The Global Mughal World

Catalog description

This course will introduce early modern court cultures of South Asia focusing on Mughal art, architecture, and material culture between the 16th and 19th centuries. At the height of its rule, the Mughal Empire occupied a position of political, economic, and demographic dominance in the early modern period equaling and even surpassing the polities of the Iberian Peninsula, the Safavids and the Ottomans. A cosmopolitan Mughal "lndo-Persianate" court culture absorbed the intellectual heritage of Indic and Central Asian ideals, which filtered into imperial albums or muraqqas and Mughal material culture. The concurrent rise of European mercantile interests of the Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French East India Companies and interactions with China further contributed to a 'worlding' of Mughal aesthetics. By the end of the 18th century even as the Mughal State disintegrated under British colonial rule, its symbolic preeminence continued to inform a phase of modernization of Mughal art that revitalized commodity culture in the colony and the metropole alike.