Workshop international | « Turco-Indica: Turkish-Related Manuscripts in South Asia » — Collège de France Paris, 31 mai 2024

Workshop international | “Turco-Indica: Turkish-Related Manuscripts in South Asia”, Paris (Collège de France), 31/05/24

Collège de France, Institut des Civilisations, Centre d’études ottomanes
52 rue Cardinal Lemoine, 75005 Paris
Salle Françoise Héritier
9h30 – 17h

While South Asia is known for its extraordinary linguistic variety and intensive production of manuscripts in these different languages, most research to date has focused exclusively on the Persian and Indic spheres.

Of course, texts in Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali and many other vernacular languages represent a massive and overwhelmingly majority body of works. The Perso-Indica project led by Fabrizio Speziale and Carl Ernst, which presents a comprehensive survey of Persian writings on Indian learned traditions, is a major contribution in this respect. The fact remains that knowledge and use of Turkish languages (mainly Chaghatay, and Ottoman to a lesser extent) are clearly attested in the Subcontinent, particularly in the Panjab, Uttar Pradesh, Kashmir, Rajasthan and Telangana. A quick glance at the manuscript catalogues of libraries in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh shows that books related to Turkish language, literature and culture were copied, read and commented on by South Asian literati. A few pioneering studies have been published on this neglected aspect of al-Hind’s intellectual history. The aim of this workshop is to take a further step in this direction by exploring two areas, namely

1) the manuscripts themselves, i.e. their number, genre, authorship, location and circulation, and

2) a selection of key texts, which reflect intellectual interactions, the transmission of knowledge (with particular emphasis on lexical and grammatical works written to teach Turkic languages) and the court culture of Mughals and other dynasties.

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