors had no rest until they succeeded in equipping the Timurid pādshāh with a juridico-religious authority and an aura of sainthood that surpassed those of the Safavids (as well as those of other contemporary Islamic rulers, such as the Ottomans). he metamorphosis was finally achieved under Akbar: the promulgation of the 1579 maḥḍar (edict) and the completion of the Akbarnāma in the 1590s signalled the end of the efforts made, since the time of Bābur’s submission to Shāh Ismaʚīl (r. 1501-24), to repair the dynasty’s damaged legit imacy.32 Jahāngīr was therefore the first among the Mughals to inherit “a fully functioning system of sacred kingship,”33 as well as a claim to reli gious leadership over both Shiʚis and Sunnis. Jahāngīr was also the first to witness the effective transformation of the Safavids from saint-kings into staunch upholders of Imami Shiʚism.34 Such a contrast in the evolution of the ideological paradigms at work in Iran and South Asia explains to a large extent the aforementioned shift in the Mughal discourse on the Safavids.

Resonating in the new leading role the Indian dynasty claimed in the cultural sphere, Mughal assertiveness vis-à-vis Iran is also discernible in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, in the criticisms directed at Shiʚism in general and the Safavids’ Imami reorientation and religious exclusivism in particular. While the former criticisms took a rather straightforward form,35 the latter unfolded with more circumspection. Such, for instance, is the case with an anecdote relating how Shāh Tahmāsp (r. 1524-76) ordered the destruction ̣ of the garden where his father, Shāh Ismaʚīl, used to hold drinking parties.36 Whereas the anecdote was apparently meant by its narrator (Naqīb Khān) to praise Tahmāsp’s orthopraxy, Jahāngīr strongly disapproved of the lat- ̣ ter’s disrespect for his father, as well as his bigotry (taʚaṣṣub). Moreover, if one reads the mention of Shāh Ismaʚīl’s consumption of alcohol as a reference to his ghulūw (exaggeration),37 Jahāngīr’s reaction may be interpreted as a condemnation of Tahmāsp’s departure from the model of sacred king- ̣ ship inaugurated by his father.38 hat the Mughal emperor had a poor opinion of the Safavid Imami creed is further demonstrated by the irony with which he remarked on the inscriptions engraved on Shāh ʚAbbās’s seal.39 Nowhere, however, is the difference between Mughal and Safavid religious views more forcefully portrayed than in the twenty-eighth majlis. Held in April 1611, the majlis was devoted entirely to Jahāngīr’s recommendations to Nūr Qulīch, an amir of Central Asian origin and Sunni persuasion, who had been chosen to lead the return embassy to the Iranian court.40 he emperor opened his admonition by asking, “Do you consider the office of ambassador (ilchī-garī) to Iran with dread and terror (harās va tars) or with extreme Sunni bigotry (taʚaṣṣub-i sunnī-garī)?” Jahāngīr added that such bigotry would be most inappropriate to the subject of an emperor who, as a “universal manifestation” (maḥḍar-i kull ) and the “lieutenant and shadow of God on earth,” was meant to be the emperor of all people, without discrimination. And if Nūr Qulīch dreaded the fact that “the shah and the whole population of this region were Shiʚis,” how would his brother, Shāh ʚAbbās, consider the subjects of the Mughal empire?41 Such a display by Jahāngīr of the inclusive policy of the dynasty reveals the hier archical principles underlying it: whereas the sacred essence of the Mughals had entitled them to dominion over all mankind, the Safavids’ self-redefi nition as mere Imami supporters restricted their sovereignty to Shiʚi adherents. Deriving from the dynasty’s accession to sacred kingship in the late sixteenth century, ṣulḥ-i kull at once became a pillar of the superior status claimed by the Mughals and a criterion by which they evaluated alternative religious views. For, if Mughal ecumenism is here contrasted to the exclusive Shiʚism of the Safavids, it is elsewhere valued over Sunni or Christian sectarianism.42 Such proclamations also highlight the persistence of reli gious tensions within the empire, particularly between Sunnis and Shiʚis.

Returning to the analysis of the Mughal discourse on the Safavids, we have seen so far how the Imami reorientation of the Iranian dynasty pro vided Jahāngīr with a unique opportunity to discredit his rival. Nor were the Safavids’ old pretensions to sacred kingship spared by Mughal criti cism. his emerges clearly in the eighty-third majlis, where Jahāngīr is shown mocking the Safavid tāj43 in general and the new model of crown introduced by Shāh ʚAbbās in particular: the latter, the emperor noted mischievously, was much sought after by the ʚulamāʙ of Mā Warāʙ al-Nahr (Central Asia, Transoxiana), who used it to clean their teeth!44 Besides its comic dimension, the anecdote is instructive for two reasons. On one hand, it indicates that, even if Shāh ʚAbbās had distanced himself from the millenarian brand of Sufism that had brought his ancestors to power, he had not rid himself of all his attributes of pīr-u-murshid (master and guide) and had even reintroduced some of them, such as the tāj.45 On the other hand, it shows that Jahāngīr considered those same attributes a thing of the past, relics made obsolete by the coming of the new Mughal order. From this perspective, the new interpretation of “Jahāngīr Embracing Shāh ʚAbbās” put forward by Azfar Moin is particularly appealing. Officially dictated in a royal dream, whose substance the Mughal recorded on the margin of the painting (“Our shah came in a dream, and so made us happy”), Abū l-Hasan’s work represents Jahāngīr and Shāh ̣ ʚAbbās standing respectively on a lion and a lamb, lying side by side on the top of terrestrial globe.46 Basing his argument on the Mughal’s dream inscription and the Safavid’s deferential posture, Moin proposes to read the painting as a rever sal of the balance of spiritual power between the two dynasties: a century after Bābur’s submission to Shāh Ismaʚīl, the saint-king Jahāngīr had per formed the “oneiric miracle” of turning the Safavid into his disciple.47 Depicted, textually and visually, with a spiritual authority far exceeding that of his Safavid competitor, Jahāngīr was also eager to publicize his pre eminence in temporal matters, as suggested by several anecdotes evoking Shāh ʚAbbās’s injustice and his sometimes cruel excesses.48 Even though the latter’s propensity to cruelty is well attested by both Safavid and Euro pean sources,49 the emphasis it was given in contemporary Mughal chron icles was undoubtedly meant to stress, by contrast, Jahāngīr’s equity and magnanimity.

