Mughal insha: A literary history of Persian essayist and epistolary prose

The Mughal Empire has been researched for political history, economy and relations of its nobility to the court, but its intellectual history has hardly met with any investigation yet. The proposed project will set up a literary history of Persian insha in Early Modern India, focusing on the classical period of the Mughal Empire. In contemporary Persian literary history, insha is considered a prose genre comprising several sub-genres, mainly letters, essays, and prefaces. It can be defined as non-narrative, aesthetic prose. While fundamentally non-fact-related, insha is historically embedded and interacting with narrative prose genres such as historical writing. Official correspondence was also seen as a branch of this genre and its most important application. The proposed project will study Early Modern Persian insha in India, its characteristics and development, and its interactions with Iran and Central Asia. It aims at establishing a thoroughly documented literary history of early modern Persian non-narrative artistic prose. It targets three main literary and historical interests which cannot be separated: 1) the development of an understudied but central and influential genre of late medieval and early modern Persian prose literature; 2) opening a new axis of access for historical source criticism in the light of the centrality of insha to historical writing and correspondence; and 3) looking for clues on the readership of letters and essays in order to trace changes in cultural value sets of Early Modern elite society in India as mirrored in insha. The main goals of the project are therefore: A documentation of production of insha collections and manuals in Early Modern South Asia based on the extant manuscript record; a characterization of insha styles and their changes in the Mughal Empire; an assessment of audiences and readership and their transformations in the period under study; and an assessment of societal changes, especially the change of value sets as reflected in Persian epistolary prose. The importance and dynamics of insha and the sheer amount of available material call for a historically meaningful balance between a long-term study and viability. The project will therefore use 15th century Timurid insha as a point of departure and continuing reference frame for Iranian, Mughal, and Deccani (Islamic South Indian) insha; it will then concentrate on the 16th and 17th centuries up to the earlier part of Aurangzebs reign. Based on previous knowledge on influential insha works, it will proceed by forming a corpus of typical examples for the consecutive periods of the Mughal Empire, and of exceptions, singling out the characteristics of insha in a period, and analysing its development. 1

The ensuing book and the lectures held will ease work with texts from 15th to 17th century India considerably because the set phrases of letters and historiography, and their historical development, is described systematically for the first time. Moreover, the book will improve the understanding of the Mughal Empire, so that both romantic enthusiasm and especially the current popular demonization by politicians in India can be met with a more differentiated picture in the long run.