Richard Eaton is among the most respected historians of early-modern South Asia anywhere in the world. He has built his renown over an almost fifty-year career and through a vast body of scholarship that has thrown light on broad aspects of the lives of Indians between roughly 1000 AD and the late eighteenth century. While his early work focused on Muslim communities, his focus began to shift in the 1990s toward interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims. The result over recent decades has been solo-authored, co-authored, single-edited, and co-edited volumes on such diverse topics as temple destruction, the intersection of politics, memory and architecture, slavery and bondage, the social lives of Deccanis, and South Asia’s place in world history. Eaton’s latest offering, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765, thus draws on years of thinking about the lives of South Asia’s inhabitants in the medieval/pre-modern/early-modern/pre-colonial period. This volume is a valuable addition to an emerging body of readable and textured books—foremost among them Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot’s India before Europe Footnote ¹—and is aimed at engaging specialists and non-experts alike in “one of the most compelling, consequential and controversial periods in India’s long history” (p. 3).

Three foundational insights undergird India in the Persianate Age. First, India before British rule was extraordinarily dynamic. Second, pre-colonial India was intertwined in multiple ways with the world around it. And third, India was the site of an immensely fruitful encounter between two powerful cultural formations, one “Persianate,” diffusing eastwards from the Middle East, and the other “Sanskrit” (in Eaton’s formulation), originating in the Indic world. The intellectual stakes for Eaton’s understanding of India’s history are important. On one level Eaton is directly challenging deeply rooted and popular views that caricature the period as marked by endless cycles of Hindu–Muslim conflict, that depict “Muslim Rule” as an epistemic break from a prior Hindu “golden age,” that portray economic, political, and cultural stasis overwhelming India after 1000, and that represent India as engaged in a defensive crouch vis-à-vis its violent and exploitative neighbors to the west until the (redemptive?) onset of British colonial rule. At another level, however, Eaton offers a positive, affirming, and agentive history of India that is sensitive to change over time, takes different historic and geographic contexts seriously, and generally avoids totalizing claims. And herein lies India in the Persianate Age’s greatest virtue. After noting the polemics that he is working against in his introduction, Eaton’s vision, of increasingly intertwined Persianate and Sanskrit worlds as a central axis of pre-colonial Indian history, takes flight. Over eight substantive chapters, Eaton makes his case most persuasively.

India in the Persianate Age opens with a discussion of two devastating raids, in 1022 and 1025, into northern India. The first was by a Hindu and South India-based dynasty, the Cholas. The second was by a Muslim and Afghanistan-based dynasty, the Ghaznavids. Both were searching for wealth, neither was interested in permanent occupation, and both engaged in similar tactics, including temple destruction, and other forms of iconoclasm. Despite these similarities, Eaton argues that these expeditions were informed by fundamentally different political, martial, and religious worldviews. In the case of the Cholas, they were drawing on ideas emanating from an existing Sanskrit cosmopolis that extended between South and Southeast Asia. The Ghaznavids, by contrast, were part of an emerging Persianate world spreading outward from the Iranian Plateau. Although the Cholas and Ghaznavids never encountered one another, the separation of Sanskrit and Persianate worlds was about to end.

The catalyst was the Ghaznavid decision, following irretrievable defeats in Iran and Central Asia in the 1040s, to move their primary base of operations to the city of Lahore (in contemporary Pakistan). Even as the Ghaznavids accommodated themselves to an Indian milieu, seen in their issuance of coins with mixed Arabic and Sanskrit legends, they also applied Persianate practices, ideals, and institutions across their realm. These processes gathered pace over subsequent centuries as waves of Persianized Turks and Afghans overtook the Ghaznavids and expanded their control across much of northern and central India. These successor ruling groups and similarly acculturated immigrants (including many Iranians) who followed in their wake created nascent bureaucracies modeled on earlier imperial Persian models, imitated existing ideals of Muslim kingship, supported Persian literary and material culture, and patronized charismatic Sufi shaikhs and their religious orders. By the fifteenth century Persianate norms exerted a familiar and powerful pull across much of the Indian subcontinent. This is attested by the example of Vijayanagara, a non-Muslim-ruled kingdom that dominated southern India for just over two centuries from the mid-1300s onward. Inasmuch as Vijayanagar’s state cult was focused on Virupaksha (a local form of the Hindu deity Shiva), its political institutions and cultural posture were deeply influenced by Persianate ideals and idioms.

Whatever their role in spreading Persianate mores, Persianized Turks, Afghans, and their allies were keenly aware that they were a small minority and that their continued rule depended on the cooperation of a majority non-Muslim population with roots in a Sanskrit world. Over the centuries, accommodation took many forms: political and military alliances, biological and kinship ties, land and financial grants, employment opportunities, cultural and religious patronage, and freedom from conversion, to name a few. This was a world, as evocatively detailed by Eaton, in which a Muslim ruler thus might install a Vishnu pillar in the courtyard of his main congregational mosque (Iltutmish, d. 1236), be given the Sanskrit title of Nayaka Shri Hammira or Lord Sir Commander (Balban, d. 1286), allow Hindu temple designs to inform mosque construction (Qutb al-Din Khalaji, d. 1320), or deploy Hindu ritual gateways (toranas) to frame a public plaza and order imperial edicts be written in Sanskrit (Muhammad bin Tughlaq, d. 1350). Such trends were even more pronounced in the regional kingdoms that followed the collapse of the Delhi-based Tughlaq Empire in the late 1300s. Again, Eaton nicely illustrates his point using a colorful cast of characters, including Malwa’s Mahmud Shah Khalaji (d. 1469), Kashmir’s Zain al-ʿAbidin (d. 1470), and Gujarat’s Mahmud Begada (d. 1511), all exemplary patrons of Sanskrit works. In the case of the sultans of Bengal, they even washed themselves in holy water from the Ganges at the time of their crowning, incorporating customs of earlier Hindu rulers.

