After Timur left : culture and circulation in fifteenth-century North India / Francesca Orsini

Acknowledgements ; Note on Transliteration ; List of Plates and Figures ; 1. Introduction by Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh ; STATES, SUBJECTS, AND NETWORKS ; 2. After Timur Left: North India in the ; Fifteenth Century by Simon Digby ; 3. Bandag? and Naukar? : Studying Transitions in Political Culture and Service under the North Indian Sultanates, Thirteenth-Sixteenth ; Centuries by Sunil Kumar ; PUBLIC LANGUAGES ; 4. The Rise of Written Vernaculars: The Deccan 1450-1650 by Richard M. Eaton ; 5. Turki and Hindavi in the World of Persian: Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century ; Dictionaries by Dilorom Karomat ; 6. Local Lexis? Provincializing Persian in Fifteenth-Century North India by Stefano Pello ; 7. Languages of Public Piety: Bilingual Inscriptions from Sultanate Gujarat, c. 1390-1538 by Samira Sheikh ; TELLINGS OF KINGS, SUFIS, AND WARRIORS ; 8. Universal Poet, Local Kings: Sanskrit, the Rhetoric of Kingship, and Local Kingdoms in Gujarat by Aparna Kapadia ; 9.Warrior-Tales at Hinterland Courts in North India, 1370-1550 by Ramya Sreenivasan 242 ; 10. Emotion and Meaning in Mirigavati : Strategies of Spiritual Signification in Hindavi Sufi Romances by Aditya Behl ; CULTURAL SPACES AND LITERARY TRANSACTIONS ; 11. The Art of the Book in India under the Sultanates by Eloise Brac de la Perriere ; 12. Apabhramsha as a Literary Medium in Fifteenth-Century North India by Eva De Clercq ; 13. Early Hindi Epic Poetry in Gwalior: Beginnings and Continuities in the R?m?yan of Vishnudas by Imre Bangha ; 14. Traces of a Multilingual World: Hindavi in Persian Texts by Francesca Orsini ; Bibliography ; About the Editors and Contributors ; Index

The 'long' fifteenth century in South Asia is persistently seen as a dark age of fragmentation and decline that ended only with the arrival of the Mughals. This volume looks beyond such assumptions and demonstrates the period to be one of intense cultural production, religious exchange and political innovations, many of which prefigured later Mughal developments and proved foundational for subsequent South Asian culture