Narrating diversity in the early Delhi Sultanate

The Indian subcontinent is shaped by diversity, with various ethnicities, cultures, and self- identifications forming its complex society, demanding constant negotiation. In this context, a common history is instrumental. The project investigates the historiography under the early Sultans of Delhi (AD 1192-1260), which had to integrate highly diverse realities of a predominantly non-Muslim environment into a common history of a monolithic Islamicate realm. The project will be affiliated to the Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte at the University of Vienna, where research on the diversity of medieval India is already conducted within the project Handling Diversity, and will cooperate closely with the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Applying narrative theory, the project will contribute to Persianate and South Asian Studies in three fields: 1) Courtly Historiography: How do these narratives work, and who has a share in their workings? Focussing on the dialectics of production of normative narratives and their reception, possible readings and audiences, it will complement existing research on medieval Persianate prose, which relies heavily on the former while disregarding the latter. 2) The society: The analysis will reveal not only the procedures, but also the drivers and imperatives of historical writing. In assessing the mutual impact of diversity and the way it is handled in the narratives, the project will contribute to our understanding of the links behind specific texts and their multiple contexts. 3) Historiographical research: The application of narrative theory to pre-modern narratives will deliver new theoretical and methodological insights regarding hurdles, requirements, and gains. To penetrate the discourses of the texts, a reading model will be designed using both classic narrative and reader-response theory. Thus, the text material will be read twice, starting once from the texts and once from the audience(s). The first reading will display the narrative handling of diversity, the second will show how the texts ought to be understood, by whom, and what is the share of the readers in the actual workings of normative historiography. The historiography of the Delhi Sultanate has remained largely untouched by literary approaches, despite their constituting part of the core literature of historiographical research also in Persianate studies. As to reader-response theory, it has never been applied to pre-modern Persianate narratives. Thus, the project will establish new frames of research. Furthermore, the analysis will contribute to a core issue of our understanding of the Indian subcontinent, the general acceptance of the political superstructure in a diverse environment. Since these are both problems of general interest in historical research, the project will have an impact beyond Persianate Studies.

The project investigated the courtly historiography under the early Sultans of Delhi (AD 1192-1260), which had to integrate highly diverse socio-religious realities of a predominantly non-Muslim environment into a common history of a monolithic Islamicate realm. By reading three chronicles with the tools provided by Narratology, the project intended to contribute to our understanding of medieval historical writing in the courtly sphere of the eastern Islamicate world: How do these historical narratives work, and who has a share in their workings? By grasping whom these politically normative texts where meant to convince, and how so, the project offered an alternative reading of these texts. It demonstrated that reading these texts, as an activity performed by the reader, has a crucial impact on how they work. Most notably, there is not only one way to read them, but several, since various passages might be understood quite differently. This seems to be intended. The project centered around these chronicles` contemporary audience and its socio-religious composition. It indicated that a readers background was decisive in how these texts were read, since it biased the way they were understood. This seems to be intended as well. Finally, the project elaborated that the actual understanding of these texts` messages, the sense-making process, took place most notably where things were not stated explicitly, but only implied. It seems that these texts were designed to be read also by people from outside the immediate courtly elites, elites which usually were Muslim immigrants from the Iranian and Central Asian highlands.Beyond our knowledge on the texts and historical writing under the early Sultans of Delhi, the project hopes to further substantiate our understanding of the blurred and shifting lines between the Sultanate`s elite groups. While the political elites where almost entirely Sunnite Muslims, the chronicles from the courtly sphere arguably tried to communicate the social knowledge of the Delhi Sultanate to non-Sunnites and even non-Muslims as well.Beyond the sphere of South Asian Studies, the insights on the role of reading, reading out, and hearing for the chronicles working will be of value not only for this specific time and region, but may contribute to our understanding of courtly historiography in Persian as a whole.