The 17th Century in India: Events, Society, Thought and Art
The workshop “The 17th century in India: Events, Society, Thought and Art” is a sequel to the convention “The Mughal Empire under Shah Jahan” on 26 and 27 May 2014. It shall continue the success of that workshop, which brought together historians and art historians from the USA, Europe and India and led to the proceedings The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan (ed. Ebba Koch und Ali Anooshahr, Bombay: Marg, 2019).
The central theme of the upcoming workshop will be the development of Indian society in the 17th century. We will turn our viewpoint away from the imperial palace to the discourses in society and their repercussion on politics. Such discourses are for example the ethos of the Mughal nobility, Norms of literature, self-awareness of religious charismatics and awareness of them by others, or the concept of art as depicted in literature.
Moreover, the workshop contains reappraisals of important events that result from a re-reading of the chronicles, and from studying new sources from the provinces and from Portuguese India. This shall accommodate the present research on the Mughal Empire and its southern neighbours, the Deccan sultanates. In the literature section, the workshop emphasizes the interdisciplinary exchange between experts on Indo-Persian literature and experts on the contemporaneous Hindi literature, which the Mughals supported likewise.