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5 results

  • 8 - The Indian Ocean

  • from Part III - Monsoon Asia
  • Pieter C. Emmer, Universiteit Leiden, Jos J.L. Gommans, Universiteit Leiden
  • Book:
    The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800
    Published online:
    29 September 2020
    Print publication:
    15 October 2020, pp 311-352

  • Summary

    After an in-depth analysis of the making of Dutch territorial power in the Indonesian archipelago, Ceylon and Malabar, the two final chapters take an even more Asian perspective on the more marginal Dutch presence in South and West Asia. Through a Dutch window, this chapter perceives a so far undetected Indian world-economy that focuses on the bustling Mughal port city of Surat. Other regional chapters likewise stress the crucial role of Indian commercial brokers, not only in the Indian subcontinent but extending towards the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Dutch can only accede to these already highly sophisticated and integrated trading systems of the Indian Ocean. Their operations are crucially facilitated by their increasingly monopolised access to both Indonesian spices and Japanese bullion. Despite its marginal position in the Mughal and Safavid Empires, it was not the spices of the archipelago and Ceylon, but the products of India (opium, saltpetre and in particular textiles) which started to dominate the global markets of the eighteenth century. These commodities gave the edge to the previously overpowered but now re-emerging British, be it as Company or, increasingly so, as private traders.

The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates
  • Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis
  • Emma J. Flatt
  • Published online:
    05 July 2019
    Print publication:
    18 July 2019
  • In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, courtliness was crucial to the political and cultural life of the Deccan. Divided between six states competing for territory, resources and skills, the medieval and early modern Deccan was a region of striking ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. People used multifaceted trans-regional networks - mercantile, kinship, friendship and intellectual - to move across the Persian-speaking world and to find employment at the Deccan courts. This movement, Emma J. Flatt argues, was facilitated by the existence of a shared courtly disposition. Engagement in courtly skills such as letter-writing, perfume-making, astrological divination, performing magic, sword-fighting and wrestling thus became a route to both worldly success and ethical refinement. Using a diverse range of treatises, chronicles, poetry and letters, Flatt unpicks the ways this challenged networks of acceptable behaviour and knowledge in the Indo-Islamicate courtly world - and challenges the idea of perpetual hostility between Islam and Hinduism in Indian history.

  • 4 - Rama Raya (1484–1565): élite mobility in a Persianized world

  • Richard M. Eaton, University of Arizona
  • Book:
    A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 2005, pp 78-104

  • Summary

    Rama Raya appears in recorded history in 1512, when Sultan Quli Qutb al-Mulk enrolled this Telugu warrior as a military commander and holder of a land assignment in the newly emerged sultanate of Golkonda. By the early sixteenth century, royal patrons at Vijayanagara were building the monumental temples that have become today, in the popular imagination, iconic images of the state. In 1515 armies of Bijapur, one of Sultan Quli's rivals to the west and another Bahmani successor-state, invaded the districts under Rama Raya's charge. The view of Vijayanagara as the victim of Islamic aggression, and therefore of Talikota as some sort of titanic 'clash of civilizations', is informed by a highly reductionist view of the presumed essential character of both Vijayanagara and the northern sultanates. Most of the political culture of both Vijayanagara and its northern neighbors was Persian, whether elements of that culture had originated in Iran itself or had been transmitted through Iran en route to India.

  • 6 - Miniature painting: Golconda and other centres

  • George Michell, Mark Zebrowski
  • Book:
    Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 June 1999, pp 191-225

  • Summary

    Golconda art was always less humanistic than other Deccani schools, figures are closer to the glorious dolls of Safavid illustration and possess less mass and naturalistic expression than is usual in the arts of India. The earliest miniature paintings probably date from the reign of Ibrahim Qutb Shah, all in variants of Persian styles and not one equal to the masterpieces of the following reign. Aurangzeb's conquest of Bijapur and Golconda was not as inimical to the arts as is generally assumed. He was an orthodox Muslim, but his only overtly hostile act in regard to art was to command all figural murals to be erased in the Adil Shahi palace in Bijapur. There are close links between Deccani painting and the Rajasthani school of Bikaner, but the precise nature of the relationship has never been satisfactorily explored.

  • 5 - Miniature painting: Ahmadnagar and Bijapur

  • George Michell, Mark Zebrowski
  • Book:
    Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 June 1999, pp 145-190

  • Summary

    The briefest and most mysterious phase of Deccani painting occurred at the late sixteenth-century court of Ahmadnagar. Two portraits of the sultan of Ahmadnagar, both inscribed Nizam Shah, painted in about 1575, one in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the other in the State Library, Rampur, encapsulate this new sophistication. At present, circumstantial evidence suggests a provenance but cannot prove it. The lyrical but uncomplicated style implies the work of a brilliant innovator working at a provincial centre far from the courtly atmosphere of the Ahmadnagar and Bijapur capitals. A related style of painting, usually with Hindu subject matter and ever increasing Mughal influence, continued throughout the seventeenth century in northern Deccani centres. The mystical temperament of Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II, the patron of the greatest of these works, gave a strong imprint to the production of the school.