Tales Bent Backward: Early Modern Local History in Persianate Transregional Contexts

AbstractThis article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on immigrants from Safavid Iran who travelled back and forth between their home cities and Hind during the early modern period. Intending to better comprehend some of the key mentalities and social practices of these cosmopolitan Persianate communities, I explore the literary strategies by which migrants worked to negotiate their place in rapidly transforming and highly competitive political environments in both Hind and Iran. Focusing on migration narratives that were commonly embedded in Persian historical works, I examine a cluster of local and dynastic histories that were composed in dialogue with one another and that emerged around a particular corridor of migration linking the Iranian city of Yazd with various cities in the Deccan. Previous scholarship has argued that immigrants could acquire social capital in their new environments by commemorating ties to Iranian cities through narratives of migration. I demonstrate that migrants also brought migration stories they had found in the Deccan back to their hometowns in Iran, where they redeployed them for similar political ends in new works of history.</jats:p

Memory on the Boundaries of Empire: Narrating Place in the Early Modern Local Historiography of Yazd.

This dissertation traces the evolution of premodern historical writing about Yazd, Iran, in order to explore the changing function and utility of local history writing as a key means of engagement in imperial affairs. Yazd had been an important intellectual, religious, and economic center in Persianate empires since Mongol times, and its notable families commanded authority and influence at court. However, by the end of the Safavid era, in the seventeenth century, Yazd had lost this standing. This study understands this decline in terms of parallel transformations that reconfigured the city’s local social networks and elements of its urban morphology. It does so by comparing the different ways in which successive Yazdi authors channeled the history of the imperial realm through stories about Yazd’s own people and places. This study of Yazd’s local histories complicates the court-centered narrative of empire that has dominated scholarship on early modern Islamic empire and outlines a complementary history of the Islamo-Persianate world from its edge. It examines the strategies by which historians writing from the margins commemorated their city’s history as a means of constructing a local sensibility and, at the same time, a sense of orientation in the world outside local places. This project structures this exploration of Yazdi historiography around a series of sites across the city that the authors presented as being constitutive of local networks of actors and, also, of the mythologies that legitimated the authority of sacred kings and their universal empires. Each chapter is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between narrative, space, and memory, and each compares the webs of narratives that Yazdi authors embed in their commemorations of these sites. Toward this end, the project charts the evolution of local strategies for “centering” the city in the larger world by examining changes in the implicit discourse on universal empire, which Yazdi historians situated in their representations of local spaces. In this way, the dissertation maps these transformations in narrative strategy onto changes in the social and topographical features of Yazd and, furthermore, correlates these with shifts in patterns of interaction between the court and the city.PHDNear Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95940/1/mancland_1.pd

Subversive Skylines: Local History and the Rise of the Sayyids in Mongol Yazd

This article examines the emergence of the Ḥusaynī sayyids as key facilitators of the Mongols’ acculturation to Islamo-Persianate society and traces the expansion of their influence at imperial courts through the seventeenth century. Previous scholarship has emphasized the pivotal role of figures like Rashīduddīn Hamadānī in brokering reciprocal processes of acculturation from the empire's centre. This study builds on such work by shifting the focus to Yazd, a provincial city. It explores the evolving and unique role of Yazdī sayyids in facilitating such processes as they fashioned new patronage networks at court and reconfigured the urban morphology of Yazd. Furthermore, using local histories alongside universal ones, this study explores narrative strategies by which Yazdī authors, writing after the Mongol period, commemorated the sayyids’ emergence. It situates these writings in the context of larger transformations that affected relations between provincial elites and the imperial centre throughout these periods