SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This introduction sets the agenda for the volume by arguing for a closer look at fifteenth-century north India, a period of multilingualism, vernacularization, the evolution of script conventions, and the emergence of specialist literary and cultural producers who served new patrons. It charts the changing political landscape of the period, with its new towns and regional polities, showing how the new contenders for power from upwardly mobile martial groups were gradually brought under more settled, bureaucratizing regimes. Against prevailing wisdom, it argues for a continuum between oral and literary cultures, and for recovering histories embedded in texts and images generally dismissed as mythic or religious. It delinks religion from script while drawing attention to the proliferation of religious groups and vocabularies in the period.