How can we conceptualise multilingual literary culture, and how can we research it? Using the turbulent ‘long fifteenth century’ in north India as a site, this article questions research models based on single languages (Hindi, Urdu) and engages critically with early modern taxonomies and archives. The article focuses on the materiality of the archive—the language, script and format in which texts were written down and copied—on the spaces and locations in which literature was produced and performed, and on the oral-performative practices and agents that made texts circulate to audiences in ways not bound by the script in which the texts appear to us. Not only are the models of composite culture and language-specificity questioned as a result, but the sites of literary production move from the court to a series of intersections, and areas that were peripheral move into view and connect with others.
AgravalVasudevsharan. Padmāvat: Malik Muhammad Jāyasī k t mahākāvya, Chirgaon, 1988.
2.
AlamMuzaffar. ‘Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation and Sufi Accommodation in Awadh Society’ in ChampakalakshmiR.GopalS., eds, Tradition, Dissent and Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar, Delhi, 1996.
3.
Anon. ‘Sikandar Lodhi aur uske ‘ahad ke ba‘z farsi musannifin’, Oriental College Magazine, Vol. 32, 1932.
BadauniAbd al-Qadir. Muntakhabu-t-tawarikh, translated from the original Persian and edited byLoweW.H., vol. 2, Calcutta, 1898–1925.
6.
BaevskiiSolomon I.Early Persian Lexicography: Farhangs of the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, translated, revised and updated byPerryJohn R., Folkestone, 2007 [1989].
7.
BahuraGopal Narayan. Pada Sūradāsajī kā, facsimile edition, with an essay byBryantK., Jaipur, 1984.
8.
BanghaImre. ‘Rekhta: Poetry in Mixed Language’ in OrsiniF., ed., Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 21–83.
9.
BarzRichard. The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhacharya, Faridabad, 1976.
Brac de la PerrièreEloïse. L’Art du livre dans l’Inde des sultanats, Paris, 2008.
14.
BuschAllison. ‘Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhasha Poets at the Mughal Court’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 44(2), 2010, pp. 267–309.
15.
BuschAllison. Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, New York, 2011.
16.
CallewaertWinand M.LathMukund. Hindi songs of Namdev, Leuven, 1989.
17.
ChatterjeeKumkum. ‘Cultural Flows and Cosmopolitanism in Mughal India: the Bishnupur Kingdom’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 46(2), 2009, pp. 147–82.
18.
De BruijnThomas. The Ruby in the Dust: The Poetics of Muƒammad Jāyasī’sPadmāvat, Leiden, 2011.
19.
De ClerqEva. ‘Apabhramsha as a literary medium in fifteenth century North India’, in OrsiniF.SheikhS., eds, After Timur Left, forthcoming.
20.
DelvoyeFrançoise. ‘Nalini’. ‘Indo-Persian Accounts on Music Patronage in the Sultanate of Gujarat’, in AlamM.DelvoyeF.N.GaborieauM., eds, The Making of Indo-Persian Culture: Indian and French Studies, New Delhi, 2000, pp. 253–80.
21.
DelvoyeFrançoise. ‘Collections of lyrics in Hindustani music: The case of Dhrupad’, in BorJ.DelvoyeF.N.HarveyJ.NijenhuisE. Te, eds, Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 141–58.
22.
DigbySimon. ‘Two Captains of the Jawnpur Sultanate’, in GommansJ.PrakashO., eds, Cir-cumambulations in South Asian History: Essays in Honour of Dirk H.A. Kolff, Leiden, 2003, pp. 159–78.
23.
EntwstleAlan W.Braj: Centre of Krishna pilgrimage, Groningen, 1987.
24.
GallegoMaria Angeles. ‘The languages of Medieval Iberia and Their Religious Dimension’, Medieval Encounters, Vol. 9(1), 2003, pp. 107–39.
25.
GiovanardiClaudio. ‘Il bilinguismo italiano-latino del medioevo e del Rinascimento’, in Storia della lingua italiana, vol. 2 ‘Lo Scritto e il Parlato’, Torino, 1994, pp. 435–67.
26.
GoswamyB.N.A Jainesque Sultanate Shahnama and the Context of Pre-Mughal Painting in India, Zürich, 1988.
27.
GranoffPhyllis. ‘Mountains of Eternity: Raidhū and the Colossal Jinas of Gwalior’, Rivista di Studi Sudasiatici, Vol. 1, 2006, pp. 31–50.
28.
GuhaSumit. ‘Mārgī, De ī and Yāvanī: High Language and Ethnic Speech in Maharashtra’, in NaitoM.ShimaI.KotaniH., eds, Maȓga: Ways of Liberation, Empowerment, and Social Change in Maharashtra, New Delhi, 2008, pp. 129–46.
GuptaParmeshvarilal, ed. Kanhāvata, by Malika Muhammda Jayasi, Banaras, 1981.
31.
HorstmannMonika. In Favour of Govinddevji: Historical Documents Relating to a Deity of Vrindaban and Eastern Rajasthan, in collaboration withBillHeike, New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in association with Manohar, 1999.
