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The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history. Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangze...
Machine generated contents note: Luxury and global history Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Karin Hofmeester; 1. Precious things in motion: luxury and the circulation of jewels in Mughal India Kim Siebenhuner; 2. Diamonds as a global luxury commodity Karin Hofmeester; 3. Gold in twentieth-century India - a luxury? Bernd-Stefan Grewe; 4. Chinese porcelain local and global context: the imperial connection Anne Gerritsen; 5. Luxury or commodity? The success of Indian cotton cloth in the first global age Giorgio Riello; 6. The gendered luxury of wax prints in South Ghana: a local luxury good with global roots Silvia Ruschak; 7. From Venice to East Africa: history, uses and meanings of glass beads Karin Pallaver; 8. Imports and autarky: tortoiseshell in early modern Japan Martha Chaiklin; 9. Tickling and klicking the ivories - the metamorphosis of a global commodity in the nineteenth century Jonas Kranzer; 10. The conservation of luxury: safari hunting and the consumption of wildlife in twentieth-century East Africa Bernhard Gissibl; 11. Luxury as a global phenomenon: concluding remarks Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Karin Hofmeester
Babur, the visionary founder of Timurid Empire in Hindustan, had a fair share of early struggle following his father’s tragic demise in AD 1494. Then on, Babur embarked on an unyielding pursuit of power amid treacherous political landscapes, the narrative unveils his moniker, ‘the chessboard king,’ portraying his adept navigation through political intricacies and adversities. From his ascent to rulership in Ferghana amidst familial threats to fleeting victories and losses in Samarkand, the book paints a poignant picture of Babur's journey. It portrays his retreat to tribal lands after relinquishing hopes of reclaiming Ferghana, eventually establishing a mountainous kingdom in Kabul, a ...
The focus of this volume is on illuminating how local educational traditions developed in particular contexts around the world before or during the encounter with European early modern culture. In this vein, this volume breaks from the common narrative of educational historiography privileging the imposition of European structures and its consequences on local educational traditions. Such a narrative lends to historiographical prejudice that fosters a distorted image of indigenous educational cultures as “historyless,” as if history was brought to them merely through the influence of European models. Fifteen multi-disciplinary scholars globally have contributed with surveys and perspectives on the history of local traditions in countries from around the globe before their own modernities. Contributors include: Guochang Shen, Yongyan Wang, Xia Shen, Gaétan Rappo, Sunghwan Hwang, Jan S. Aritonang, Mere Skerrett, Saiyid Zaheer Husain Jafri, Zackery M. Heern, Judith Francis Zeitlin, Layla Jorge Teixeira Cesar, Mustafa Gündüz, Igor Fedyukin, Edit Szegedi, Inese Runce, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, and Davíð Ólafsson.
The book narrates interesting and amazing legends of Lord Jagannath. The mythical, historical, metaphysical, philosophical and cultural paradigms intertwine leading to an open-ended interpretation as questions arise in the seeker's mind get the corresponding answers based on their perception and intellect, blurring the lines between illusion and reality. Here faith replaces reason heralding a miraculous transformation of the "soul.” A true makeover, revealing the essence of the self, removing imprints of past "Samskaras" as one takes a dip in the ocean of "Bhakti.” It is in this mode that one should read these legends of the Lord. It is this esoteric experience which each quest for divin...
The City's Pleasures is the first historical investigation of the tremendous changes that affected the fabric and architecture of Istanbul in the century that followed the decisive return of the Ottoman court to the capital in 1703. These were spectacular times that witnessed the most extraordinary urban expansion and building explosion in the history of the city. Showing how architecture and urban form became involved in the representation and construction of a changing social order, Shirine Hamadeh reassesses the dominance of the paradigm of Westernization in interpretations of this period and challenges the suggestion that change in the eighteenth century could only occur by turning towar...
This book provides, for the very first time, a critical edition and an English translation (accompanied by critical notes and technical analyses) of the chapter on spheres (golādhyāya) from Nityānanda’s Sarvasiddhāntarāja, a Sanskrit astronomical text written in seventeenth-century Mughal India. Readers will learn how terrestrial and celestial phenomena were understood by early modern Sanskrit astronomers using spherical geometry. The technical discussions in this book, supported by the critically edited Sanskrit text and geometric diagrams, offer an opportunity for historians of the astral sciences to understand developments in astronomy in seventeenth-century Mughal India from a mor...
Muslim reverence for the Qur'an as the Word of God has manifested itself in various artistic forms throughout history and up to the present day. This innovative collection of essays explores creative expressions of the Qur'an in a wide range of media. Contributors include museum curators and leading academics in art and architectural history, palaeography and material anthropology, and their studies span four continents and cover topics from medieval coins and early illuminated copies of the Qur'an to contemporary painting. They offer a multidisciplinary approach to the questions of how, why and in what contexts the Qur'an has inspired Muslim artists and craftspeople to adorn the spaces they inhabit and the objects they cherish with its verses. The volume includes 120 colour illustrations, some published for the first time, and an extensive bibliography.
To scholars in the field, the need for an up-to-date overview of the art of South Asia has been apparent for decades. Although many regional and dynastic genres of Indic art are fairly well understood, the broad, overall representation of India's centuries of splendor has been lacking. The Art of Ancient India is the result of the author's aim to provide such a synthesis. Noted expert Sherman E. Lee has commented: –Not since Coomaraswamyês History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927) has there been a survey of such completeness.” Indeed, this work restudies and reevaluates every frontier of ancient Indic art _ from its prehistoric roots up to the period of Muslim rule, from the Himalayan...