Ali Anooshahr | Timurid Sovereignty in pre-Mughal India

Talk Abstract: Nearly a hundred and twenty five years separated the sack and burning of the city of Delhi by the Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) and the establishment of the “Mughal” Empire in India by his descendants. How did this legacy affect the formation of Mughal rule? Scholars either ignore this problem and insist on the Timurid prestige of the Mughals, or they point out the negative view of Indo-Muslim elites towards the Timurids and perhaps try to explain how the Mughals overcame this problematic association. Yet, the memory of the sack of Delhi did not remain static and informed notions of sovereignty in north India long before the Mughals arrived in the 1520’s and certainly continued to remain controversial into the 16th century. This presentation will investigate a number of fairly obscure Indo-Persian chronicles from the 15th and early 16th centuries in order to shed light on the thorny problem of sovereignty in for Islamic states of South Asia.

Speaker Bio:Ali Anooshahr received his BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998. He spent the next two years in “teachers’ boot camp” as a substitute teacher in the Houston Independent School District. He was subsequently admitted to UCLA’s History Department where he obtained his MA (2002) and PhD (2005) in Islamic History. He was a CLIR-Mellon post-doctoral fellow in 2005-6 and Ahmanson-Getty Fellow in 2006-7. He used that time to convert his dissertation into a book manuscript, teach courses at the Cal State system, and catalog Persian, Ottoman, and Arabic manuscripts at UCLA Library’s Special Collections. After a year of teaching at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, he moved to Davis in 2008 as a scholar of "comparative Islamic Empires". In his book and articles, Anooshahr focuses particularly on the transmissions of texts and individuals along networks that connected India, Iran, Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire. His current research include Indo-Persian hisotriography as well as revising early Safavid history.

This event is presented under the aegis of the Berkeley Pakistan Initiative

[mirzausmanbaigkassar]

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