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E-book
Author Flood, Finbarr Barry, author

Title Objects of translation : material culture and medieval "Hindu-Muslim" encounter / Finbarr B. Flood
Published Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2009

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Description 1 online resource (xv, 366 pages) : 184 illustrations
Contents Roots or Routes? -- Networks, Translation, and Transculturation -- Things and Texts -- Polyglot Frontiers and Permeable Boundaries -- Gifts, Idolatry, and the Political Economy -- Heteropraxy, Taxonomy, and Traveling Orthography -- Cultural Cross-dressing -- Prestigious Imitation -- Fractal Kingship and Royal Castoffs -- The Raja's Finger and the Sultan's Belt -- Accommodating the Infidel -- Sunni Internationalism and the Ghurid Interlude -- From King of the Mountains to the Second Alexander -- Homology, Ambiguity, and the Rule of Sri Hammira -- Looking at Loot -- Signs of Sovereignty -- Looting and Difference -- Trophies and Transculturation -- Remaking Monuments -- Taxonomies, Anomalies, and Visual Pidgin -- Rupture and Reinscription -- Noble Chambers and Translated Stones -- Patrons and Masons -- Markets, Mobility, and Intentional Hybridity -- Palimpsest Pasts and Fictive Genealogies -- A World within a World -- Monuments and Memory -- The Fate of Hammira -- Conclusion : In and Out of Place -- Appendix : Principal Dynasties and Rulers Mentioned
Summary "Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book, which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries, challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures ... By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation (among them looting, gifting, and trade) through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world"--Publisher's description
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes English
Online resource; title from PDF title page (ACLS, viewed September 11, 2014)
Print version record and online resource (A & AePortal, viewed on July 1, 2019)
Subject Material culture -- South Asia -- History
Ethnic relations -- History
Cultural geography -- South Asia -- History
Cultural geography
Ethnic relations
Material culture
South Asia
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780300249750
0300249756
1400833248
9781400833245