Wednesday
16
October 2024
4:00 - 5:30 PM IST
Location
Room 113, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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From Epic Hero to Sufi Master: Poetic Personas of the Mughal Emperor Akbar
Seminar and Lecture Series
Sunil Sharma
Professor of Persianate & Comparative Literature
Boston University
Speaker
Early modern Persianate empires, i.e., the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, relied on the rhetorical power of court literature to chronicle and justify their expansionist campaigns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Poetic narratives of conquest drew on classical literary models such as the Persian national epic, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, and employed motifs of travel, both actual and metaphoric, and marvels, resulting in the creation of new hybrid texts. A close reading and analysis of some poetic texts of conquests composed by the Mughal court poet Faizi during the reign of the emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) shows how effectively poetry could be used to describe imperial expansion as an outcome of inevitable and divinely natural events.
Speaker
Sunil Sharma
Sunil Sharma is Professor of Persianate & Comparative Literature at Boston University. His areas of research are premodern Persian and South Asian literatures, specifically poetry and court cultures, history of the book, and travel writing. His last book, Mughal Arcadia: Persian Poetry in an Indian Court (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a study of early modern Persianate literature. The output of a multi-year project entitled “Veiled Voyagers: Muslim Women Travelers from Asia and the Middle East” with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Daniel Majchrowicz was recently published as Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press, 2023). He has written about various aspects of Amir Khusrau's poetry and also published translations in In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau (Penguin, 2011).
