Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" EncounterObjects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Networks Translation and Transculturation | 5 |
Things and Texts | 9 |
The Mercantile Cosmopolis | 15 |
Gifts Idolatry and the Political Economy | 26 |
Heteropraxy Taxonomy and Traveling Orthography | 37 |
Cultural Crossdressing | 61 |
Fractal Kingship and Royal Castoffs | 75 |
Rupture and Reinscription | 152 |
Noble Chambers and Translated Stones | 160 |
Patrons and Masons | 184 |
Markets Mobility and Intentional Hybridity | 189 |
Palimpsest Pasts and Fictive Genealogies | 227 |
Monuments and Memory | 247 |
The Fate of Hammira | 255 |
In and Out of Place | 261 |
The Rajas Finger and the Sultans Belt | 84 |
Accommodating the Infidel | 89 |
From King of the Mountains to the Second Alexander | 93 |
Homology Ambiguity and the Rule of Sri Hammira | 107 |
Looking at Loot | 121 |
Looting and Difference | 123 |
Trophies and Transculturation | 126 |
Remaking Monuments | 137 |
Principal Dynasties and Rulers Mentioned | 269 |
Notes | 271 |
311 | |
317 | |
b Conceptual and Theoretical | 347 |
353 | |