In recent decades the Deccan as a region of study has experienced a watershed. Pioneers such as George Michell, Phillip Wagoner, Richard Eaton, Helen Philon, and Deborah Hutton have nurtured a generation including Marika Sardar, Pushkar Sohoni, and many others. Given this enormous progress, how to move forward? Emma Flatt's The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis adds a much-needed social dynamic to our understandings of Indo-Islamicate societies. Flatt probes the flotsam of extant sources from the early-modern Deccan by drawing upon theoretical models including courtliness and ethics similarly explored by Daud Ali in his seminal social history, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (2004). Part I of Flatt's book addresses court society by considering dispositions, friendship, transregional networks, and mercantilism. In Part II, she demonstrates how the acquisition and practice of epistolary, esoteric, and martial skills molded selves. With clarity and historical sensitivity, she weaves together an account of a world of courtiers and merchants cultivating skills to achieve ethical refinement and to coexist.
In Part I, Flatt develops the notion of a courtly disposition for early modern Indo-Islamicate society through an array of canonical writings and their relationship to historical episodes. In doing so, she shows how the body and soul were malleable, and through consistent practice, riyāzat, of skills, one could build and perfect their disposition. Ethical practice facilitated long-distance, transcultural movements and enabled the court to be, what German sociologist Norbert Elias called “a network of people” (p. 14). These practices not only pervaded the court, but such codes enabled mercantile communities to thrive as well.
Flatt's ability to work across periods and regions enables her creative and far-reaching interventions. Due to the inter-court entanglements of various individuals and the porousness of frontiers she does not tether her book to a single Deccan court. This is a rare work that historicises sixteenth-century material with its roots in the fifteenth and earlier centuries. This book thus innovatively redefines our understanding of this world of independent yet interconnected court cultures over both time and space.
The author provides two accurate summaries of her own project (pp. 24–28, 304–306), so rather than paraphrasing, I shall engage with one key element of Part II, her study of the Nujūm al-‘Ulūm or Stars of the Sciences by ‘Alī ‘Ādil Shāh (r. 1557–79) of Bijapur composed in 1570 (Chester Beatty Library In 02).
Flatt's discoveries on the authorship and significance of the Nujūm has brought it back to scholarly attention after Linda Leach and Deborah Hutton's publications (1995 and 2006 respectively). Now, the manuscript merits a collaborative project with historians, art historians, and philologists. Given that the Nujūm contains some of the most significant and complex paintings in the history of the Islamicate or South Asian book we must define its form and function carefully. Is it sufficient to call the Nujūm an ‘astrological encyclopedia’ when one substantial cluster of manuscripts—to understand this single work—comes from the corpus of cosmographies or compendia of wonders? The Nujūm's remit was to codify, not necessarily to personally prescribe (p. 222), therefore further relegating it to the category of encyclopedia or cosmography, of which astrology was one subject. This was perhaps an encyclopedia explicitly intended for its time, as Flatt reads, ‘necessary medicine’ for the lives of the sultan's close circle.
The Nujūm is an expansive text and perhaps subverts neat generic categorisation. Flatt reminds us how this was more all-encompassing as a project including sections on horses, arms and armour and elephants, including several non-extant chapters. According to Flatt, “Noticeably, the book is framed as a practical pedagogical manual and not in the genre of ‘ajaib va makhluqat (wonders and marvels) where a series of strange practices, beliefs and beings from other lands are described with a proto-ethnographic eye rather than intended as a guide for imitation” (p. 219). Here, the genre—‘ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt’ or ‘wonders-of-creation’,—appears to be mistitled. It would also be a mischaracterisation of the ‘ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt to state that it was not didactic, yet it was of more popular appeal rather than discursive science. Many entries in Islamicate wonders-of-creation cosmographies (‘ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt) occupy the realm of the fantastic or talismanic, which were important for courtiers and scholars alike, but the genre had considerably transformed from the thirteenth-century work of Qazvini to its sixteenth-century Deccan reincarnations (cf. Persis Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam).
Indeed, the Nujūm is a storehouse of knowledge about esoteric skills. But it is not prescriptive as many esoteric texts are. Given the state of research and as far as we know now, when occult science is included in the Nujūm, it draws from much earlier scholars such as Sirāj al-Dīn Abū Ya‘qūb al-Sakkākī (d. 1229) (Travis Zadeh 2020). Esoteric or occult science (al-‘ulūm al-gharībah) is witnessing its own renaissance in Islamicate studies and history (cf. Evrim Binbas 2013, and Liana Saif 2019), but it is important to distinguish between the esoteric and cosmographical. While they overlap, their differences lead themselves to salient comparisons.
Over the past decade, we have witnessed Flatt's project steadily unfold through landmark articles and now it is a pleasure to have the coherent, larger intervention in hand. In a measured social history of the Deccan sultanates, this book brings a long-lost world alive. The ethical lives of the individuals in this book adds nuance to the somewhat exhausted political histories of local states, imperialism, and political identity in the Indo-Islamicate world. Like Ali's Courtly Culture, which gives us a conceptual language for analysing early medieval Indian courtliness, one hopes that this book will reshape the field and stand the test of time. Scholars of Persian, Islamicate, South Asian, and early modern history at large will find this conceptualisation of the court, courtly disposition, and skills deeply insightful and a model for future studies.
