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• 1. Introduction: the travel account from Beijing to the Bosphorus
• 2. From Timur to the Bahmanis: fifteenth-century views
• 3. Courtly encounters
• 4. An ocean of wonders
• 5. When hell is other people
• 6. An eastern mirror
• 7. The long road to rum
• 8. On early-modern travel.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Originally published in 2007, this groundbreaking work is based on detailed and sensitive readings of travel accounts in Persian, dealing with India, Iran and Central Asia between around 1400 and 1800. The first comprehensive treatment of this neglected genre of literature (safar nama), it links the Mughals, Safavids and Central Asia in a crucial period of transformation and cultural contact. The authors' close reading of these travel accounts help us enter the mental and moral worlds of the Muslim and non-Muslim literati who produced these valuable narratives. These accounts are presented in a comparative framework, which sets them side by side with other Asian accounts, as well as early modern European travel narratives, and opens up a rich and unsuspected vista of cultural and material history. This book can be read for a better understanding of the nature of early modern encounters, but also for the sheer pleasure of entering a new world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Protected by vast mountains and seas, the Indian subcontinent might seem a nearly complete and self-contained world with its own religions, philosophies, and social systems. And yet this ancient land and its varied societies experienced prolonged and intense interaction with the peoples and cultures of East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and especially Central Asia and the Iranian plateau. Richard M. Eaton tells this extraordinary story with relish and originality, as he traces the rise of Persianate culture, a many-faceted transregional world connected by ever-widening networks across much of Asia. Introduced to India in the eleventh century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan, this culture would become progressively indigenized in the time of the great Mughals (sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries). Eaton brilliantly elaborates the complex encounter between India's Sanskrit culture--an equally rich and transregional complex that continued to flourish and grow throughout this period--and Persian culture, which helped shape the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and a host of regional states. This long-term process of cultural interaction is profoundly reflected in the languages, literatures, cuisines, attires, religions, styles of rulership and warfare, science, art, music, and architecture--and more--of South Asia.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: cosmopolitanism, courtliness and ethics in the Deccani Sultanates
• Part I. Courtly Society: 1. Courtly disposition
• 2. Networks, patrons and friends
• 3. Courts, merchants and commodities
• Part II. Courtly Skills: 4. Scribal skills
• 5. Esoteric skills
• 6. Martial skills
• Concluding remarks.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Contents: Letter IV A relation of the Canatick-country
• A special chorography and history of East-India
• Collections of the coins, weights and precious stones
• Letter V Travels into Persia.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Composed in the form of letters and first published in 1698. This volume, edited with notes and an introduction, contains Letters IV and part of V, with a chapter on Indian history and customs, and another on coins, weights, and precious stones. Follows on from Second Series 19 and continued in 39. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1912.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)