Whither Medieval India: Problems and Possibilities in the Study of Medieval Indian History

This lecture will review developments within the field of medieval history. It will assess major changes in the discipline over the last three decades, as an earlier model driven historiography has given way to newer ‘revisionist’ work that has recalibrated the epochal divisions of precolonial history, created new archives, and explored material and textual sources in new ways. It will assess the gains and limitations of these developments and suggest avenues for future historiographical development.

 

 

Ali ANOOSHAHR (University of California, Davis)

The Autumn of the Middle Ages in Mughal India? Memoirs of Bayazid Bayat

The reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (1556-1605), particularly during its latter half, is seen as a period of "early modernity" in Indian history. This would of course imply that the middle decades of the century, from the reign of Akbar's father Humayun, constitute a transitional period where the Mughal state necessarily evolved out of pre-early-modern (hence medieval) phase. This paper will study this transition from the perspective a soldier and memoirist who was in the imperial service from the 1540's until his retirement in the 1580's to see if traces of such a transition have survived in the perspectives of an actual eyewitness and participant.