Humanities and Languages
Research Interests: Early Modern History, Courtly Cultures, Performance Studies, Mercantile Networks, Indigenous Histories, Early Modern Literatures
Profile
Professor Ayesha Sheth is a historian of early modern South Asia. She specialises in the study of courtly culture and polity formation, focusing on music, literature, and comparative knowledge traditions within South Asia and the larger Persianate cosmopolis. She is trained in Persian, Sanskrit, and early-modern vernaculars (Braj, Apabhramsa). Her research engages with a multilingual archive of historical, musicological, and literary sources in conjunction with visual materials.
Research
Professor Sheth is interested in questions of courtly culture, polity formation, literary production, vernacularisation, and multilingualism from the perspective of the polities and individuals that flourished in northern and central India between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her doctoral research examined the political life of the Sultanate period (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) through an archive of musicological sources. By studying developments in musicological theory and practice in the context of the rise of new aspirants to political life during the Sultanate period, specifically merchants and regional governors, her work traced how musicological knowledge became a tool and an instrument for political and social self-fashioning. Her research thus provides a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between knowledge and political power before its formalisation within Mughal courtly conventions.
Professor Sheth is currently developing two research projects: one on the history of the Gond kingdoms of central India, and the other on the role of Jain mercantile networks in early modern literary and cultural circulation.
Publication
Sheth, A. (2023). Re-imagining the Regional Polity: Lessons in Bhrātṛbhāva and Bandhubhāva from the Baghel Kingdom. South Asian Studies, 39(2), 160–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2023.2287835