Comparing the Persian and Sanskrit worlds, 1000-1800: a framework for historical writing

The University of Arizona (UA) is committed to ensuring an accessible and inclusive experience for students, employees and all who use University technology and resources. If you require a captioned version of this video, please reach [email protected] If you are interested in an upcoming CMES talk and require captions, please reach out to the above-listed email. CMES staff will work with the Disability Resource Center to ensure that captions are done either at the time (if it is a live-streaming event) or that captions will be done immediately for a video used in furtherance of classroom activities. Filmed by University of Arizona's Center for Middle Eastern Studies on 9/23/2016. MENAS Colloquium Series cmes.arizona.edu/colloquium Richard M. Eaton, Professor, History, UA The writing of India's late medieval early modern history has been bedeviled by an excessive focus on religion, in particular, Hindu-Muslim conflict. It is as though the past thousand years of South Asian history has been written backwards, with the whole of it a serving merely as a prolonged and bloody prelude to the bitter Partition of 1947, which divided the subcontinent into an explicitly Muslim Pakistan and predominantly Hindu Republic of India. This talk proposes a new way of viewing the period 1000-1800, commonly mis-labled the subcontinent’s “Muslim era.” In particular, it proposes to analyze, compare, and contrast the socio-cultural worlds produced by two trans-regional literary traditions, Persian and Sanskrit, suggesting that the idea of the “cosmopolis” is a far more useful category precolonial history than is the threadbare, flawed and more limiting one of religion.