Conference “South Asia and the Neighboring World in the Mughal Period: Intellectual and Material Exchanges” — EHESS Marseille, 10-11 December 2025
PROGRAM AND PANELS
Wednesday December 10th
10.00-10.30: Introduction and coffee
Panel 1: India and the Islamicate world I, salle A
Chair: Alka Patel (Aix-Marseille University– Laboratoire d’Archéologie Médiévale et Moderne en Méditerranée)
10.30: Christopher Bahl (Durham University), “Scholarly exiles in Mecca – approaching a political practice of the Mughal court”
11.15: Kaori Otsuya (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), “Intellectual Exchanges between the Hijaz and South Asia: Repurposing al-Samhūdī’s (d. 911/1506) History of Medina by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Dihlavī (d. 1052/1642)”
12.30: Lunch
Panel 1: India and the Islamicate world II, Salle Le Miroir
14.00: Farah Akhtar (University of Chicago), “From Herat to Delhi: Akbarian Metaphysics in the Writings and Praxis of Abdul Raḥmān Jāmī (d.1472) and Khwaja Khurd (b.1601)”
14.45: Nariman Aavani (Harvard University), “Mind, Knowledge, and Commentary Across Empires: Mīr Zāhid’s (d. 1689) Sharḥ al-Risālat al-Quṭbiyya in its Transregional Islamicate Context”
15.30: Coffee break
Panel 2: Material exchanges, Salle Le Miroir
Chair: Damien Carriere (Aix-Marseille University)
16.00: Sara Keller (University Erfurt), “Mughal stone inlays in architecture between circulation and affordance”
16.45: Mahdieh Tavakol (Universität Hamburg), “Material Vehicles of Cultural Exchange: The Transfer of Books from India to Safavid Iran through Endowment”
17.30: General discussion
Thursday December 11th
Panel 3: East Asian and oceanic trajectories, Salle Le Miroir
Chair: Éloi Fiquet (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
10.00: Dror Weil (University of Cambridge), “An Eastern Gaze: South Asia and the Making of an Islamic Archive in Premodern China”
10.45: Arash Khazeni (Pomona College), “‘On the Wonders of Islands and the Strangeness of Seas’: Persian Travel Writing and the Climes of the Indian Ocean in the Late Mughal Period”
11.30: Coffee break
12.00: Daniel Jacobius Morgan (Santa Clara University), “Oceangoing Miracles from Maghrib to Mughal India: Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī’s Ḥizb al-baḥr in Eighteenth-Century Delhi”
12.45: Lunch
Panel 4: Indic learning across Muslim societies, Salle Le Miroir
Chair: Carmen Spiers (Aix-Marseille University)
14.00: Eva Orthmann (University of Gottingen), “Horse treatises from the Islamic World”
14.45: Shankar Nair (University of Virginia),“The World within a Word: Global Intellectual Exchanges in the Mughal Yogavāsiṣṭha Translations”
15.30: Coffee break
16.00: Victor Baptiste (École Pratique des Hautes Études), “The Reception of an Indo-Persian Mas̲navī in Iran: Z̤ahīr Kirmānī’s Rewriting of Mihr-u Māh”
16.45: General discussion
Venue: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales/School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Centre de la Vieille Charité, 2 rue de la Charité, Marseille. Salle A is located on the second floor; the Salle Le Miroir is located on the ground floor.
Organizers: Asad Q. Ahmed (University of California, Berkeley), Naveen Kanalu (EHESS-CRH, Paris), Fabrizio Speziale (EHESS-CESAH, Marseille-Paris).
With the collaboration of: Raffaello De Leon-Jones Diani (EHESS-CESAH) and Inayatullah Din (EHESS-CeRCLEs).
Supporting institutions: France-Berkeley Fund, Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Berkeley), Centre de recherches historiques (Paris), Centre d’études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes (Paris), Centre de recherche sur les circulations, les liens et les échanges (Marseille), Ville de Marseille, Musées de Marseille.
South Asia and the Neighboring World in the Mughal Period:
Intellectual and Material Exchanges
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Marseille
December 10th-11th 2025
The conference examines the intellectual networks, material exchanges, and scholarly interactions between the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) in South Asia and its neighboring regions of the Middle East, Iran, Central and Southeast Asia. This conference takes a transregional perspective to the recent debates surrounding the cosmopolitan nature of early modern intellectual activities and networks. The scholarship in the last decade has heavily focused on the place of Persian—the high literary and administrative language of the Mughal elites as well as its influences on producing a distinct Indo-Persian culture in South Asia. While Indian Ocean studies had privileged the study of peninsular India, recent works have focused on Iran’s cultural and political influence in the creation of a distinct Persianate world. The expanded definition of the “Persianate” has generated insights on literary and cultural practices, elite self-fashioning, religious pluralism, and artistic production. Others have urged to recognize its limits, boundaries, and the severe constraints of relying on Persian literary narratives for writing about pre-modern South Asia. For instance, the vibrant literary practices in Sanskrit and the vernaculars have been increasingly present in examining the region’s multilingualism. Yet, current approaches, as this project argues, do not take into account the inter-regional dynamics specific to Islamic intellectual networks.
The conference invites scholars to take a transregional perspective to Islamicate culture through the influences and trends in legal, religious, and scientific practices from both the perspective of intellectual and material histories. Rather than artificially decouple the Persianate from the Islamicate, a tendency prevalent in most scholarship on South Asia, our aim is to bring together scholars working in diverse genres of textual practices to examine forms of transmission and acculturation in Arabic, Persian, and other languages as mutually coexisting spheres of Islamic knowledge production.
The conference addresses the need to bring into dialogue scholastic debates, norms, and practices with their transmission in writing practices of the period. Early modern relations between these regions were circumscribed by larger intellectual networks that were trans-imperial in nature while also constrained by specific socio-political contexts. In other words, although the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids had extensive internal diversity in literate communities, we argue that their connections going beyond the imperial frontiers have to be examined to revise historiographical views that tend to be concentrated on national or regional zones.
We welcome submissions on themes outlined above taking into account wide-ranging discussions in literature, poetry, philosophy, logic, law, medicine and other fields without ignoring the material transmission through the circulation of works across long distances.
Please send an abstract of 300 words and a short bio of 200 words to the following email address by June 10th 2025: fabrizio.speziale[at]ehess.fr
Organizers: Asad Q. Ahmed (University of California, Berkeley), Naveen Kanalu (EHESS-CRH, Paris), Fabrizio Speziale (EHESS-CESAH, Marseille-Paris).
Venue: EHESS, Centre de la Vieille Charité, 2 rue de la Charité, Marseille.
À retrouver sur le site de l’EHESS
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Chargé de diffusion scientifique (10 octobre 2025). Conference “South Asia and the Neighboring World in the Mughal Period: Intellectual and Material Exchanges” — EHESS Marseille, 10-11 December 2025. IISMM. Consulté le 14 mars 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14w2l