Taken together, the numerous discussions involving Iran were obviously meant to impart one lesson to the readers of the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: once the axis of the Persianate ecumene, Iran had been provincialized by the phoenix-like rise of the Mughals, who were now to be considered the new holders of the cultural, religious, and political prestige formerly enjoyed by the shahs. According to the discursive representations promoted by ʚAbd al-Sattār and his royal patron, Hindustan, as the seat of Mughal power, had no doubt succeeded Iran as head of the world.

Turan

Compared with the near ubiquity of Iran in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, the presence of Central Asia appears considerably fainter. Equally striking is the contrast in references to the region: some match contemporary topoi, but others open new windows on Mughal perceptions of Mā Warāʙ al-Nahr. Such is the case, for instance, with the region’s lofty reputation in matters of Islamic law. Considering the many sessions devoted to questions of jurisprudence (on which more below), the fact that Transoxiana is men tioned only once in this regard is puzzling,50 especially when connected with the disparaging comments showered on Bukhara later on in the text: instead of being praised as a major centre of Islamic learning, as was tra ditionally the case, the city becomes, under the always facetious tongue of Jahāngīr, the home of blind and lame creatures.51

Less surprising is the absence of references to the contemporary Ashtarkhānid (or Jānid) rulers of Bukhara and Balkh.52 Walī Muḥammad (r. 1605-11), as well as Imām Qulī Khān and Nadhr Muḥammad Khān, who together succeeded him in 1611, fare little better in the Jahāngīrnāma.53

Such a faint presence in contemporary Mughal chronicles reflects Jahāngīr’s lack of interest in establishing diplomatic relations with the Uzbek pol ity—at least until 1622, when the capture of Qandahar by Shāh ʚAbbās finally enticed him to strike an alliance with the ruler of Bukhara. Yet, even after this political rapprochement, Jahāngīr continued to consider Imām Qulī Khān with contempt, an attitude he made no effort to hide, even in the presence of visitors from Transoxiana. he account the poet Muṭribī of Samarqand has left of the twenty-four conversations he had with the Mughal emperor in late 1626 and early 1627 is illuminating in this respect: Jahāngīr inquired about Imām Qulī Khān only once, and then only to complain about his attitude.54 Even if the Uzbek khanates of Bukhara and Balkh constituted a major regional power the Mughals had to reckon with, the Ashtarkhānids (in contrast to Shāh ʚAbbās) were obviously not a relevant reference for Jahāngīr, where the elaboration of his imperial identity was concerned.

The Central Asia that appears significant in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī is one of the past—a recent past, in the first place, with several mentions of the great Uzbek leader ʚAbdallāh Khān Shaybānī (r. 1583-98). Even though the latter had been one of Akbar’s fiercest enemies, he is not vilified in the text. here is an anecdote associating his court with the rusticity traditionally ascribed to the Uzbeks, in the guise of a man wolfing down a whole mare before swallowing an equivalent amount of alcohol,55 but, overall, ʚAbdallāh Khān was shown due respect by the participants in the Mughal majālis. Rather than his Ashtarkhānid successors, it is he (and his son ʚAbd al-Muʙmin), for instance, whom Jahāngīr chose to be depicted alongside Shāh ʚAbbās in some majlis taṣwīr (assembly painting).56 Such respect did not derive solely from ʚAbdallāh Khān’s stature as a formidable opponent to the Mughals. In the last assembly recorded by ʚAbd al-Sattār, the courtier Diyānat Khān describes approvingly the humility of the Uzbek’s attitude whenever he visited Samarqand, the former capital city of the world conqueror Timur: resisting the sycophantic suggestions of his entourage, Abdallāh Khān refused to appropriate the latter’s throne (masnad ), prefer ring instead to sit on a carpet on the ground. he demonstration of such humility toward Jahāngīr’s prestigious ancestor, especially by a man who had just taken possession of Mā Warāʙ al-Nahr and Khorasan, could not but elicit the highest praise on the part of the emperor: “If ʚAbdallāh Khān has acted this way,” he said, “it shows his greatness and equity (buzurgī va inṣāf ).”57

This anecdote is the only place in the text in which Timur is mentioned. Contrary to expectation, the Mughals’ well-known pride in their Timurid origins hardly surfaces here, and only two other sessions allude, briefly, to another Timurid ruler, Timur’s grandson Ulugh Beg (d. 1449).58 he same is true of Chingis Khan, the other celebrated ancestor of the dynasty, and of the Mongols more generally. he latter appear in three of the table talks recorded by ʚAbd al-Sattār,59 but they are not the main object of the discussions, which focus instead on the last two Khwārazm Shāhs—ʚAlāʙ al-Dīn Muḥammad (r. 1200-20) and his son Jalāl al-Dīn Mingburnu (r. 1220-31)—and their ousting from power by the Mongols. Furthermore, the loss of their domains by the Khwārazm Shāhs is not taken up by ʚAbd al-Sāttār in order to lavish praise on Mongol might; it is instead explained by ʚAlāʙ al-Dīn Muḥammad’s irreverence towards Shaykh Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 1221), the founding father of the Kubrāwiyya Sufi order. With respect to Central Asia as the land of the Mughals’ forefathers, then, the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī differ somewhat from other contemporary literary and visual sources, in which the Chingisid and Timurid legacies of the dynasty loom much larger.60 he fact that ʚAbd al-Sattār’s work purported to legiti mate Jahāngīr’s rule on a spiritual rather than dynastic basis accounts, at least partly, for this difference.

Whatever facets they may have emphasized, the anecdotes ʚAbd al-Sattār recorded concerning Mā Warāʙ al-Nahr presented the Mughal court as a place where Turkish history was still very much alive. Because approxi mately half of the conversations bearing on Central Asia were conducted in Turkish (ba zabān-i turkī), they give additional evidence of the contin ued use of that language by some groups, at least, of the Mughal elite.61 he emphasis on Turkish is interesting particularly for two reasons. Together with reference to the use of “Hindī” in the imperial majālis,62 it reminds us of the linguistic dimension of Mughal cosmopolitanism. his is illustrated not only by the diversity of the languages spoken at court and throughout the empire, but also by the multilingual practices of a substan tial part of the elite, including the monarch.63 While, for many of the elite, multilingualism amounted merely to the daily use of a variety of languages, it became for others a prominent feature of their politics of patronage or of their own literary compositions.64 Mughal domination thus promoted a true “dialogue across linguistic boundaries” which ran parallel to the con tinuous Persianization of Hindu scribes.65 he latters’ acculturation remained, however, a relatively gentle process that left the Mughal munshīs (chancery scribes) free to voice their own worldviews in the Persianate lit erary genres they perforce adopted.66

