One of the developments in the historiography of South Asia which contemporary scholars deeply regret is that its past has come to be seen through the frame of religion. The reasons for this are several: Persian chroniclers of the period between 1000 and 1750 tended to see the world in terms of Muslims and Hindus; British historians following James Mill's The History of British India (1817) divided the region's history into Hindu, Mahomedan and British periods; the British in ruling India, as their gazetteers and censuses reveal, understood its society in terms of its religions; the great political movements of the colonial era, the Hindu nationalist dimensions of the Congress and the All-India Muslim League, drew on specifically Hindu and Muslim pasts to strengthen their present endeavours; the modern states of India and Pakistan, which emerged from this period, do the same; in the hundreds of thousands of schools throughout the subcontinent, textbooks teach children to look at their past through a religious lens.

Amongst the reasons for regretting the religious framing of South Asia's past are first that it has contributed substantially to the communalisation of politics. It played a significant role in the Partition of India. Since then, it has hardened attitudes in India towards Pakistan, and vice versa, and played a significant role in the rise of Hindu nationalism to dominate India's politics. Second, religious framing has produced gross distortions of history. The truth of the matter is that the Hindu and Muslim worlds, far from being separate, distinct and perennially hostile to each other, were instead interdependent, drawing freely from each other's symbols of power and authority and resting on the diverse skills which each had to offer. So, for instance, in 1347 Marappa, one of the founders of the Deccan kingdom of Vijayanagara, declared that he was a ‘Sultan among Indian kings’. So, too, the jharokha, a small raised pavilion projecting from the palace walls in which an Indian king might show himself to his people, was adopted by the Mughal Emperor, Humayun, and descendants continued his practice of showing himself to the people until it was abandoned by Aurangzeb. In the same way in the 1420s the army of Deva Raya II of Vijayanagara employed 10,000 Turkish soldiers, while the skilful management of the Mughal treasury, as well as government in general, owed much to Hindu Khatris, Kayasthas and Brahmins. The examples of interdependence are legion.

Richard Eaton's answer to the problem of ‘framing’ is inspired by the Sanskritist, Sheldon Pollock's, coinage of the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ to describe the large area of South Asia from the fourth to the fourteenth century in which ideas developed in Sanskrit texts circulated above the boundaries of vernacular languages, ethnic groups and regions. Sanskrit texts carried the knowledge and values of high civilisation, ranging from grammar, architecture, how to behave, how to rule, how society should be regulated, and so on. It bred shared values, shared styles, shared idioms. This formulation has encouraged Eaton to propose a second cultural formation which from the eleventh to the nineteenth century embraced much of West, Central and South Asia—the Persianate Age. Comparing the Persianate world with the Sanskrit cosmopolis, Eaton states:

So, the Persianate world becomes the new framing device. Much of India's history between 1000 and 1800, Eaton tells us, “can be understood in terms of the prolonged and multifaceted interactions between the Sanskrit and Persianate worlds”.

What does Eaton's reframing do for the history of South Asia? As he promises, it means a history with a much stronger emphasis on the interdependence and interpenetration of the Persianate and Sanskrit worlds—crudely put, the Muslim and the Hindu worlds. Indeed, he delights in the many examples of this he draws to our attention. It also means reinterpretation of behaviour and events. For instance, it used to be assumed that, when the Ghurid Turks in their attacks on the Delhi region desecrated the temples of Hindu rulers and carried off their idols, these Muslim Turks were engaging in religiously-motivated iconoclasm. Understanding however, changes when the practice is placed in the context of the Sanskrit cosmopolis. The Ghurid forces were behaving in exactly the same way as Indian rulers when defeating rival kings. By destroying their temples and their idols, they were separating their rival from the most visible signs of their sovereignty.

Another benefit of Eaton's framing is that the world of the Deccan is enabled to play a more substantial role in the history of the period than before. We benefit from Eaton's life of research on the Deccan as represented by his Sufis of Bijapur 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton, 1978) and, with Philip B. Wagoner, his Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India's Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600 (OUP Delhi, 2014). Thus, the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara, which long resisted the attempts of the Deccan sultanates to expand south of the Krishna river, is brought centrally into the story. We are told that we should regard the peninsula of India at the time as “a single, interconnected zone”. A good example of this is the way in which people used coinage. The Bahmani Sultanate minted coins, dinars and tankas, based on those of the Delhi Sultanate, while Vijayanagara minted a gold coin, the hon, which derived from the earlier Hindu Chalukya dynasty of kings. The hons, despite their Sanskrit titles and images of Hindu deities, came to drive out the dinars and tankas in the Deccan sultanates in spite of attempts to enforce the use of Sultanate coinage. We should not be surprised by this, Eaton tells us:

A splendid example of the interpenetration of the Sanskrit and the Persianate worlds.

Of course, Eaton's Persianate framing helps emphasise the connections between South Asia and the Iranian world. He makes clear how Sultan Firuz Bahmani set out to Persianise his court, every year sending ships to the Persian Gulf to recruit Persian-speaking scholars, administrators, soldiers and artisans. He built a new palace city, Firuzabad, which would mimic Timur's aesthetic vision in his White Palace at Shahr-i Sabz south of Samarqand. The copying went down to the level of placing a pair of lions on the spandrels of the western gateway of Firuzabad as Timur had placed them on the spandrels of his White Palace. This is just one example of the host of influences and people that flooded into the Deccan at the time.

Right down to the nineteenth century there was a similar movement of people and ideas into northern India. Eaton leaves us in no doubt that the extraordinarily diverse community that gathered at the Mughal court and its successors from all over the Persianate world. Strangely however, he does not refer to two of the more substantial legacies they left in South Asia. One was the transfer of high-level skills in ma′qulat, the rational sciences, from Iran and Central Asia to northern India, creating the basis for the Dars-i-Nizami, the curriculum, or better put the way of teaching, which has dominated madrasa education down to the present. The second, although Eaton may regard himself as protected by his 1750 cut-off date, was the establishment of several powerful Shia courts so that the region has become, after Iran, the most powerful centre of Twelver Shiism in the world.

Finally, and this has less to do with Eaton's Persianate framing than with his quality as a historian, the text is full of powerful vignettes and significant conclusions. We are reminded that Ghurid invasions opened up economic opportunities for Indian merchants in the Middle East. We are reminded, too, that these invasions hastened the decline of Buddhism. There is a constant awareness of the significance of the military labour market which was a feature of South Asia from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Associated with this labour market, there is a fascinating section on the emergence of the idea of Rajput, initially an open category which only subsequently came to be martialled in clans with genealogies and warrior heroes. There is the no less fascinating story of the military revolution brought to the Deccan by gunpowder technology. Unlike much of the rest of the world, because of the topography of the Deccan and because of technological innovation both in guns and in fort design, the introduction of gunpowder advantaged defenders against attackers. Then, Eaton delights in telling us about Persian dictionaries, many more of which in the period were produced in South Asia than in Iran.

India in the Persianate Age is a brilliant achievement, and one which is easy to read. I noted only one flaw. Eaton has Nur Jahan buried in her husband's mausoleum in Shahdera (Lahore), rather than in the separate mausoleum she constructed for herself. This said, the book offers a new way of thinking about South Asian history in the years 1000-1750 which avoids some of the distorting and damaging ways of the past. It should be rapidly adopted outside the highly politicised contexts of South Asia. One can only hope that, despite the calls of nationalist histories, its influence is felt there as well.