Iran and Persianate Culture in the Indian Ocean World

Andrew Peacock

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780755656035
• Edition: 0
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

The first interdisciplinary study of the history of contact between Iranians and the peoples and polities of the Indian Ocean. Most of the historiography of the Iranian world focuses on interactions and migrations between Iran, Central Asia and India. Nonetheless, this Iranian world was also closely connected to the maritime one of the Indian Ocean. While scholarship has drawn attention to diverse elements of these latter interactions, ranging from the claims to Shirazi descent of East African communities, to Persian elements in Malay literature, and Iranian communities of merchants in China, such studies have remained largely isolated from one another. The consensus of historiography on the Indian Ocean presents it as an 'Arabic cosmopolis', or, in earlier times, a Sanskrit one. The aim of this book is thus to bring together scholars working on disparate aspects of Persianate interactions with the Indian Ocean world from antiquity to modern times to provide a more rounded picture of both the history of the Persianate world, broadly conceived, and that of the Indian Ocean. The book brings together a collection of internationally renowned scholars from a variety of disciplines – including archaeology, history, literature, linguistics, art history – and covers interactions in Iran's political and commercial relations with the Indian Ocean world in history, Persian-speaking communities in the Indian Ocean world, Persian(ate) elements in Indian Ocean languages and literatures, Persian texts dealing with the Indian Ocean, and connections in material culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• BIPS – Studies In The History and Culture of the Persianate World
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Sasanian origin of Siraf?
• 2 Mark marking on ceramic transport jars: Clues to Persianate actors and networks in the Indian Ocean world (eighth through tenth centuries ad)
• 3 The Shirazis in East Africa, myth or reality?
• 4 Maritime relations between the Persian Gulf and China: An overview from the Song through the Ming periods (tenth to seventeenth centuries)
• 5 The role of Iran in the Islamicization of the Maldives
• 6 Medieval Khurasan and the Indian Ocean world
• 7 From Devas to Muwakkils: Manifestations of Indic Gods in Persianate works
• 8 Traditional Malay conversion narratives, Sufi hagiography and Persian historiography: Crafting political legitimacy while ‘centring the periphery’ in the Malay world
• 9 The Jamiʿ al-barr waʾl-bahr: The place of ‘birds of paradise’ in the elaboration of Perso-Islamicate traditions on the eastern frontiers of Indonesia
• 10 A Persian Shiʿi anthology circulating in Patna, Dhaka and Siam in the seventeenth century: A lesser-known ship of Persians to Southeast Asia
• 11 Arabic-Persian bilingualism and Persianate identities in the early modern western Indian Ocean: The case of Mirza Muhammad Fayyaz
• 12 Unfinished hyperboles! Adam’s footprint in Sri Lanka and wonder on the edge of modernity
• 13 Rejecting the Persianate past: A pioneering Urdu history of the Indian Ocean
• 14 Royal exile in the Indian Ocean: Reza Shah’s sojourn in Mauritius
• Index
• Copyright Page