The use of Turkish in the royal assemblies recorded by ʚAbd al-Sattār was but one aspect of the multilinguality of Mughal India, but it had a specific resonance with the imperial identity of the dynasty. he fact that all the conversations held in Turkish featured Jahāngīr and one ʚAbd al-Razzāq Birdī Uzbek (d. 1616) deserves special attention.67 Little is known about ʚAbd al-Razzāq, except that he was among the Uzbek amirs who, having opposed the Ashtarkhānid ruler Walī Muḥammad, settled in India in order to escape his wrath.68 After his arrival at the Mughal court in January 1611, ʚAbd al-Razzāq probably stayed there for a year, before being sent to fight in the Deccan, where he died in 1616.69 His use of Turkish is natural, but his systematic recourse to that language to the exclusion of any other is significant. Like many dignitaries from Central Asia, ʚAbd al-Razzāq prob ably also knew Persian, so it appears that he chose to use Turkish over Persian—but why? Let us remind here that Turkish was the dynastic idiom of the Mughals: by speaking that language, ʚAbd al-Razzāq gave Jahāngīr a marvelous opportunity to emphasize the Central Asian origins of his lin eage, which the emperor did not fail to do, as he ostensibly set himself up as an intermediary for those members of his court who did not know Turk ish. When conversing in Turkish, Jahāngīr also displayed his own imperial omniscience, the symbolic significance of which was not lost on his entou rage. Concluding the relation of Jalāl al-Dīn Mingburnu’s flight from the armies of Chingis Khan, ʚAbd al-Sattār says,

As these words concerned the affairs of the Turks (aḥwāl-i turkān), ʚAbd al-Razzāq Bīrdī Uzbek was asked for confirmation. he relation of the affairs of the Turks had astounded him, and he said, “We would never have thought that the emperor of Hin dustan thus narrated the affairs of the Turks.” He added, “Although he is the king of Hindustan (mālik-i Hindūstān) in outward appearance (ba ẓāḥir), inwardly (dar bāṭin) he is the emperor of the world (pādshāh-i ʚālam) by right and by heritage (ba istiḥqāq va mīrāth).70

Abd al-Razzāq had thus understood perfectly the Mughals’ position on Central Asia: they were entitled, by their Turco-Mongol origins and their status as world-emperors, to rule its territories. he continued use of Turk ish at the imperial court was only one of the many elements preserving the Central Asian identity of the dynasty. Better known elements included the pride the Mughals took in their prestigious genealogy, as well as their lavish patronage of the elites from Mā Warāʙ al-Nahr. Although not a salient feature of the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, Jahāngīr’s relentless efforts to attract those elites to his court run through the pages of the Khāṭirāt-i Muṭribī and, to a lesser extent, the Jahāngīrnāma.71 By doing so, the monarch crafted a powerful image of his dominions as an empire governed by a rightful heir of Timur and populated by countless men of the sword and the pen, who came from all of Transoxiana. Such an image was aimed especially at the would-be immigrants from Mā Warāʙ al-Nahr and at the Central Asian elements of the empire, who were thereby encouraged to see Delhi or Agra as a new Samarqand. Incidentally, it also added legitimacy to the dynasty’s persistent claims on Transoxiana, which were to take a far more concrete form after Jahāngīr’s death.72 In Firdawsī’s terms then, Mughals achieved world-domination by uniting Iran and Turan, but the fact that this union took place under an Indian umbrella gave an interest ing twist to the traditional Firdawsian schema.

Hindustan

In the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, Hindustan appears as a multifaceted otherness, whose diverse manifestations elicited equally varied responses from the Mughals. Unsurprisingly, it is Indian religious traditions—especially those of Hindus, though Jains are referred to twice in the text73—that are the object of most of the discussions concerning India. hese traditions are not, on the whole, discussed in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī as a set of meta physical beliefs,74 unlike the debates with the Jesuits on Christianity in which doctrinal and scriptural questions were foremost,75 but consistent with what we know otherwise of the Mughal emperors’ rather pragmatic approach to Indic lore. While it has long been held that the Mughals’— especially Akbar’s—sponsorship of the translation of Sanskrit works, such as the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, reflected the dynasty’s liberal views in religious matters, Carl Ernst has called attention to the “primarily politi cal significance” of the process.76 As indicated by the title given to the Per sian version of the Mahābhārata—Razmnāma (Book of War)—Akbar does not seem to have seen these texts as overly religious, and the translations he commissioned were intended primarily to access and publicize India’s historical, political, and military traditions. Unlike his father, Jahāngīr, as ruler, sponsored no translation from Sanskrit; the only two such works that may, with any certainty, be attributed to his patronage dated from his days as a rebel prince (then known as Salīm) in Allahabad. he less well-known thereof is the Dvādaṣa Bhāva (Twelve Existences), a now lost Sanskrit work that has come down to us through the only existing copy of the Per sian translation made in Allahabad.77 In addition, in 1597, Niẓām al-Dīn Pānīpatī presented Salīm with a Persian rendition of the Yōgavāśiṣṭha, a twelfth-thirteenth-century treatise on Vedantic metaphysics constructed as a dialogue between the prince Rāmā and his Brahman advisor Vāśiṣṭha. In the note he appended to the translation, Jahāngīr declares the text a work of Sufism (taṣawwuf ) especially valuable for the advice it contained. It may therefore be considered a transitional text, bridging the gap between the political translations commissioned by Akbar and the mystical ones spon sored by the latter’s great-grandson Dārā Shikūh (d. 1659).78 Jahāngīr’s interest in a text such as the Yōgavāśiṣṭha also accords well with what the monarch writes in his memoirs about his relationship with the Hindu saṃnyāsī (ascetic) Jadrūp. he passages describing his successive visits to the saṃnyāsī—which constitute the most detailed account of the emperor’s relations with a Hindu religious figure—show that Jahāngīr’s attraction to Jadrūp lay in the mystical qualities of the latter, whose knowledge of the “science of the Vedanta (ʚilm-i bedānat), which is the science of Sufism (ʚilm-i taṣawwuf ),” could also prove helpful in the business of kingship.79 he monarch’s interest in Vedantic metaphysics does not appear, however, anywhere in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, which is especially surprising in a text that purported to be a spiritual handbook. Instead, the debates with Hindu figures focus consistently on the normative aspects of their religious traditions. In the course of the thirty-ninth assembly, Jahāngīr thus inquired of a learned Hindu about the origins of the worship (parastish) of the cow and of the ban on eating its meat.80 On another occasion, the emperor stepped into a debate between Rājpūts who were trying to decide whether the antelope (nīl-gāw) belonged to the species (nauʚ) of deer (āhū) or of bovid (gāw), in order to know whether the consumption of its meat was lawful (ḥalāl ) or unlawful (ḥarām).81 In these instances and more gen erally, Jahāngīr’s position vis-à-vis the Hindu faith and the social practices derived from it appears remarkably neutral, except in those rare cases in which Hindus were seen as diverting Muslims from the path of Islam.82

