Book Description

"The seventeenth century is well known as a time of entanglement and mobility, during which the Arabian Sea acted as a highway of communication. Merchants sailed from Arabia to Iran and India in order to ply their trade, pilgrims journeyed the other way in order to make the ?ajj in Mecca, and poets and scholars migrated in all directions in their search for careers, knowledge and patronage. Yet the small amount of modern scholarship about the literature that was produced in the region during this period has tended to study authors in isolation. This book makes the case for a connected literary history of the Arabian Sea littoral. It examines how the movement of authors created two literary communities, one Arabic and one Persian, sometimes running in parallel and sometimes intersecting, which linked Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula in a system of exchange. Digging into a wealth of seventeenth-century literature that remains in manuscript, the book brings to light how the mobility of human actors made the poetry and prose of this period into an interconnected corpus, where writers used cognate forms, imagery and rhetoric to connect with one another across vast distances. The book combs through biographical anthologies of seventeenth-century poetry, reconstructing the overarching patterns in movement followed by the literary classes, before focusing on six case studies, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. For the first time, the book shows how the literary texts produced at this time in places such as Yemen, the Deccan and Iran were in dialogue with one another. It demonstrates that migration was multidirectional and multilingual (and so more widespread than is generally appreciated) and it connects the findings of cultural history with material philology."--