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About the Book:
The reign of Shah Jahan (1628–58) is widely regarded as the golden age
of the Mughal empire, yet it is one of the least studied periods of Mughal history.
In this volume, 14 eminent scholars with varied historical interests—political,
social, economic, legal, cultural, literaryand art-historical—present
for the first time a multidisciplinary analysis of Shah Jahan and his predecessor
Jahangir (r. 1605–27). Corinne Lefèvre, Anna Kollatz, Ali Anooshahr,
Munis Faruqui and Mehreen Chida-Razvi study the various ways in which the events
of the transition between the two reigns found textual expression in Jahangir’s
and Shah Jahan’s historiography, in subaltern courtly writing, and in
art and architecture. Harit Joshi and Stephan Popp throw light on the emperor’s
ceremonial interaction with his subjects and Roman Siebertz enumerates the bureaucratic
hurdles which foreign visitors had to face when seeking trade concessions from
the court. Sunil Sharma analyses the new developments in Persian poetry under
Shah Jahan’s patronage and Chander Shekhar identifies the Mughal variant
of the literary genre of prefaces. Ebba Koch derives from the changing ownership
of palaces and gardens insights about the property rights of the Mughal nobility
and imperial escheat practices. Susan Stronge discusses floral and figural tile
revetments as a new form of architectural decoration and J.P. Losty sheds light
on the changes in artistic patronage and taste that transformed Jahangiri painting
into Shahjahani. R.D. McChesney shows how Shah Jahan’s reign cast such
a long shadow that it even reached the late 19th- and early 20th- century rulers
of Afghanistan.
This creatively conceived collection of articles invites us to see in Mughal
India of the first half of the 17th century a structural continuity in which
the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan emerge as a unit, an inspired reconceptualization
of the Mughal empire as visualized by Akbar on the basis of what Babur and Humayun
had initiated. This age seized the imagination of contemporaries and, in a world
as yet unruptured by an intrusive colonial modernity, Shah Jahan’s court
was regarded as the paradigm of civility, progress and development.
About the Editors:
Ebba Koch taught at the universities of Vienna, Oxford and
Harvard; she specializes in the architecture, art and court culture of the Great
Mughals of South Asia and their artistic connections to Central Asia, Iran and
Europe. Her books include The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens
of Agra (2006/2012) and Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology (2001).
Ali Anooshahr is a Professor of History at the University
of California, Davis. He is a scholar of “comparative Islamic empires”
with a focus on historiography, history of memory, and cultural history of Persianate
societies in the early modern period. He is the author of two books: The Ghazi
Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam (2009) and Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian
Empires (2018), and articles published in Iranian Studies, Indian Economic and
Social History Review, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Journal of Early Modern
History and Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.
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