What seems to have mattered most to the Mughal was to gain knowledge of those social practices in order to regulate them and, if necessary, to act as an arbiter, as he did in the second case mentioned. Jahāngīr’s numerous discussions with the ʚulamāʙ of his court as recorded in the Majālis reveal a similar eagerness on the part of the monarch to set himself up as the highest authority in juridical matters, a claim which his father Akbar had already made for himself with the promulgation of the well-known maḥḍar of 1579.83 Even though Jahāngīr may have considered some aspects of the Hindu faith as radically alien to his own, he was bound—as the emperor of all his subjects—to know and regulate its social implications. hroughout ʚAbd al-Sattār’s work, the difference in faith between ruler and ruled is thus acknowledged but never presented as something problematic per se, or as an abnormality that should be eradicated. On the contrary, the peaceful management of the empire’s religious diversity was publicized by its rulers as one of the greatest achievements of the dynasty.

Although the religious dimension of Indian otherness was not a domain in which the Mughals interfered much, the dynasty was keener on erasing other aspects of the difference. Among those aspects is what the Mughals seem, upon their arrival in the subcontinent, to have considered the “cultural backwardness” of the Indian military elites—elites whose martial qualities they nonetheless highly valued.84 Particularly significant in this respect are the proceedings of the twenty-seventh majlis:

At that moment, letters from the amirs of the Deccan were presented to that most holy one [Jahāngīr]. Rāja Manohar Kachhwāha’s letter was read [aloud]. He complained of his luck and fortune and wrote the following couplet: “You try so hard to find excuses [for yourself] that, if you were to forget my name, it would also be my fault.” hat august one [Jahāngīr] immediately said, “Such a misfortune is also due to your name.” He said so because, in writing that couplet, the raja had stepped out of the circle of proper conduct (dāʙira-i adab). Rāy Manohar hails from the Kachhwāha tribe (qawm). In Hindūstān, this tribe is the wildest and the most rustic (vaḥshī va rūstātarīn) among the Indians who dwell in the mountains and in the desert. But, thanks to the educa tion (tarbiyat) His Majesty ʚArsh Āstānī [Akbar] gave him, he [the raja] now acquiesces in [the judgment] of those who approve of delicacy in the writing and knowledge of poetry.85

This passage shows that the Mughals conceived of themselves as civiliz ing heroes, who successfully domesticated the wild tribes of Hindustan to which their many valuable Rājpūt allies belonged. he underlying standard of this cultural hierarchy was naturally the urban Iranian Islamic court cul ture the Mughals had come to personify in North India. Although Jahāngīr was the first member of the dynasty to be born of a Rājpūt mother, he refrained here, as elsewhere, from publicizing this aspect of his identity.86 Contrary to what the above analysis may suggest, the otherness of Hin dustan was not something that had merely to be tolerated (the religious traditions) or domesticated (the wilderness of its inhabitants): it was also an element that merged into the dynasty’s already composite identity as “Turco-Iranians” (in the cultural sense of the term) and that eventually became a source of great pride. his is clear from the evocation, in the Majālis-i Jahangīrī, of a series of Indian particularities from a wide range of domains, such as the fauna—including the description by Jahāngīr (com municated to an Iranian poet) of the mynah bird which, the emperor insisted, could be found only in Hind87—and the customs, such as wed ding ceremonies, which ʚAbd al-Sattār describes:

It was the night of the wedding of Tātār Khān’s son, which took place in the most holy presence [of Jahāngīr]. . . . According to the custom of Hind (rasm-i Hind ), a sehra was placed on the face-covering veil (rūy miqnaʚa) that adorned the head of the son of Tātār Khān. Common people hang all kinds of flowers strung on threads on the [groom’s] forehead, while the wealthy arrange rubies, pearls, and other jewels on it, and this is called sehra in the idiom of Hind (iṣṭilāḥ-i hind ). And, because there is no such custom (rawish) in Iran and Turan, Riẓā [ʚAbd al-Razzāq] Bīrdī Uzbek, who had recently arrived from [his] homeland, was astonished by this custom of binding the sehra and said: “May God protect His Majesty! Why do they hang this on the face?”88

This passage points to the well-known adoption by the Mughal elite of various Indian customs and festivals89 and illustrates an equally well-known phenomenon, the exotic character that seventeenth-century India retained in the eyes of foreign visitors, even those from neighbouring regions such as Transoxiana.90 Perhaps more interesting is the position of mediator or interpreter that the Mughal emperor claimed for himself with respect to this Indian exoticism: the supreme authority he exercised over the region entitled him to act as the official translator of Indian pecularities, to the benefit of the travellers visiting his court from around the world. Ironically, such a lofty claim is partly belied by the tentative explanations that Jahāngīr proposes to ʚAbd al-Razzāq Bīrdī Uzbek of the origins of the sehra: the imperial answer owes more to improvisation than to the “ethnographic” knowledge the monarch is otherwise known to have cultivated.

Conclusion

I would like to mention briefly another—perhaps the most radical— expression of Indian otherness that is be to be found in ʚAbd al-Sattār’s book. hree of the majālis actually set the subcontinent in a Mughal geog raphy of wonder, a category known as ʚajāʙib-u-gharāʙib in the mediaeval Islamic world and as mirabilia in the contemporary West. he first of these wonders is related by one Fīruz Khān:

He said that there is a place in Bengal, in the country of Sylhet, where Indians (Hinduwān) go to perform ablutions. A woman (zanī) [once] went to that reservoir for that purpose. After she had performed her ablutions and come out [of the reser voir], her appearance ( ṣūrat) changed to that of a man, and she bore all the signs and marks of manliness (āthār va ʚalāmāt-i mardī). Before that, she had had several chil dren, and, after she had turned into a man, she also became a master of family (kad khudā) and had several children: she became the father of some after having been their mother for a while! He [Fīruz Khān] said, “I have seen this person with my own eyes: she is still alive and has become a Muslim (musulmān).”91

The moment Jahāngīr heard the story, he had a message dispatched to the governor of Bengal, enjoining him to check the truth of the report and to send that person to the court. Indian marvels appear in two different guises elsewhere in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: a monkey from Bengal able to expose thieves and diagnose illnesses; and an Indian woman, whose body evacuated no excrement and who had therefore become an object of worship (parastish) among the Indians.92 hese anecdotes provide food for thought about the circulation of wondrous figures within the Asian-Islamic ecumene and between South Asia and the West,93 and they certainly deserve further exploration in gender studies. Here, however, I want to focus on what they tell us of the Mughals’ relationship to India, for which the geographical setting of these anecdotes is particularly significant: that two of the stories take place in Bengal corroborates the construction of these Eastern border

lands of the empire as the “oniric horizon” of Mughal India.94 In addition, in two of the three cases under review, the court is a place where the mar vels from all over the empire—whether they have already been transported there (the woman with no excrement) or are about to be (the woman turned man)—have to be deposited and inventoried. Once brought to the court, these wonders were transformed into objects of study for the benefit of Jahāngīr, who, following his constitutional empiricism and obstinacy, sought to unravel their mysteries.95 When, after six days under the scrutiny of the court physicians, the body of the woman with no excrement had not revealed its secrets, the emperor unhesitatingly extended the inquiry for another five days.