According to Eaton, one of the key developments of the fifteenth century was the emergence of a public, vernacular space thanks to increasing paper usage, the rising use of regional languages in administration, and popular devotional movements that deployed poetry and song in local languages to express religious devotion. However, as Eaton shows, neither Persian nor Sanskrit were displaced by this development. To the contrary, kings as well as upwardly mobile landholders, merchants, and administrators all continued to patronize Persian and Sanskrit toward accruing prestige and status. In the case of Persian, the rise of regional kingdoms not only led to the language’s growing popularity beyond the old imperial centers of India but also increasing seepage of Persian vocabulary into languages like Hindavi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bangla, and Telugu. Such developments, in turn, spawned a further intertwining of Persianate and Sanskrit ideals and idioms, as reflected in the vernacular premakhyan literary genre of Awadh or works like the mid-sixteenth century Telugu adaptation of a part of the Sanskrit Mahabharata, which was written by a Brahman author, commissioned by a Muslim patron, and inspired by Firdausi’s eleventh-century Persian epic, the Shah-nama.

By the time the Mughals came to dominate northern India starting in the 1560s they were operating in tightly blended Persianate and Sanskrit worlds. In an innovative insight on Emperor Akbar’s (d. 1605) reign, Eaton argues that many of his best known actions—such as forging a Mughal–Rajput alliance, creating a multicultural nobility, offering religious protection to his subjects, positioning himself as a sacred king, articulating new courtly ideals and rituals, rejigging succession practices, creating new styles of art and architecture, etc.—in fact point to Mughal adaptation to this reality. Nowhere is this point better illustrated than in Eaton’s discussion of the multiple strands that informed Akbar’s vision of his rule: “At different points in his career, then, Akbar variously fashioned himself as a Sufi master, a solar and even divine emanation, a renewer of the second Islamic millennium, a Timurid prince and a traditional Indian sovereign” (p. 242). Although Akbar’s immediate successors, Jahangir (d. 1627), Shah Jahan (d. 1666), and ʿAlamgir Aurangzeb (d. 1707) largely distanced themselves from the cult-like aspects of Akbar’s reign, all assumed the need for an inclusive idiom of rule that accommodated India’s cultural and religious diversity alongside their participation in a Persianate world. Thus, even as Shah Jahan was an extraordinary patron of Persian letters, he also permitted his children Dara Shukoh and Jahanara to use Persian translations of Sanskrit texts to argue for the resonances between Islam and Vedic Hinduism. In the case of Aurangzeb, he clearly saw no contradiction between imposing a poll tax on non-Muslims (jizya) in 1679 while continuing to support Hindu temples with cash and/or land grants, meeting with Hindu mendicants, or allowing non-Muslim supporters to laud him as an incarnation of the Hindu deity Ram.

As Eaton correctly points out, the political collapse of the Mughals in the early eighteenth century did not diminish the attractiveness of the Persianate world or the desire of Indians to participate in it. Indeed, post-Mughal successor states were often keen patrons of both Persian and Sanskrit learning. In 1720s Jaipur, for example, this led to the translation of Nasir al-Din Tusi, Ptolemy, and Euclid from Persian, via Hindavi, into Sanskrit. In the end, however, as Eaton notes in his conclusion, the rise of British colonial rule in India as well as nationalism in Iran and the encroachment by Indian vernaculars on the cultural spaces once occupied by Sanskrit and Persian had consequential results. Declining linguistic usage led to a precipitous recession of the “values, sentiments and ideas” (p. 393) that undergirded both Persianate and Sanskrit worlds. This, in turn, finally capsized an ecosystem of Persianate and Sanskrit interactions that had spanned almost a thousand years.

India in the Persianate Age is a deeply engaging, erudite, and well-written book. Its attempt to straddle between academic and non-academic audiences is largely successful. I did wonder, however, about the use of the term “Persianate.” Echoing the work of the late Shahab Ahmed, for instance, to what extent does “Persianate” obfuscate other generative elements in the paradigm, such as the Indian or Arabic, while also nourishing “Persian” nationalist readings of history and ideas of “Persian” exceptionalism? This, in turn, led to some disquiet as to where to draw the lines between “Persianate” and “Sanskrit” worlds, whether Eaton’s frequent references to hybridization inaccurately presume fully formed civilizational boundaries (echoing a similar argument against the word “syncretism” when talking about Hindu–Muslim encounters), and what if anything about the emerging Persianate world in the Indian subcontinent was distinct from its Persianate counterpart(s) to the west? In a similar vein, the occasional deployment of “Indic” as a complement to Persianate will likely raise questions about what this term means. Is it a substitute for “Hindu” and/or “Sanskrit”? Or is it something more capacious? And where in the schematic of Persianate and Sanskrit worlds did the vernacular world stand? Following on Sheldon Pollock’s work on the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, wasn’t the Indian subcontinent post-1000 in fact increasingly home to three worlds, simultaneously interacting, influencing, and being nourished by one another? If this was the case, although reference is made to the rise of Indian vernaculars, it is a world that remains under-examined in relation to either Persianate or Sanskrit worlds. Indeed, the use of “Persianate” in the book title may not sufficiently capture the multiple enmeshed cultural worlds that Eaton so successfully points to. At the end of the day, ambitious books almost always lend themselves to lots of searching questions. India in the Persianate Age does so too. But it also offers wonderful vistas into a world that existed before the crude filters of religious and secular nationalism largely obliterated them from our contemporary view. Ultimately this, to my mind, is justification enough for appreciating and learning from this work.