Islam and Muslims In South Asia: Historical Perspective

206 hal,:21 c

How to do multilingual literary history? Lessons from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north India

How can we conceptualise multingual literary culture and how can we research it? Drawing upon a 3-year AHRC funded project, this essay focuses on the materiality of the marchive, on the spaces and locations in which literature was produced and performed, and on the oral-performative practices and agents that made texts circulate to audiences in ways not bound by the script in which the texts appear to us.Not only are the models of composite culture and language specificity questioned as aresult, but the sites of literary production move from the court to a series of intersections, and areas that were peripheral move into view and connect with others