Instead of rejecting what they considered the exoticism of Hindustan as something so radically different that it prevented assimilation, the Mughals appropriated it with the pride of the landowner putting the marvels of his domain on display for his guests. Such an attitude must be interpreted in the light of the universal claims of the dynasty: Jahāngīr’s determination to describe and make sense of—and thereby classify—everything he observed in his empire was a strong assertion of his rule over the territories he had come to regard as the world in miniature. For all that, the Mughals’ feel ings towards Hindustan should not be reduced to a sense of pride in ownership. here are many passages in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī that illustrate what one might call, following Christopher Bayly’s work, some form of “old patriotism.”96

The Akbarī chronicler Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad had been the first to intro duce a notion of territorial identity in the Persianate historiography of North India—a move that was soon to be emulated by his protégé ʚAbd al-Qādir Badāʙūnī and that is also to be seen in the contemporary Taʙrīkh-i alfī.97 In the writing of ʚAbd al-Sattār, such a regional enthusiasm appears deeply intertwined with the Mughals’ celebration of their own cosmopoli tanism, the two not being seen as mutually exclusive.98 Albeit the Mughals conceived of themselves as world-emperors, their sovereignty took root in Hindustan, and although, by the time of the composition of the Taʙrīkh-i alfī, this geographical location may have been perceived as the very source of the dynasty’s preeminence, that was no longer the case by the first decade of the seventeenth century. On the contrary, in the eyes of Jahāngīr and ʚAbd al-Sattār, it was Mughal dominance that had allowed Hindustan to thrive to the extent of becoming the new centre of the early modern world—or at least of the Persianate ecumene—a transformation in which the dynasty took no small pride. In both cases, however, it is the successful and intricate combination of localism and cosmopolitanism promoted by the Mughals that seems to have constituted the ultimate standard of the dynasty’s xenology, as it developed from the late sixteenth century onwards.

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Notes

*) Corinne Lefèvre, CNRS, Paris, co.lefevre@gmail.com. I am grateful to Maria Szuppe, Ines Županov, and the anonymous peer reviewers at the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article

1)Abd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (Report of Night Assemblies at the Court of Nūr al-Dīn Jahāngīr from 24 Rajab 1017 to 19 Ramaḍān 1020 AH/24 October 1608 to 15 November 1611 AD), ed. A. Nawshāhī and M. Niẓāmī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1385sh/2006):

234 (citation) and 263 (for a similar passage). For a more developed and bombastic asser tion of the Mughal court’s cosmopolitanism, see Chandar Bhān Brahman, Chahār chaman, ed. Y. Jaʚfarī (Delhi: Office of the Cultural Counselor, Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2003): 53-8, as translated in R.K. Kinra, Secretary-poets in Mughal India and the Ethos of Persian: he Case of Chandar Bhān Brahman, PhD diss. (University of Chicago, 2008): 259-60.

2) Although Majālis-i Jahāngīrī is a twenty-first-century title (the only extant manuscript being untitled), it will be referred to here as such for greater convenience.

3) Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr, Emperor of India, trans. W.M. hackston (Washington DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and New York: Smithsonian Institution and Oxford University Press, 1999): 22; Jahāngīr, Jahāngīrnāma: Tūzuk-i Jahāngīrī, ed. M. Hashim (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Farhang-i Irān, 1980): 2. he reference here is to the Ottoman sultans Selim I (r. 1512-20) and Selim II (r. 1566-74).

4) See, e.g., E. Koch, Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); S. Ramaswamy, “Conceit of the Globe in Mughal Visual Practice,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 49/4 (2007): 751-82; R. Skelton, “Imperial Sym bolism in Mughal Painting,” in Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World, ed. P. Soucek (London and University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988): 24-30.

5) For recent exceptions to this generalization, see: M. Alam, he Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200-1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Kinra, “Secretary-poets”; and A. Behl, “Pages from the Book of Religions: Comparing Self and Other in Mughal India,” in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of Indian and Tibet, 1500-1800, ed. S. Pollock (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 312-67.

6) Following the definition proposed by M.W. Lewis and K.E. Wigen, he Myth of Conti nents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): ix, “metageography” is here used in the sense of “the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world.”

7) For a thorough reconsideration of the nature of ʚAbd al-Sattār’s collaboration with Xavier, as well as of Muslim-Christian discussions at the Mughal court, see M. Alam and S. Sub rahmanyam, “Frank Disputations: Catholics and Muslims in the Court of Jahangir (1608-11),” Indian Economic and Social History Review 46/4 (2009): 457-511. For further insight into Xavier’s Ādāb al-salṭanat (he Duties of Kingship, 1609) and ʚAbd al-Sattār’s hamarat al-falāsifa (he Fruit of Philosophers, 1603)—two little-known texts dealing with secular rather than religious subjects—see A. Sidarus, “O espelho de príncipes de Jerónimo Xavier SJ dedicado ao imperador mogol (1609),” in Caminhos Cruzados em História e Antropologia. Ensaios de Homenagem a Jill Dias, ed. P.J. Havik, C. Saraiva, and J.A. Tavim (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2010): 37-50; and C. Lefèvre, “Mughal India—

Muslim Asia—Europe: Circulation of Political Ideas and Instruments in Early Modern Times,” in Structures on the Move. Technologies of Governance in Transcultural Encounter, ed. A. Flüchter and S. Richter (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2012): 131-7. 8) See ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 90, 127, for his contribution. On Ibn Miskawayh’s work and the various Persian renditions commissioned in Mughal circles, see C.-H. de Fouchécour, Moralia. Les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e siècle au 7e/13e siècle (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1986): 34-7, and M. Alam, “Akhlaqi Norms and Mughal Governance,” in he Making of Indo-Persian Culture. Indian and French Studies, ed. M. Alam, F.N. Delvoye, and M. Gaborieau (Delhi: Manohar, 2000): 87.

