The Lotus & the Lion: Essays on India's Sanskritic & Persianate Worlds

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Written over the first two decades of the present century, the essays in The Lotus and the Lion dwell on Indian history between the eleventh and the eighteenth centuries, when India was the site of the encounter between two great pan-Asian literary traditions, the Sanskrit and the Persian-metaphorically, the lotus and the lion-and the sociocultural and moral worlds they created and sustained. The book's first part explores how these cosmopolitan and prestigious worlds interacted both with each other and with regional cultures.
The second part presents five essays dealing with Islam in precolonial India, ranging from the nature of Islamic traditions, to Islamization in Punjab and Bengal, to current debates on understanding Islam in India. The third part offers two essays on the Mughals, the first elaborating different kinds of frontiers in Mughal history, and the second proposing new ways of evaluating the emperors Akbar and 'Alamgir. The fourth part contains four essays on the Deccan, ranging from the Tughluq invasion to the earliest advent of gunpowder technology and of written vernaculars in the region. The book closes with five essays on historical methodology, each one illustrating a different way of engaging with, and of illuminating, India's rich past.

Richard M. Eaton is Professor of History at the University of Arizona, with a special interest in India from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. His previous publications include Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (1978); The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (1993); A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives (2005); Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India's Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600 (co-authored with Phillip B. Wagoner, 2014); and India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 (2020).

THE ESSAYS IN THIS volume reflect my scholarly engagement with South Asian history in work published between 2000 and 2020. When Bhola Varma of Primus Books proposed publishing a volume of my selected essays written during those two decades, I initially hesitated, recalling the words of Mark Twain. 'When the Lord finished [creating] the world', wrote America's great humorist,

…he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of those incautious early opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the 'Innocents Abroad.' The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both."