Persian and Arabic literary communities in the seventeenth century : migrant poets between Arabia, Iran and India / James White

• VerfasserIn: White, James 1991-
• Place / Publishing House: London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney : I.B. Tauris, [2023]; © 2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: I.B. Tauris Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Persian Literature
• Physical Description: xvi, 255 Seiten; Illustrationen, Karten; 24 cm
• Notes: Includes bibliographical references

"The seventeenth century is well known as a time of entanglement and mobility, during which the Arabian Sea acted as a highway of communication. Merchants sailed from Arabia to Iran and India in order to ply their trade, pilgrims journeyed the other way in order to make the ?ajj in Mecca, and poets and scholars migrated in all directions in their search for careers, knowledge and patronage. Yet the small amount of modern scholarship about the literature that was produced in the region during this period has tended to study authors in isolation. This book makes the case for a connected literary history of the Arabian Sea littoral. It examines how the movement of authors created two literary communities, one Arabic and one Persian, sometimes running in parallel and sometimes intersecting, which linked Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula in a system of exchange. Digging into a wealth of seventeenth-century literature that remains in manuscript, the book brings to light how the mobility of human actors made the poetry and prose of this period into an interconnected corpus, where writers used cognate forms, imagery and rhetoric to connect with one another across vast distances. The book combs through biographical anthologies of seventeenth-century poetry, reconstructing the overarching patterns in movement followed by the literary classes, before focusing on six case studies, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. For the first time, the book shows how the literary texts produced at this time in places such as Yemen, the Deccan and Iran were in dialogue with one another. It demonstrates that migration was multidirectional and multilingual (and so more widespread than is generally appreciated) and it connects the findings of cultural history with material philology."--

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Connected Literary History. The Corpus: Why Study Literature as a Whole? Parallel Establishments: The Arabic Cosmopolis and the Persianate World. Past Studies. Migration, Mobility, and the World of the Seventeenth Century -- 2. First Chapter: Society in Motion. Patterns in Migration. Persian in Arabia, Arabic in Persia, and 'this Arabic-Persian-Hindu land'. The Biographical Anthologies: Memorialising Literary Networks. Connected Authors: A Survey of the Major Networks -- 3. Second Chapter: Mecca-Deccan-Iran. Ibn Ma??um: Background and Outlook. Building a Network in the Deccan: the Arabic Literary Circle of Ni?am al-Din A?mad. -- 4. Third Chapter: India-Yemen. The Indian Blade: the life of al-?arim al-Hindi. Cosmopolitan ?ana?a: al-?arim al-Hindi and his Peers. Praise of the Imams: al-?arim al-Hindi and the Courts of Yemen -- 5. Fourth Chapter: Syria-Iran and India. Baha? al-Din al-?Amili: The Bilingual Audience of the Kashkul. Beyond Iran: The ?Amili Migration to India. Translating the Kashkul into Persian in Qu?bshahi Golkonda -- 6. Fifth Chapter: Iran-Deccan-North India. Salik Yazdi and Faraj Allah al-Shushtari: a collective biography. Form and the Making of Meaning in Golkonda. Shared Audiences: A Dialogue Between Salik and Faraj Allah -- 7. Sixth Chapter: Central Asia and India - Isfahan. Émigré Writers in Safavid Isfahan. The Case of Mali?a. Writing as a Communal Venture: The Commonplaces. -- 8. Seventh Chapter: Iran - North India - Iran. The Return Trips of Ilahi and ?a?ib to India. Patronage and Authorship: The Poets' Relationships with ?afar Khan A?san and ?Inayat Khan Ashna. Isfahan Once More. -- 9. Conclusion. -- 10. Sigla of the manuscripts used, and brief descriptions of them. -- 11. Bibliography. -- 12. Indices.