32.
KhandalavalaKarlChandraMoti. New Documents of Indian Painting: A Reappraisal, Bombay, 1969.
33.
KingChristopher. ‘The Nagari Pracharini Sabha of Benares, 1893–1914: A Study in the Social and Political History of the Hindi Language’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1974.
34.
KolffD.H.A.Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: the Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850, Cambridge, 1990.
35.
McGregorR.S.Hindi Literature: From the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century, Wiesbaden, 1984.
36.
MinerAllyn. ‘Ragas and Raginis, Sufis and Sants: Music in north India in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in OrsiniF.SchofieldK., eds, Tellings and Texts: Singing, Story-Telling and Performance in South Asia, forthcoming.
37.
MominMohiuddin. The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography Under the Mughals, from Bábur to Sháh Jahán, 1526–1658: A Study on Inshá, Dár al-Inshá, and Munshīs Based on Original Documents, Calcutta, 1971.
38.
MukherjeeTarapadaHabibIrfan. ‘Land Rights in the Reign of Akbar: The Evidence of the Sale-deeds of Vrindaban and Aritha’, Proceedings: Indian History Congress (1989–90), Vol. 50, 1990, pp. 236–55.
39.
NovetzkeChristian L.Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India, New York, 2008.
40.
O’HanlonRosalind. ‘Speaking from Siva’s Temple: Banaras Scholar Households and the Brahman “Ecumene” of Mughal India’, in O’HanlonR.WashbrookD., eds, Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives, London, 2011, first published as Special Issue of South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 2( 2), April2011, pp. 253–77.
41.
OrsiniFrancesca. ‘Krishna Bhakti and Sufis in Awadh’, in DalmiaV.FaruquiM. eds, Religious Interactions in Mughal India, New Delhi, forthcoming.
42.
OrsiniFrancescaPellò.Stefano ‘Bhakti in Persian’, unpublished paper, presented at the panel on ‘Rethinking Bhakti in North India’, 21st EASMAS conference, Bonn, 2010.
43.
OrsiniFrancescaSheikhSamira (eds.). After Timur Left: Cultural Production and Circulation in the Long Fifteenth Century, New Delhi, forthcoming.
44.
PauwelsHeidi. ‘The Saint, the Warlord, and the Emperor: Discourses of Braj Bhakti and Bundelā Loyalty’, Journal of the Economic & Social History of the Orient, Vol. 52(2), 2009, pp. 187–228.
45.
PavieTheodore. Krichna et sa Doctrine, Paris, 1852.
46.
PhukanShantanu. ‘Through a Persian Prism: Hindi and Padmavat in the Mughal Imagination’, unpublished Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2000.
47.
PhukanShantanu. ‘“Through Throats Where Many Rivers Meet”: The Ecology of Hindi in the Persian Imag-ination’, Indian Economic Social History Review, Vol. 38(1), 2001, pp. 33–58.
48.
PlukkerD.F.The Mirigāvatī of Kutubana: Avadhī text with critical notes. Amsterdam, published Ph.D., 1981.
49.
PollockSheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, Berkeley, 2006.
50.
RizviS.A.A.Alakh Bānī, Aligarh, 1971.
51.
SahaShandip. ‘Between Temple and Court: The Pushti Marga in Mewar’, paper presented at the 20th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (ECMSAS), Manchester, UK, 8–11 July 2008.
52.
SchofieldKatherine. ‘The Mughal Rasika’, paper presented at the conference ‘Tellings, Not Texts: Singing, Story-Telling and Performance’, School of Oriental and African Studies, 8–9 June 2009.
53.
ShackleC.S. ‘Approaches to the Persian loans in the šdi Granth’, Bulletin of SOAS, Vol. 41(1), 1978, pp. 73–96.
54.
ShafiM. Mohammad. ‘Three Old Documents’, Proceedings of the Idara-i Maarif-i Islamia, Lahore, 1936, pp. 281–85.
55.
ShafiM. Mohammad
. ‘Urdu fiqre aur dohre ā~hvīn aur navīn adī hijrī kī fārsī ta nifāt se’, Oriental College Magazine (August), 1930, reprinted in Maqālāt-e žāfiz Maƒmūd Sherānī, Lahore, 1966.
56.
SheraniHafiz Mahmud. ‘Makhdūm Shaikh Bahā’ud-dīn Barnāwī’, Oriental College Magazine, 1927, part 1 (August), pp. 41–58, part 2 (November), pp. 9–26.
57.
SiddiquiIqtidar Husain. Waqi‘at-e-Mushtaqui of Shaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui, New Delhi, 1993.
58.
SinhaSurendranath. Subah of Allahabad under the Great Mughals (1580–1707), New Delhi, 1974.
WeightmanS.C.R. ‘The text of Alakh Bānī’, in McGregorR.S., ed., Devotional Literature in South Asia. Current Research, 1985-1988, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 171–78.