9)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: xlv.

10) As shown by several art historians—e.g., G.A. Bailey, he Jesuits and the Grand Mogul: Renaissance Art at the Imperial Court of India, 1580-1630 (Washington DC: Freer Gallery of Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Smithsonian Institution, 1998), and Koch, Mughal Art—Mughal borrowings of European art continued unabated until at least the 1650s.

11) See Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Frank Disputations,” for a global assessment of the evolution of ʚAbd al-Sattār’s relation with the Jesuits; and ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 34-6, for a sharp statement by the author of his disappointment with the Catholic priests. 12) he author’s appearance in his own text takes various forms: he either refers to himself in the third person, using his name, ʚAbd al-Sattār, or the circumlocution “this most hum ble disciple” (īn kamtarīn-i muridān), or speaks directly in the first person. In any case, his authorial presence is palpable.

13) For a discussion of the ancient background of this institution, see S.M. Ali, Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages. Poetry, Public Performance, and the Presentation of the Past (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010): 13-32. he term maḥfil was also widely used in the South Asian context, but it seems to have applied more specifi

cally to poetry and music gatherings. For an analysis of the maḥfil as a “liminal space” where hierarchy and gender codes were regularly transgressed, see K. Butler Brown, “If Music Be Food of Love: Masculinity and Eroticism in the Mughal Mehfil,” in Love in South Asia. A Cultural History, ed. F. Orsini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 61-86.

14) E. Wagner, “Munāẓara,” in Encylopaedia of Islam, 2d ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1992): 7: 565. For a detailed analysis of the impact of adab principles on artistic speech in assembly, see S.M. Ali, Arabic Literary Salons: 33-74.

15) he inter-religious debates of the Mongol era were a precedent, in both general policy and courtly practice, for those held in Mughal times, but the writing down of such exchanges in the form of a literary text seems to have been alien to the Mongols. his is, at least, what we gather from extant accounts, most of which were written by Christian par ticipants in the discussions (most famously, William of Rubrouck [d. c. 1293]) or later summarized by Īlkhānid chroniclers such as Juwaynī (d. 1283). For further details, see e.g., B.Z. Kedar, “he Multilateral Disputation at the Court of the Grand Qan Möngke, 1254,” in he Majlis. Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, ed. H. Lazarus-Yafeh et al. (Wies baden: Harrassowitz, 1999): 162-83.

16)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 1-2, 113-4.

17) S. Kumar, he Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192-1286 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007): 373-5.

18) As shown by contemporary textual and visual evidence, Jahāngīr followed his predeces sors in presenting himself as a pīr and appointing disciples from among the amirs. For a reconsideration of Mughal imperial discipleship in the light of Safavid developments, see A.A. Moin, Islam and the Millennium: Sacred Kingship and Popular Imagination in Early Modern India and Iran, PhD diss. (University of Michigan, 2010).

19) See, e.g., R.C. Foltz, Mughal India and Central Asia (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001): 7-8. When viewed from the vantage point of the area of circulation formed by the early modern Asian-Islamic ecumene, several regions are conspicuous by their absence from the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: the nearest being the independent Deccan sultanates—Ahmadna

gar, Bijapur, and Golconda are mentioned only once, in connection with the Mughal cam paigns launched in their direction—and the most remote being the Ottoman empire and the Indonesian polities.

20) Although Tūrān referred originally to the “lands of Tūr,” the rebel son of the Iranian king Farīdūn, the term later came to designate the “lands of the Turks,” through a corrup tion of “Tūr” into “Turk,” as a consequence of the Turkicization of the region. In Mughal use, however, “Tūrān” was the name commonly given to the lands north of the Oxus River, which were then under Uzbek control.

21) See, e.g., Abū l-Faḍl, Akbar Nāma, trans. H. Beveridge (Kolkata: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 2000): 3: 612-3.

22) M. Alam, “he Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan,” in Literary Cultures in History. Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. S. Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 131-98.

23)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 51; and see 43, 49, for the episodes preceding this exchange.

24) For a classic account of the diplomatic relations between the two monarchs, see R. Islam, Indo-Persian Relations: A Study of the Political and Diplomatic Relations between the Mughal Empire and Iran (Tehran: Iranian Culture Foundation, 1970).

25) But see Jahāngīr, Jahāngīrnāma: Tūzuk-i Jahāngīrī: 111-2, and ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 195-7, for variations between the two versions.

26)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 198-9, 204-5, 223-4, 232-3.

27) Ibid.: 205.

28) Ibid.: 199.

29) Ibid.: 232-3.

30) For further analysis of the relationship between Jahāngīr and Shāh ʚAbbās, see C. Lefèvre, “Jahāngīr et son frère Šāh ʚAbbās: compétition et circulation entre deux puissances de l’Asie musulmane de la première modernité,“ in Muslim Cultures in the Indo-Iranian World during the Early-Modern and Modern Periods, ed. D. Hermann and F. Speziale (Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, and Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2010): 23-56.

31) he most famous Mughal portraits of Shāh ʚAbbās are two works dated to respectively c. 1618 and c. 1620: “Jahāngīr Embracing Shāh ʚAbbās” by Abū l-Hasan (on which more ̣ below) and “Jahāngīr Entertaining Shāh ʚAbbās” by Bishan Dās, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (F1945.9a and F1942.16a), reproduced in M.C. Beach, E. Fischer, and B.N. Goswamy, ed., Masters of Indian Painting, I: 1100-1650 (Zürich: Artibus Asiae, 2011): fig. 16 p. 226 and fig. 10 p. 272. he artist Bishan Dās was also ordered to join Khān ʚĀlam on his official embassy to Iran (1613), where he painted a series of portraits from life of the shah and his dignitar ies (Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 319; A.K. Das, “Bishandas,” in Masters of Indian Painting, I: 1100-1650, ed. M.C. Beach, E. Fischer, and B.N. Goswamy (Zürich: Artibus Asiae, 2011): 259-78; S.C. Welch, “he Emperor’s Shah: Emperor Jahangir’s Two Portraits from Life of Shah ʚAbbas,” in Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive, ed. A.I. Davies, W.W. Robinson, and C.P. Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1995): 260-3.

32) F.W. Buckler, “A New Interpretation of Akbar’s ‘Infallibility’ Decree of 1579,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, new ser. 56/4 (1924): 591-608; and Moin, Islam and the Millennium.

33) Moin, Islam and the Millennium: 270.

34) For a thorough analysis of this process, see K. Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).

35)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 54, 131.

