A Persian Archive of Early Modern Diplomacy: Letters and Emissaries between Golkonda and Isfahan

Speaker: Shounak Ghosh

Chair: Roy Fischel

This talk discusses select episodes in diplomatic exchange between the Safavid empire in Iran and the Quṭb Shāhī sultanate of Golkonda in the Deccan (peninsular southern India) in the first half of the seventeenth century through a historical and contextual analysis of state histories (tawāriḵẖ) composed in both the courts and epistolary correspondence (murāsalat) exchanged between their ruling elites. Most emissaries appointed by the Deccan sultanates to Safavid Iran were prominent members of the diasporic community – émigré Iranians who (or whose ancestors) had formerly served the Safavid empire in some capacity. This placed the emissaries at the interstices of the value systems and ethical sensibilities of both Iranian and South Asian courtly systems.

My talk reconstructs the dynamic and versatile profile of the envoy by delineating how their roles were defined, articulated, and perceived in contemporary textual practices. I will explain how the genre of Persian epistolary compositions (inshā’), that constituted the bedrock of diplomatic letter-writing, offers conceptual categories for the study of diplomacy and challenges the applicability of European epistemologies to understand the uncodified and flexible nature of diplomatic practice in the Persianate world. My talk will highlight the complexities of working with Persian manuscripts’ collections and the enormous potential of this archival repository in writing compelling histories of early modern diplomacy.

Banner image: Image: Library of Congress, African and Middle East Division, Near East Section Persian Manuscript Collection

In-line image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.