IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts 

Alam, Prof. Muzaffar, University of Chicago, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Chicago, Safavid Iran and Mughal India: Rivals or Complementary Centres?

This paper will focus on the relationship between the Safavids and the Mughals between the time of the rulers Akbar and Shah Abbas and the early eighteenth century.  It will address the complex cultural relationship between these two neighbouring political systems concentrating primarily on intellectual and literary figures and other travellers who circulated between the two domains.  Amongst other figures, the mid-seventeenth-century traveller Mirza Muhammad Mufid Mustaufi, who visited India at the time of Shah Jahan will be discussed at some length.  Mufid in his travel-cum-autobiography represents a case of someone who was disappointed with Mughal India and made no attempt to conceal his discomfort there. Others made the transition between the two domains more easily, as we know from Persian poetry extolling Mughal India as the 'Mecca of all in need'. But still, there was an underlying aspect of literary and cultural rivalry, which culminated in the well-known controversy around Shaikh Ali Hazin on the Indian diction in the writing of Persian. The speaker’s paper will hence also draw on my earlier work concerning the emergence of Persian as a language of power in Mughal India, in the context of the Mughal-Safavid relationship.
 

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