36) Ibid.: 15.

37) Such an “exaggeration” included the belief “in the human potential to transcend matter and access the divine while on earth”—an access which Shāh Ismaʚīl clearly claimed for himself. For an in-depth study of ghulūw movements in early modern Iran, see Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs (citation p. xvi).

38) See also ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 17, for another stern condemnation of Tahmāsp as heretic ( ̣ rafḍa).

39)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 193-4.

40) Jahāngīr later changed his mind and entrusted Khān ʚĀlam with the charge of the embassy in 1613 (Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 148). 41)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 201.

42) Ibid.: 3, 34, 78, 184.

43) he tāj (crown) was as an emblem of affiliation to the Safavid Sufi order and was worn by the disciples of the shah. It was introduced by Shaykh Haydar in 1487 and is therefore ̣ known more generally as tāj-i Haydarī ̣ .

44)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 203.

45) For other examples, see Moin, Islam and the Millennium: 248. On the new tāj reintro duced by Shāh ʚAbbās in the 1590s—Safavid disciples had stopped wearing it shortly after Shāh Tahmāsp’s death—see B. Schmitz, “On a Special Hat Introduced during the Reign of ̣ Shāh ʚAbbās the Great.” Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 22 (1994): 103-12.

46) For other recent analyses of this painting, see Ramaswamy, “Conceit of the Globe”; H. Franke, Akbar und Ğahāngīr. Untersuchungen zur politischen und religiösen Legitimation in Text und Bild (Schenefeld: EB-Verlag, 2005): 308-12; and J.R.I. Cole, “he Imagined Embrace: Gender, Identity, and Iranian Ethnicity in Jahangiri Paintings,” in Safavid Iran and her Neighbors, ed. M.M. Mazzaoui (Salt Lake City: he University of Utah Press, 2003): 49-61.

47) Moin, Islam and the Millennium: 311-2. hat Shāh ʚAbbās is here represented wearing his new tāj highlights the mystical dimension of his subordination and lends additional weight to the interpretation.

48)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 8, 55-6; Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 178, 201.

49) On which, see S. Bashir, “Shah Ismaʚil and the Qizilbash: Cannibalism in the Religious History of Early Safavid Iran,” History of Religions 45/3 (2006): 248-50; and W. Floor, “he Khalifeh al-kholafa of the Safavid Sufi Order,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 153/1 (2003): 63-4.

50)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 149-52.

51) Ibid.: 158.

52) On the Ashtarkhānids of Jahāngīr’s time, see A. Burton, he Bukharans. A Dynastic, Diplomatic and Commercial History, 1550-1702 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997): 123-211.

53) Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 33, 82, 86, 363.

54) Muṭribī l-Asamm Samarqandī, Khāṭirāt-i Muṭribī, ed. A.G. Mirzoyef (Karachi: Insti tute of Central and West Asian Studies, 1977): 65; Muṭribī l-Asamm Samarqandī, Khāṭirāt-i Muṭribī, trans. R.C. Foltz, Conversations with Emperor Jahāngīr (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1998): 82. Muṭribī’s Khāṭirāt are another important source for the study of Mughal Central Asian mutual perceptions. Documenting the last moments of Jahāngīr’s reign, they provide an interesting counterpoint to the picture that emerges from the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī and will therefore be regularly referred to in the present analysis. For recent studies of Muṭribī and his Khāṭirāt, see M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 120-9; M. Szuppe, “Circulation des lettrés et cercles littéraires. Entre Asie centrale, Iran et Inde du Nord (XVe-XVIIIe siècle),” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 59/5-6 (2004): 997-1018; Foltz, Mughal India and Central Asia: 106-23.

55)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 180. Since their appearance on the Transoxianan political scene, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Uzbeks had been looked down upon by their rivals for their lack of refinement and, more particularly, their ignorance of the Iranian Islamic court culture which the Timurids of Herat and later of India conversely personified. Despite a rapid assimilation of the “Timurid civilization” that culminated in the rule of ʚUbaydallāh Khān Shaybānī (r. 1512-39) (M.E. Subtelny, “Art and Politics in Early Sixteenth Century Central Asia,” Central Asiatic Journal 27/1-2 [1983]: 121-48), the Uzbeks continued to be described, in seventeenth-century Mughal literature, as uncouth.

56)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 53-4. For other portraits of ʚAbdallāh Khān and his son commissioned by Jahāngīr and discussed during court sessions, see Samarqandī, Khāṭirāt-i Muṭribī: 61-3, and Samarqandī, Conversations with Emperor Jahāngīr: 76-8. While the album painting mentioned in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī has yet to be identified, the ones referred to by Muṭribī are likely to be the portrait of ʚAbdallāh Khān painted in 1618 by Abū l-Hasan (S. Stronge, ̣ Painting for the Mughal Emperor. he Art of the book, 1560-1660 [London: V&A Publications, 2002]: pl. 96 and p. 133) and the portrait of ʚAbd al-Muʙmin, preserved at the Gulistan Palace Library of Tehran and bearing an autograph inscription by Jahāngīr identifying its subject (M. A. Rajabi, Iranian Masterpieces of Persian Painting [Tehran: Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the Institute for Promotion of Visual Arts, 2005]: 474). Finally, we also know from literary sources that the mural decoration of Mughal palaces and pavilions often included portraits of past and present rulers of Europe and Islamic Asia. See, e.g.: F. Guerreiro, Jahangir and the Jesuits, trans. C.H. Payne (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997): 63-5; T. Roe, he Embassy of Sir homas Roe to India, 1615-1619, as Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence, ed. W. Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899): 1:240; Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 335, 341.

57)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 257-8.

58) Ibid.: 111-2, 237.

59) Ibid.: 171-3, 183, 221-2.

60) C. Lefèvre, “Recovering a Missing Voice from Mughal India: he Imperial Discourse of Jahāngīr (r. 1605-1627),” JESHO 50/4 (2007): 466-8; C. Lefèvre, “In the Name of the Fathers: Mughal Genealogical Strategies from Bābur to Shāh Jahān,” Religions of South Asia (Genealogy and History in South Asia, ed. S. Brodbeck and J. Hegarty) 5/1-2 (2011): 409-42.

61) For a recent overview of the role of Turkish in Mughal India, see B. Péri, “‘He has Excel lent Command of Turki Since It Is the Language of His Forefathers’: Turki in Mughal India,” a lecture presented at the Royal Asiatic Society, London, 10 February 2011. For other evidence dating from Jahāngīr’s reign, see, e.g., Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 77; ʚAbd al-Bāqī Nahāwandī, Maʙāthir-i Raḥīmī, ed. M.H. Husayn (Kolkata: he ̣ Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1910-31): 3: 591; W. Foster, ed., Early Travels in India, 1583- 1619 (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1999): 80-1.

