Book notice: Mughal Arcadia by Sunil Sharma

Raziuddin Aquil 

Scholars are increasingly realising that literature and history are inextricably linked to each other. Earlier, literary scholars had generally no or little sense of history, and poorly trained academic historians thought literature is all about fictitious imagination of writers devoid of any sense of reality. Historians are now beginning to realise that government data which they so much valued for the writing of history could be fudged, as it happens, to cover up failures of governance (as some learned theorist put it: government data tells us only what it wants to tell us). By contrast, all literatures are products of their time. Literature and society construct each other. Historians can study literature to understand its contexts which is what the parameters of research recommend - understand the past in all its varied dimensions, including literary cultures and intellectual traditions to understand a society better.

Scholars of medieval Indian history have traditionally emphasised on the primacy of Indian-Persian sources for the writing of history, but few scholars have actually seriously studied Persian literary works and, thus, very little is available in terms of edited texts and translations. Happily, new historians have opened up in recent decades a whole new archive of material in several languages and across genres.

The author of the recently published book, Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court (Harvard University Press), Boston University based, Prof. Sunil Sharma is a fine scholar of medieval and early modern Indian Persian literature, which is a vast field, and this book on Persian literature under the Mughals should be a veritable treat.