62)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 191.

63) See, e.g., Nahāwandī, Maʙāthir-i Raḥīmī: 2:590-3 for a powerful evocation of the mul tilinguality of his patron, ʚAbd al-Raḥīm Khān-i Khānān, whom he refers to significantly as a zabān-dān (linguist).

64) I. Bangha, “Rekhta: Poetry in Mixed Language. he Emergence of Khari Boli Literature in North India,” in Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture, ed. F. Orsini (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010): 21-83; A. Busch, “Riti and Register. Lexical Variation in Courtly Braj Bhasha Texts,” in Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture, ed. F. Orsini (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010): 84-120; and A. Busch, “Hidden in Plain View: Brajbha

sha Poets at the Mughal Court,” Modern Asian Studies 44/2 (2010): 267-309. 65) Bangha, “Rekhta”: 46.

66) M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, “he Making of a Munshi,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24/2 (2004): 61-72; M. Alam and S. Subrahman yam, “Witnesses and Agents of Empire: Eighteenth-Century Historiography and the World of the Mughal Munshī,” JESHO 53 (2010): 393-423; Kinra, “Secretary-poets”; R.K. Kinra, “Master and Munshī: A Brahman Secretary’s Guide to Mughal Governance,” Indian Eco nomic and Social History Review 47/4 (2010): 527-61.

67)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 149-51, 180, 183, 209-10, 230. his contrasts with the Khāṭirāt-i Muṭribī, where Persian rather than Turkish was the preferred language of communication between monarch and poet.

68) Burton, he Bukharans: 125, 127-8.

69) See Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 121, 136, 193, where he is called Razzāq Virdī Uzbek.

70)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 183.

71) Samarqandī, Khāṭirāt-i Muṭribī: 25-6, 28-31, 33-4, 48-9, 59, 63-5, 69; Samarqandī, Conversations with Emperor Jahāngīr: 29, 33-5, 40-1, 60-1, 73, 79, 81, 86; Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 33-4, 82-3, 86, 126.

72) While such claims remained largely rhetorical during Jahāngīr’s time (Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 33), they became military operations under the leadership of Shāh Jahān (r. 1628-58) during the 1640s.

73)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 110-1, 272.

74) For one exception, see ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 72, where Jahāngīr refers to the faith of the Hindus (dīn-i Hunūd ) as fanciful beliefs, emphasizing the impassable bar rier that separated revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) from others. 75) M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, “Frank Disputations”: 489-504. 76) C.W. Ernst, “Muslim Studies of Hinduism? A Reconsideration of Arabic and Persian Translations from Indian Languages,” Iranian Studies 36/2 (2003): 174. 77) M.C. Beach, he Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India (1600-1660) (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1978): 40-1.

78) Ernst, “Muslim Studies of Hinduism?”: 185. On this manuscript, see also Franke, Akbar und Ğahāngīr: 257-8.

79) Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 209-10 (citation), 283, 285, 313-4. 80)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 96-8.

81) Ibid.: 64-5.

82) Ibid.: 22-4; Jahāngīr, Jahāngīr Nāma: Memoirs of Jahāngīr: 111, 374. 83) Jahāngīr’s desire to know all the rules governing the Islamic diet (ḍābiṭa-i kullīya barā-yi ānchi bāyad khwurd ) is a recurrent feature of the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, where the emperor may be seen badgering the ʚulamāʙ on the lawfulness of, among other things, drinking grape and sugar-cane wine, and eating fish (with and without scales) or the flesh of an animal killed by musket (ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 47, 117-8, 143-4, 149-52). While an in-depth analysis of the monarch’s obsession with such aspects of Islamic law falls outside the scope of the present article, it is clear that Jahāngīr’s need to identify and make an

inventory of every practice sanctioned by Islamic law presages the standardization pursued by emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) in this domain, through his commissioning of the massive Fatāwā-yi ʚĀlamgīrī (1667-75).

84) For the topos of Rājpūt bravery as illustrated in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, see ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 140-1, 174-7, 218, 259.

85)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 66-7.

86) For further development of this point, see Lefèvre, “In the Name of the Fathers”: 427-9. 87) Ibid.: 169.

88) Ibid.: 230.

89) Diwali is the only Hindu festival mentioned in the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 271), but the Jahāngīrnāma abounds in references to court celebrations of Diwali, Dasehra, and Rakhi, as well as the solar and lunar festivals of the weighing of the ruler. For an overview of the festivals celebrated at the Mughal court, see P.N. Chopra, Life and Letters Under the Mughals (Delhi: Ashajanak Publications, 1978): 83-107.

90) For other examples, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels.

91)ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 141.

92) Ibid.: 191, 241-2. he only example of a non-Indian marvel present in the Majālis is an Iranian man able to state the number of words contained in a book after having read it once, an ability that did not rank very high compared to the marvels of Hindustan (ʚAbd al-Sattār, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: 263-4).

93) A similar story of thief-identifying monkeys is found a couple of decades later, in the account of a Central Asian traveller to the subcontinent: Maḥmūd b. Amīr Walī Balkhī, Baḥr al-asrār, ed. R. Islam (Karachi: Institute of Central and West Asian Studies, 1980): 79-80. For a stimulating foray into the dissemination of marvels originating in Mughal India, see J. Flores, “Distant Wonders: he Strange and the Marvelous between Mughal India and Habsburg Iberia in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Comparative Studies in Soci ety and History 49/3 (2007): 553-81.

94) See Flores (“Distant Wonders”: 571), who was himself borrowing from the title of an article by J. Le Goff, “he Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oniric Horizon,” in Facing Each Other: he World’s Perception of Europe and Europe’s Perception of the World, ed. A. Pagden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000): 1-19.

95) For further development of this point, see Lefèvre, “Recovering a Missing Voice”: 474-8.

96) C.A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia. Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

97) M. Athar Ali, “he Perception of India in Akbar and Abūʙl Faẓl,” in Akbar and his India, ed. I. Habib (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997): 218-9; A. Anooshahr, “Mughal His torians and the Memory of the Islamic Conquest of India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 43/3 2006): 275-300, and his contribution in the present volume; Kumar, he Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate: 355-7.

98) Strong echoes of this aspect of the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī may be found in the later work of the celebrated munshī Chandar Bhān Brahman (d. 1662-3), which has recently been the object of a thoughtful and stimulating reconsideration by Kinra, “Secretary-poets.”

The Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (1608-11): Dialogue and Asiatic Otherness at the Mughal Court

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